Norton Simon's 'Temple Wrestler' statue heading home to Cambodia

Since 1977, visitors to Pasadena's Norton Simon Museum have encountered an ancient Cambodian statue that has the wide, hulking build and arrogant attitude of an NFL nose tackle who has just sacked a rival quarterback.

From its pedestal at the end of a long, rectangular downstairs gallery, this life-size presence in sandstone — identified simply as a "Temple Wrestler" created in the early 900s — does not deign to look upon the 10 other figures with whom it shares the room, even though most of them are Hindu deities.

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Instead, with a tilted head and a face that seems to wear a sneering laugh, it gazes far above its smaller companions' heads.

They won't have to put up with his arrogance much longer.After Thursday, its last day on display, the so-called wrestler, which is missing its hands and feet, is going to be taken down, packed up, and sent home to Cambodia.

The statue, which it turns out is no mere wrestler but one of the leading figures in the ancient Hindu epic the Mahabharata, will soon reside at the National Museum of Cambodia, where it will join four other pieces relinquished by the auction houses Christie's and Sotheby's and New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The five statues are believed to have been grouped together for more than a millennium in an entrance chamber of the Prasat Chen shrine to the god Vishnu at the ancient temple complex of Koh Ker. Then war and political chaos descended on Cambodia in the