The Immense Edifice: How I loved the stinky old wrestling room and am learning to love the new

by Skip Saunders, English instructor and wrestling coach

Hamlet caresses the skull of Yorick, his childhood playmate. His melancholy sits beautifully on brood while he holds the bones with his eyes, hands and words. Once more he is the poet prince of Denmark; but when Hamlet smells the skull, poetry dies, and with a disgusted “Pah!” he flings the now mere thing to its dirt. He hates and fears “too, too solid flesh”; and although he goes on to win at fencing (sort of), his “Pah!” reminds us that without his sword, his title and his "words, words, words," Hamlet is helpless, and hapless, in his mortal coil.

He would have made a lousy wrestler.

If blood is the red badge of courage, then stink is jock ambrosia, and wrestling is the only sport which has, or needs, a body odor rule. The mat allows no place to hide, and smell itself becomes a trophy-or a rebuke. Heavyweight Sean Briggs ’90, blessed with a wit faster than the pins he suffered, lost every match of his first junior varsity event, then spoke prophesy: “You know you've had a bad tournament when you can still smell your deodorant.” Smell is the most physical sense; as air-borne molecules of sweat and skin literally touch olfactory neurons, the brain has its most direct access to the outer world. A place mulched with tons and years of these sloughed-off bits grows a profound funk which, Proust knew, is far more real than anything else we can know of history:

When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered...the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls...bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory.

But smell is an artifact which cannot be transported, only lost. And for that reason, in the perverse way of wrestling, I will miss our old, nasty practice room.

I am by no means ungrateful. The new room, like everything about the new A. J. Huffman Athletic Center, is spectacular beyond the imaginings of our most bitter quondam gripes; three full mats stretch end to end, while the old room bent a single mat around a concrete corner. That awful closet was a source of weird pride-we had the worst practice facility in all of Georgia and still produced All-Americans-but it badly limited us: we never learned to wrestle the whole space, and lost hundreds of points out of bounds to opponents trained on full rings. Now in this huge, well-lit, well-padded palace, our wrestlers already are better at finishing moves, at pursuing takedowns past the first step, at working the edges, at concentrating on their moves instead of dodging teammates. And we are in better shape; there is no waiting for a turn, and no corner to hide behind.

We are working hard to deserve the gift, to shoulder the burden of our luxury. But we start without the smell of wrestling history. The old room, slimy with ancient excretions and recent decay, stank of greatness and pain, eccentricities and private language, the futile combat of Clorox against blood and BO. Sweat was passed like DNA. Dulaney wrestled Peek wrestled Keown wrestled Brown wrestled Sirmans wrestled Cowan wrestled Smithson wrestled Gorham wrestled Woolard wrestled Greene wrestled Cobb wrestled Fitzner wrestled Marines wrestled Keene wrestled Swift wrestled Eberhard, who now wrestles Hicks, Hinton, Owens and his own little brother; and those touched by these last will wrestle new Dulaneys, Peeks and Fitzners for generations.

But not in the old room. The smell has been broken.

The molecules shed by Worthy, Richardson, Kosboth, Brock, Smith, Minshew, Seiz, and hundreds of unthanked others piled up like leaves to be crushed, by mass and time, into diamonds-diamonds now lost in the clean new air. A magnificent building gleams, but an immense edifice is gone. We will befoul the Huffman Center; some corners stink already. But they don't stink as much, yet, as they did when senior Michael Brown entered our cramped and fetid Eden for the first practice of 1986. Inhaling deeply, that champion pinned the moment as he would dozens of opponents, roughly and quickly: "I love that smell."

He'd have stuck the wordy prince within a round.