It's four days before New Year's Eve. Metallica's "Enter Sandman"— off to never never land— pipes through the speakers in the David Pottruck Wrestling Room in the bowels of the Palestra. It puts the obvious pain and suffering of the University of Pennsylvania wrestling team practicing there in context; it almost seems bearable.

Dustin Wiles, an NCAA qualifier who can't practice because of a skin disease on his lip, circles the room with a leather dummy on his back, weaving between a half-dozen drilling partners taking corrective cues from the smallest man in the red-and-blue padded room. Meet the Quakers' new wrestling coach, Larry "Zeke" Jones, whose reputation dwarfs his physical stature.

Jones, 39, may be the most credentialed coach ever hired in any sport at any level in this city. At 114 1/2 pounds, he was ranked No. 1 in the United States between 1989 and '95 and was a four-time World Cup gold medalist, six-time U.S. Open National Freestyle champion and 1992 Olympic silver medalist. Jones was also the 2004 U.S. Olympic freestyle coach and 2003 U.S. Pan American Games freestyle coach. On Dec. 17 he was renamed coach for the Pan American team in 2007.

"It's all been satisfying and gratifying, but it's only made me hungrier," he says of his interest in upping his sport's profile in traditionally basketball-or-bust Philadelphia. "Will this ever be a wrestling town?" he asks rhetorically. "In my lifetime, it's a long shot at best, but it doesn't mean we're not going to try."

Jones' Sept. 1 arrival at Penn—which hosts the University of Maryland at 1 p.m. Sat., Jan. 7, at The Palestra (there's also a pre-match 11 a.m. youth wrestling clinic there)—was a harbinger for the Sept. 22 announcement that, for the first time, Philadelphia will host the NCAA Championships, wrestling's version of Never Never Land. It's a ways off, but the three-day event to be held March 17-19, 2011, at the Wachovia Center will attract 90,000 spectators and should generate between $10 million and $15 million in economic impact for the city, according to Larry Needle, executive director of the Philadelphia Sports Congress, a member of the local organizing committee.

It's not like Philly's alien to the NCAA. The Palestra hosted the first NCAA basketball tournament in 1939, and 50 NCAA tournament games in all during 19 national championships. This March, the Wachovia Center will host the 2006 NCAA Men's first and second round basketball games. (In 2001, the Men's East Regionals were here.) The 2000 Women's Final Four and portions of the 2004 and 2005 women's tournament were in Philly, as were the 2003 NCAA Men's Gymnastics championships. The NCAA Men's Lacrosse championships set records last spring when Penn was the host school at Lincoln Financial Field. That tournament returns here May 27-29. Philly's been busy building its case as a future Olympic Games host.

Beyond Penn and the NCAAs, and in partnership with Sunkist Kids National Training Program and USA Wrestling, Jones is promising a year-round Foxcatcher-type epicenter for wrestling at the Palestra that could finally exorcise the legendary venue's basketball ghosts. (Foxcatcher was a world-class training facility run by John du Pont on his 800-acre Newtown Square estate. It dissolved after the eccentric chemical company heir was found guilty of the Jan. 26, 1996, murder of Olympic wrestling champion Dave Schultz, his head coach.)

Jones says Penn's program, now 102 years old, made its greatest strides because of Foxcatcher. Both Brandon Slay, Penn's two-time NCAA finalist who became a 2000 U.S. open freestyle national champion and a 2000 Olympic gold medalist in Sydney, and Brett Matter, the Quakers' career wins leader and 2000 NCAA champion (Richard DiBatista in 1941-42 was Penn's only other), were Foxcatcher proteges.

"The formula works," says Jones. "I'm telling our kids (and recruits) not to think of us as a four or five-year program, but as an eight or 10-year program. After your undergraduate degree, get a graduate degree while working toward world, national and Olympic titles."

He'd begun a similar year-round program at West Virginia, where he was an oft-courted assistant head coach. Combined, Jones coached four NCAA champions, 30 All-Americans and 36 conference champs there and at his alma mater, Arizona State, where four teams he mentored finished in the top 10 at the NCAA championships. As a Sun Devils' wrestler, he was a three-time All-American and a member of the 1988 NCAA championship team and runner-up squads in 1989 and 1990.

But it's not as if Jones inherited a turkey of a program. Under Roger Reina, who after 19 of Penn's best seasons stepped down to take a nonathletic position at the university, the Quakers have finished in the top 20 at the NCAA championships five of the last seven seasons, and had at least one All-American in nine straight years. In its history, there have been 20 All-Americans, all but three of them (DiBatista claimed the honor twice) since 1997.

Now, Penn Charter product Colin Hitschler, who like his brother Rob is a third-generation wrestler at Penn, says, "The way the wrestling world looks at us will always be different now because we have an Olympic-caliber coach … In the wrestling world, there's no reason Penn can't be what Philadelphia is for basketball."

As practice ends, Jones asks his current crop of athletes, whose thin, stretched T-shirts are soaked to the skin, to walk the room "strutting that attitude we're talking about." But they're dead tired. Some have their hands on hips. One hooks his mouthpiece behind his right ear. Then, they pull into a circle where senior quad-captain Richard Ferguson leads them in a light stretch on the way to Never Never Land.