Wrestling’s Private Equity Champion

Michael Novogratz, a principal at the Fortress Investment Group and former Princeton wrestler, is trying to score an emergency takedown. Since the International Olympic Committee voted to eliminate wrestling starting in 2020, Mr. Novogratz has been working the phones from a war room inside Fortress’s 46th-floor headquarters in Midtown Manhattan.

His goal â€" to restore the sport’s Olympic berth â€" has been sharpened into a strategic overhaul of wrestling’s standing, akin to a corporate turnaround.

“This is now, like, my part-time job,” said Mr. Novogratz, a co-founder of Fortress Investment Group, a private equity and hedge fund group that manages more than $53 billion in assets.

He and volunteers, including Greg Elinsky, a former champion wrestler in the National Collegiate Athletic Association who spent 11 years at Goldman Sachs, aim to raise $3 million to hire marketing and public relations firms and strategists to lobby for the sport. Time is short: the I.O.C. meets in St. Petersburg, Russia, in May, then in Buenos Aires in September to take a final vote on the issue.

So far, Wall Street’s little-known wrestling club has raised $1.2 million. Contributors include James Dinan, the chief executive of hedge fund York Capital Management, whose son, Michael, wrestles at Horace Mann School in the Bronx and was a waterboy for the United States wrestling team in last year’s London Games; Richard Tavoso, Mr. Novogratz’s college teammate who is head of global arbitrage and trading at RBC Capital Markets; Todd Boehly, the president of investment firm Guggenheim Partners who was a Maryland State champion in high school; Andrew Barth, a bond manager at American Funds who wrestled at Columbia University; and Paul Tudor Jones II, the billionaire founder of the Tudor Group, a hedge fund firm. (Mr. Jones did not wrestle but was a welterweight boxing champion at the University of Virginia.)

But amid the drama inside the I.O.C. and the International Association of Associated Styles, the sport’s international governing body known as Fila, the task involves herculean wrangling as much as hard-nosed strategizing.

“The I.O.C makes decisions based upon political and personal animosities and friendships,” said Andrew Zimbalist, an economics professor specializing in sports at Smith College. “It’s an irrational process.”

In coming days, Mr. Novogratz, the new spokesman for U.S.A. Wrestling, the sport’s governing body in the United States, plans to court two million American enthusiasts to help unify the sport’s major Web sites.

The organization recently hired KOM Sports Marketing, a branding agency in Colorado Springs, Colo., where the United States Olympic Committee is based. Another goal: having Fila hire Teneo Holdings, a consulting and investment firm, to press wrestling’s cause.

Mr. Novogratz, the founder of Beat the Streets, a wrestling program in New York, sees wrestling’s popularity in Iran, Japan, Turkey and Central Asia as untold selling points.

On another front, he wants to see a promotional film made with cameos by Ray Lewis, the just-retired N.F.L. linebacker for the Baltimore Ravens and the actors Ashton Kutcher, who wrestled in high school, and Channing Tatum, who plays an Olympic wrestler in the forthcoming movie “Foxcatcher.”