We don't have high def, so it took a lot of peering at the screen to catch it, but there is a colorful pad on the stanchion at the end of the bench-- and I just happened to catch some wrestling footage and saw that the padding in the corners in the ring, that covers the turnbuckles used to tension the ropes, is a tall, vertical wedge of foam. The stanchion padding looks a lot like that foam column in the ring, so that metaphor makes perfect sense now.

~Susan