Since our board voted to give $3,000 to the USA Wrestling group assigned to "save Olympic wrestling" I have been considerable thought to this topic. I did not support this donation as this group does NOT have a plan. I feel our $3000 will basically buy appetizers and drinks for their first meeting. Although I respect what each of these men have accomplished in their lives, I do not think they can succeed without some outside of wrestling help. BIG HELP. The IOC hates FILA and it may be time to blow up that organization if we want wrestling to be resurrected in the Olympics.

Let us get to the core of the problem... WRESTLING is not a popular spectator sport and is NOT fan friendly. Why is this? The NCAA D1 Folkstyle nationals are on prime time tv now but only a few highlights from the Olympics make it to our living rooms. WHY? There are (roughly) 275,000 HS wrestlers and nearly 3,000 D1 wrestlers but MAYBE only 200 true Olympic hopefuls. 275,000 wrestlers, parents, families, coaches, and fans understand, at least at a basic level, the rules and scoring of a Folkstyle match. Although there is judgement involved, FS/GR have become nearly 100% subjective. Let me describe a match to you, pretend you have only watched folkstyle before:

Saturday afternoon you stumble onto the World Team Trials on ESPN 2. You liked wrestling in HS so it catches your attention. You see some action and the official on the mat raises two fingers for red. You are thinking 2-0 red. But wait, they show one gentleman sitting at a table flash a paddle scoring 2 for blue and another gentleman flashed his paddle 3 for red. The action stops and the officials convene at one of the tables and begin to argue. Then additional officials arrive to watch the match on a video replay. It has been five minutes since any wrestling has taken place when finally the official returns to the center to award 2 blue and then two red. They finish the period with the score 2-2 and the wrestlers go to their corners. When they return to the center the score is 0-0. How did that happen? They wrestled for two minutes and no one scored. The official gets a little black bag from one of the officials at the table. Another smaller bag is pulled out and inside of it was a blue ball. What does this have to do with wrestling? Is someone in a blue chair going to win a door prize?!? The red wrestler presents the leg the blue wrestler pointed at. The official talks and points suddenly the blue wrestler grabs the red wrestler's leg and grabs the blue wrestler and they go to the mat. No one has control but somehow the blue wrestler is given 1 point. The wrestlers go to their corner. At this point I have NO CLUE what is going on but they return for a third period. I am thinking this is the dumbest wrestling I have ever seen but I am curious and I want to see someone's hand raised even if I have NO IDEA what is going on. They wrestle on their feet, pushing, shoving, but no shots. Finally the red wrestler shoots and drives blue to the edge of the mat and out of the circle. Red gets 1 point. I don't know why because he didn't take him down? They return to the center where red dances and runs until time expires. They raise his hand. He won? I guess he did but it didn't look like wrestling to me... Ok, back to soccer, at least I know what is going on there.

What is crazy about that story is that is it COMMON! In fact, it is very possible for one wrestler to score more points than the other in the three periods but still lose. Three ego, I mean three man mechanics, the clinch, the push out, no stalling (passivity), the "ball grab", all of these recently installed rules are NOT SIMPLE to understand and are not fan friendly to the average U.S. wrestling fan. UFC and MMA are huge and very popular now because there is NO CONFUSION who is winning those bouts. We have to reinvent international wrestling and get away from subjectivity. Do NOT involve officials in developing the rules for this new objective sport. Guess what, if the officials are the only ones that understand the scoring NO ONE will want to watch.

A failure to plan is a plan to fail. That is where we are on saving Olympic wrestling. Instead of saving it I think it needs to be reinvented.

I'm not a huge fan of the current FS/GR rules either. Let's hope that FILA’s Extraordinary Congress this May results in a significant improvement to the rules. This is one part of the efforts being made to get the IOC to reinstate wrestling to the Olympics.

Will,

I agree with most of what you said. I will add that I think there is an additional core problem that we need to solve if we want to make wrestling appeal to a large population....

Emphasize the team aspect and make it a dual type format. The average person understands the fairly simple scoring of a dual. We have made wrestling too much of an individual sport (look at boxing if you want to see where we are headed). People love getting behind their country and supporting it. Remember when the US beat Russia in hockey and then went on to win the gold? Most people don't understand the intricate rules of hockey such as icing, etc....but everyone was watching the Miracle on Ice.

By the way.....this applies to folkstyle in high school and college also. These are all fixes we can control.

Personally, I would have liked to see our $$$ being donated to help get more duals in our high schools or creating a state kids dual tournament of some kind. Just my opinion.

Shawn Budke

I hate to, but I agree with Will. I am confused during the matches, and so are most typical wrestling fans. So other people, who make up 99% of the world wide population, will not understand it, and will not continue to watch. This is similar to how I feel when I turn on the Olympics and see people pushing things across a wooden floor with a stick, or people in a pool dancing with glittery ribbons in sync with a stick. Wrestling has to change, so as to be evident of a true victor to the ignorant. People being wrestling ignorant, for the most part, don't care about rules. They will watch if they can understand when the match is over, who the true champion is.

My son wrestled in the elementry duals in Nebraska this year. The dual made the weekend of wrestling a lot funner cheering for a team versas cheering for one wrestler. I like the duals much better than tournaments. I would like to see more duals for kids also. My son learned that wrestling is not just about one person in a dual setting. Everyone has to wrestle good for the team to win. I think duals would help kids stay in wrestling longer. Could wrestle a couple of duals on a Saturday and the kids would be involved during the whole day. Not just a few matches. Just my thoughts on the matter of wrestling duals. This is my first experience with FR/GR. Yes the scoring is very different. But I do like it. Unless the majority wrestling fans are exposed to FR/GR it will always be foreign to them. They will not be intrested in watching. Change seems very hard for the wrestling community to handle. Just my thoughts.

Josh Parker
Mission Valley

I'm not really a boxing fan, but I will watch it and a few other sports during the Olympics because i understand the basics of the sport, and for the most part I can tell who is winning, or who will most likely be the victor. Wrestling will fail if we resort to your line of thinking, where we hope all spectators who might watch Olympic wrestling, spend the time in between getting educated on the rules just in case when they are channel surfing and run across Gr/Fr they will be able to follow. It needs dumbed down, just like boxing, MMA, UFC, etc. CLEAR VICTOR.
As crazy as it seems, most people watching the Olympics have nothing to do with any of the sports that they watch, except when it comes on every four years. If people enjoyed it enough from watching Olympic wrestling, it would boost the sports attendance. If we leave it as is, then it is evident of where it will be in the future, NON EXISTENT. It is not that change is hard, it is that we must evolve as to what the world enjoys seeing. MMA has raised the bar.