LAS VEGAS, NV—Sin City is a holiday destination known for its surfeit of skin-on-skin contact, but this might be taking it a little too far.

On a Saturday morning in Vegas, excruciatingly fit college-age men in lycra singlets grapple and tussle on shock-absorbing rubber mats inside the Las Vegas Convention Center. With the volume of man-flesh being pressed together, it should be a prime destination for the bachelorette parties that flock here on weekends. But today, the 1,500-strong crowd gathered to spectate the 26th edition of the Cliff Keen Las Vegas Collegiate Wrestling Invitational consists mostly of families, coaches and a plethora of injured teammates, all cheering on wrestlers from American colleges and universities.

Schools from clear across the United States send wrestling teams to Vegas for this annual tournament, with powerhouses like Nebraska, Illinois and Wisconsin facing off on equal footing with your Utah Valleys, your Adams States, your Riders. A trip to the competition’s host city is an early Christmas present for the wrestlers themselves, who will undoubtedly be rubbing the after-hours benefits of their destination in the faces of the women’s lacrosse team that had a travel weekend to University of Illinois Carbondale.

Still, tuning out the distraction of casinos and strip clubs is just one of the challenges facing the competitors here, along with making weight and conquering one’s opponent.

I attended the weekend’s semi-final session, partly on the advice of my friend Max, who wrestled in this tournament when we were in college together, and partly as a way to keep myself away from the blackjack tables for a couple hours. (My luck had been pretty lousy so far.)

According to Max, the semi-final matches are more intense than the finals, because at an early season tournament such as this one, the primary goal is to reach the final, where it becomes a “happy to be there� moment with a top-two placing — which determines seeding in the spring national championship tournament — assured. Additionally, semi-final losers have to wrestle twice more in the consolation round, with further chance for injury, and can drop to as low as sixth place. Two more matches — hey, college wrestlers: if you don’t want to spend more time on the mat, wrestle better!

The semi finals begin with the lightest division, the 125 pounders. The athletes in this division carry an amazing amount of muscle mass on their tiny frames, and they are fast — in collegiate wrestling, most points are scored through takedowns, where one wrestler takes another to the ground in a position of complete control.

Brute force rarely cuts it for a two-point takedown, so when the match begins from a neutral position, wrestlers usually bend at the waist and stick their torso way out in front, to defend their most prized piece of bodily real estate: their legs. With their torsos almost parallel to the floor and their legs kept back, the wrestlers engage each other’s shoulders and paw at each other’s heads. The start of a wrestling match often looks a lot like a bear fight minus the razor-sharp claws. (Although optional claws could really spice up collegiate wrestling’s television ratings — as could the use of colourful lycra singlets in bear fights.)

This posturing is the prelude to a shoot, or a dive at the opponent’s knee or ankle with the goal of undermining his balance and taking him to the mat, ultimately with you on top. The 125 pounders shoot like crazy, and writhe and wriggle around once engaged, so that you get a lot of funny positions — one wrestler clinging upside-down to the back of another, or one wrestler who’s managed to get a hold of his opponent’s leg and has hoisted it up on his shoulder, leaving his foe bouncing on one leg while he decides exactly when and how to finally drop him to the mat.

There are a number of attacking variants, several of which I am personally familiar with: one of my other roommates in college was a 320-pound offensive lineman, and he liked to quiz our wrestler roommate on moves and then practice them on me. After the time he dropped me on my head on our concrete floor, wrestling practice ended for good, as did my ability to remember my middle name and, occasionally (when there’s a full moon, especially), where I live.

From the 125 pounders, the weight classes increase incrementally so that watching the tournament begins to feel like one of those “Milk: It Does A Body Good� commercials where the kid gets progressively larger and larger. As the wrestlers get heavier, the tactics shift from speed and quickness to power and leverage, so that once you get to the heavyweight category, encompassing competitors over 197 pounds, they really do look like angry bears, fighting a battle of attrition for every inch of ground. Still, you do occasionally see a spectacular throw in the heavyweight category, and every head in the house would turn at the sound of a hulking man being slammed loudly to the rubber mat and the immediate “oooh� that would follow from the fans nearest by.

Though I didn’t make it back for the 5pm finals, largely due to the second of my three weekend dates with the Las Vegas Hilton’s sports book — details forthcoming this Friday, stay tuned! — I can tell you that the University of Michigan Wolverines won the team title in a squeaker over Missouri and Ohio State. And in the spirit of competition, I’ll be hosting my own invitational tournament this weekend — I’ve even begun sewing all my wife-beater undershirts to my boxer-briefs, creating a line of homemade wrestling singlets, so come as you are! Although be forewarned that if you weigh more than 300 pounds, I’m probably not going to let you compete in my weight class, especially if you’re one of these three guys.

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Posted on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 at 10:07 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.