Sunday, December 31, 2006

Here I am, caught in a good friend's side headlock.

For me, 2006 was a good year in wrestling. All but one of my matches came in August, and while I would rather they be somewhat more spread out through the year, I was glad that they took place at all. I enjoyed wrestling seven great guys--Larry (IN), Ed, Thomas, John, Michael, Tim and Bob. Four other matches didn't work out, and for that I apologize to Chuck, Larry (FL), Matt and Big Guy. I hope we'll get another chance in 2007 or sometime not far beyond that. As for the coming year, I don't know what it holds in store, whether regarding wrestling or life in general. I have possibilities of matches in nearby cities--"nearby" meaning within five hours' drive--in February and June. I don't know what will happen with these, but I'm sure I'll be writing about them and the men I'm in touch with. In 2007 I hope to buy a pair of pro boots to take with me to matches, and I'd like to get another pair of trunks, either blue or white. My fondest wish is that somebody close by will appear on the scene to allow me the opportunity to wrestle more regularly and to take advantage of the activity's benefits as exercise. Regardless, I'll keep wrestling with men I'm able to meet, wrestling with myself and wrestling with God. And I'll keep writing about these things, whether or not anybody reads.

Friday, December 29, 2006


For a brief time in 1997, Applebee's became "Wrestling Central" for me. Not to say that I wrestled at Applebee's, but I spent a good bit of time with wrestlers at various Applebee's locations. Sometimes we met there for conversations, sometimes for pre-match meetings to get a feel for each other before we committed ourselves to trunks and the mat. For a long time after this series of meetings--four of them, I think--I couldn't go in an Applebee's without thinking about wrestlers and wrestling.

I wanted to wrestle this one guy, AB, who lived a couple of hours away from me, not far from a city to which I was commuting a couple of times a week to earn my doctorate. For some reason AB and I couldn't wrestle on the day that I was passing through, but we met at Applebee's to talk about wrestling and get to know one another a bit. This was my second meeting with a wrestler, and a little of the nerves remained. But soon after we sat down at our table, I relaxed and had a good chat with him.

I'd seen pictures and profiles of AB online, and so I knew more about him than he knew about me. He'd done some training with a professional wrestler, which interested me. I enjoyed hearing about his experience in the ring. Although this meeting took place several years ago, I seem to remember that AB had his first professional match coming up soon after our meeting. I don't remember where it was to take place, but I'm guessing that it was most likely either at the gym where he trained or some local National Guard Armory or middle school gym.

AB was gay and into wrestling the same way I was, and my limited experience at the time led me to wonder how he could get in the ring to wrestle without fearing a "public" erection. I was certain that any wrestling I might do would inspire a constant erection, perhaps even a spontaneous ejaculation. I couldn't picture wrestling in public or with a man who didn't understand how that might happen. I've come to find out that, once the wrestling gets underway, I typically don't have any sort of obvious erotic reaction to it.

AB and I hit it off well that day, and I was sure we'd wrestle sometime in the not-too-distant future. But it was not to be. Although we never saw each other in person again, we would have a falling out that would lead him to break all contact with me. . . .

Coming soon: a story about the second guy I actually got my hands on. The wrestling wasn't great, but the guy's story--told to me at an Applebee's--was amazing.

Tuesday, December 26, 2006



This is one of my favorite head scissors pics. I like to look at it and wonder what sequence of moves and countermoves led to this particular hold. I like to wonder what the ref is thinking, what the wrestler in control is thinking, what the wrestler trapped between the big man's thighs is thinking. This photo was taken years ago, of course. I'd guess in the 1950s or 1960s. Did the blatant eroticism of what's happening here occur to any of these three? To any in the audience? It's a fun hold to look at and to think about. And it's one I'd like to participate in.

Saturday, December 23, 2006

[aside.]

Whenever these brown gazes make contact,
they wrestle nervously, clasp and release
and clasp again, jostling for leverage,
pushing and pulling, intent and afraid.

No hint of this betrayed by face or hand—
no words leap from lips or echo in cold,
dark, lonesome valleys of mind or body.
Yet shameful wordless weakness haunts the joints, aches

along muscles that must needs clinch or snap.
Jesus!—we have wives and kids and beliefs
and desires neither welcomed nor understood,
ratcheting this tension up and up until

our only relief is beating retreat
to houses and lives and preoccupations
that keep souls and flesh safe from what we would do
without them—What would we do without them?

Thursday, December 21, 2006

Okay, I find the word "church" in such close proximity to my masked face and naked torso to be strange indeed. Many would think me crazy, but I know I'm not--no more than most people at least. My passions and obsessions just seem to be the way I'm wired. It's "how I roll," unfortunate for me as that might be. Although certainly not at ease with my particular sexuality, I've grown more comfortable with it after reading the following article sometime back. It's from Monitor on Psychology 32.4 (2001).

Our Erotic Personalities Are as Unique as Our Fingerprints: Research Debunks Long-held Notions about Sexual Orientation (BY TORI DeANGELIS)

The gay rights' movement notwithstanding, the bulk of the public is still not ready to accept the fact that people display a range of sexual and affectional proclivities, says Linda Garnets, PhD, a researcher at the University of California at Los Angeles.

But there is irony in society's attempts to avoid sexual discomfort, Garnets contended in a keynote address at the January National Multicultural Summit II.

The latest research shows that people's erotic and affectional "personalities" are as varied and unique as a fingerprint or someone's voice, and that no one person is, as she puts it, "100 percent heterosexual 100 percent of the time." People's erotic attractions can be surprisingly fluid . . . , and science fails to support the conventional wisdom that people's sexuality can be neatly placed in rigid categories, she said.

Emerging research from hundreds of studies debunks a number of notions about sexual orientation, Garnets said. One is that sexual orientation is dichotomous--that one is either exclusively homosexual or heterosexual. Instead, new research finds that sexual orientations exist along a continuum, like colors in the spectrum of a rainbow. People can be sexually, affectionally or erotically attracted to people of the same gender, the other gender or both genders, she said.

New research also challenges the idea that people's sexual behavior is what defines sexual orientation, Garnets said. Sexual orientation has many dimensions that are related to their sexual orientation, including erotic and affectional fantasies, emotional attachments, self-identification and current relationship status.

The idea that people's sexual identities, behaviors and fantasies comprise a seamless whole is likewise disproven by research, Garnets added. Studies show a wide variety of overlapping possibilities--the woman who identifies herself as a bisexual but never develops a strong attraction to a man, for instance, or the heterosexual man who uses homoerotic fantasies when having sex with his female partner--that point to more complex realities.

New empirical findings also challenge the notion that sexual orientation begins at a young age and doesn't change, Garnets added. There's considerable evidence that some people's attractions toward both women and men can change over time. Both those who identify as bisexuals and those who don't can experience these changing gender attractions. Women who have had exclusively heterosexual experiences, for example, may develop attractions to women at any point in their lives.

In addition, research shows, strictly biological, genetic, social or familial explanations rarely explain how each of us develops a particular sexual orientation, she said. For instance, only four studies to date have examined brain differences between heterosexuals and homosexuals, and each has different results. There are gender differences in such findings as well, Garnets said. While some evidence points to a possible genetic link for homosexuality in men, no such evidence exists for women. Similarly, women appear to be more fluid in their propensity to change their feelings about which gender they're attracted to.

Bisexuality, which has come under increasing study recently, provides a fascinating new model that challenges rigid beliefs about sexuality, Garnets added. Bisexuals "challenge the either-or assumption that sexual orientation comes in only two mutually exclusive categories," Garnets said. In contrast to society's mandates, bisexuals tend to put someone's personal qualities before gender as the criteria for choosing a partner. As one bisexual woman put it, "'My sexual orientation is toward creative people of color who can cook,'" Garnets quipped. Likewise, transgendered individuals raise interesting questions for society, Garnets said. There is no clear relationship, for example, between cross-dressing and other cross-gender behaviors and sexual orientation.

When society condemns those of differing sexual orientations, it limits its own expression, Garnets contended. People's condemnation of gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered people is particularly based on fear of being labeled gay themselves. In turn, this fear leads people to conform to gender roles to avoid being labeled "gay." Yet such restrictions limit the range of human potential, she believes.

Other cultures provide kinder models for differing sexual orientations. Native American cultures, for example, view cross-gendered individuals "as blessed, possessing both a male and a female spirit, as two-spirited," Garnets said, a latitude that may open up new doors for rich and creative expression.
Last night I was at a meeting at church, when these two young fellows came in. One of them, I knew, the other I didn't. They asked for the former Youth Director, but somebody in our group told them that he'd gone home. They said they'd come to wrestle. That caught my attention, of course. Apparently our former YD, a former amateur wrestler as well, was going to work out with these guys or coach them or just provide them a place to wrestle somewhere there at the church.

A couple of things stayed in my mind after that. First, I thought about the former YD, and, again, how difficult it must be for those who have participated in wrestling when young to continue to participate as an adult. How does a man who loves to wrestle find others or outlets for exercising that love?

Second, I want to look into this and find out what was about to take place. The young man I know is thin, which isn't my preferred body style, but the stranger was husky, built much more like a wrestler. Maybe I could get in on this wrestling, and maybe one of the men I know that I'd like to wrestle could be brought in as well. A whole series of events that would put me on the mat with one of these friends and wrestling crushes played out in my mind.

I recently read a blog from a guy in a church somewhere in the USA who was promoting a wrestling program at his church as a means to develop young men's (teenagers') character. Probably he's never met the likes of me. Not that my obsession with wrestling hurts my character, but involving me with wrestling in an attempt to build character might not work out as planned.

I've wrestled at church before, but that's a story for later.

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Today I was walking at the gym during the lunch hour. From up on the elevated track that runs around the wall above the weights and exercise machines and ball courts, I was looking down on the folks working out below. I didn't have my mp3 player and was somewhat bored, so I was watching everybody else and listening to the country music radio station the staff had playing.

About the third lap, I noticed this guy walking on a treadmill. He was a big fellow, and my first thought was Good for you, guy. Get yourself in some shape and live longer. My second thought was Hey, that looks like W, a guy who works where I do but in a different department. I didn't have my glasses on, so I couldn't tell for sure, not for another couple of laps at least. Once the light played tricks on me, and I thought I saw, as I passed above and behind him, some golden brown hair on top of his head. No, that's not him, I thought. W wears his thinning dark hair trimmed close. Then, as I came around one side and could see a bit of profile, I felt fairly certain it was him. Not until he walked away, however, was I convinced. He has a distinctive walk, a posture that leans back somewhat, perhaps to counterbalance his belly.

W and I have been on a couple of projects together, but I don't know him that well. I do, however, have what I call a "wrestling crush" on him. I'd love to get him into a pair of wrestling trunks and get on the mat with him. He's roughly my height but a good bit younger and, I guessing, 50 pounds heavier. But he's shaped like one of the old-time wrestlers, and that's what caught my eye the first time I ever saw him. He's quite the bear.

These wrestling crushes have been the most difficult things to deal with over the years. I see a man or know a man whose shape and bearing resonates with my wrestling desires, a man whose body I'd like to see nearly naked and feel in contact with mine. And I can do nothing but obsess and fantacize. In the online environment, the men I meet come already interested in wrestling. The wouldn't be in the places I meet them if they weren't. But out in the real world, wrestling life is completely different. Asking a man to wrestle with you isn't like asking him to have lunch or shoot some hoops. On the one hand, television wrestling has made the notion of wrestling seem so stupid to most of us. On the other hand, our culture has become so paranoid about same-sex contact that wrestling--for most everybody beyond the teenage years--is seen as far beyond the limits of acceptable behavior. I've had--and I have--wrestling crushes on men who I'm almost certain would wrestle if the subject could ever be broached, but I've never found the courage to approach them. Some, I think, feel the same way I do about it, which makes it doubly difficult to give voice to the desire.

And so, W walks away from his treadmill, to the dressing room and then out into the world, and I keep walking 'round and 'round.
My first wrestling experience took place on 2 January 1996. On New Year's Day, I traveled a couple of hours to a friend's house and spent the night with his wife and him. That night, I didn't sleep much, going over and over in my mind what might happen that afternoon, and when morning finally came, I got up and drove another three hours or so, to a city where other friends lived. The plan was that D and I would meet for lunch. If we liked each other, we'd go back to his place and wrestle.

We met at this little restaurant he'd told me about. I don't remember what he ate, but I was so nervous I couldn't tackle anything but a salad. Neither of us ate much, but we had a good conversation. When we finished, we decided that, yes, we thought we could go through with this, so we paid our checks and got in our cars and I followed him to his house, which was in a nice little neighborhood in a medium-sized town (near the city where my friends lived). My most nervous moment might have been stepping through his front door and into his world. Anything could happen, I thought, here in this private place away from the eyes of the world.

He'd set up a room upstairs. The place was small, with a single window facing the house next door and a small mat, maybe a tumbling mat, on the floor. He stayed there while I went into the bathroom to change.

I didn't have wrestling trunks in those days, and I didn't wear the colored no-fly briefs I wore most often in those early matches before I bought my trunks. I took off my clothes and put on a pair of black form-fitting workout shorts with a wide white waistband.

I took a deep breath and came out of the bathroom. Nerves and January and the fact that I had on nothing but this pair of shorts made the place seem cold, and I felt as if I were shivering when I stepped into the wrestling room to find him waiting there in a pair of gym shorts and a t-shirt.

D was gay, but I don't think he was involved in any relationship. He'd grown up in the Midwest. He was older than I, by maybe ten years or so, making him at the time in his late 40s or early 50s. He had a round face that smiled easily, a high voice and a high, warm laugh. He was maybe 5'11" and weighed around 260, which made him big in the belly and upper body. He also had big legs with thick strong thighs. And here he was, nervous too but ready to wrestle me.

One of the notions that kept me awake the night before was rolling over and over in my mind images of how we might get started, get warmed up. I heard myself suggesting that we try a few holds, and I pictured me putting a head scissors on him--my favorite hold, my obsession--and warming up as he tried to escape. D was a fan of the bear hug, so I pictured him taking me in that. I was still wondering about this when I came out of the bathroom and entered "the ring."

D stripped off his t-shirt.

"Come here," he said as he walked toward me. "Hold out your arms."

He took a forearm in each hand and kneaded it. Then he moved up to my upper arms.

"You do the same," he said.

The chill in the room faded as we moved closer and accustomed ourselves to touching another man. And then he stepped in close and took me in a warm embrace--not a wrestling hold, not a bear hug, but an embrace. The ice was broken.

Next thing I knew I was in a standing side headlock, the first I'd ever been in after years of dreaming about it!

Over the course of the next hour or two, we wrestled there in that small room. We moved back and forth between wrestling half-speed catch-as-catch-can falls and just swapping holds we wanted to try. One would lock in a hold and the other would try to escape. If he did, we would continue to wrestle around until one got the other in something that he couldn't get out of.

D once worked me into a head scissors and double hammerlock, to which I eventually had to submit. I took him with a bear hug, which he loved. I worked him over with a figure-four head scissors. He made me submit to a body scissors and full nelson.

For a first experience, it was awesome! One of the images that still lingers in my mind over ten years later is of a head scissors he had me in. My head was sideways between his thighs so that I faced his feet. I remember looking at those crossed feet, saw them working together as he cinched the hold tighter and tighter. He had great legs.

When the session was ended, I showered and dressed and walked with him downstairs. We'd talked a lot over the course of the afternoon, which, as it often does when I wrestle men I like, meant as much to me as the wrestling. At his front door, we hugged and expressed our satisfaction that we could, in fact, get almost naked and wrestle another man without any overt sexual events taking place. We were both relieved. Again, we hugged, and I headed to the nearby city to visit friends for a couple of days.

I saw D again at a Waffle House some months or a year later. He was passing through where I lived, and we'd arranged to meet for a meal. We talked openly about wrestling, and I remember watching a couple of people at nearby tables paying attention to us. But we had a good visit. We've been in touch via email since--although not in a long time now--but have never wrestled each other again.

That was my first experience, as I said. I wouldn't wrestle again until August, when I would have three matches back to back and then back out of another.

Thursday, December 14, 2006

Bear Hug

Between us no space
even for a breath.
Around me his arms constri—
rict—constrict—breathless—

he lifts me
up—belly to his breast—breathless—
grimacing—red-faced—breathless—to destroy me.

Wednesday, December 13, 2006





Head Scissors

His thighs hold my head firmly,
even though I try to squirm
away from the intimacy of this
delicious and humiliating hold.

Submit, he says through bared teeth
clenched with the strain of holding me
immobilized between his thighs.
Submit, he says again. I won't
submit, I say, my voice
orphaned inside my head as I
rejoice from beard to feet in his increase of control. Then,
Stop, I say, and murmur my submission to his thighs.




Monday, December 11, 2006

I wrestled my first match just after New Year's 1996. I'd been online for a couple of years by this point, but I took my time about, first, coming up with the idea to wrestle "life" and, second, to arrange a match. I was talking and cyberwrestling a lot with a guy I knew as "Luke," but he lived a good distance away, and I had no viable reason to travel in his direction. Although I didn't spend as much time with anybody else online, the same was true--in regards to travel--with several other wrestlers I was interested in.

I don't remember how I met D. More than likely we met in AOL's "wrestling m4m" room. He was an older guy, mid 50s or so, I think. (I was just turned 37.) We chatted online for a good long while. Our interests were similar, although he liked bear hugs while I liked head scissors. Our size was similar, although he outweighed be by several pounds. Our experience was similar--none on my side and little if any on his. Other common interests drew us together as well--religion, education, an interest in history and so on. He taught history at a university near where some friends of mine live, and at some point I was struck by the idea that I could plan a visit to see my friends and try to set up a wrestling match with this D. That's what I did.

We exchanged pictures via regular mail, I think, and arranged the match for January 2nd. We would meet for lunch somewhere in his town and then, if we felt okay with each other, we'd go back to his place and wrestle. Afterwards I would continue on to spend the rest of the trip with my friends.

I can hardly express the mix of emotions I felt as the time for our meeting approached. I was excited that this longtime fantasy of mine was on the verge or being realized. I was afraid of what might happen if we wrestled. Again, both of us had similar interests, so I had no fear that an erection on my part would offend him or humiliate me. He said it was just as likely to happen to him as well. I'd always known that I wasn't gay, and I'd apparently worked hard over the years to deflect any ideas that my wrestling interest, as it turned more toward men, suggested that possibility. What I feared in my meeting with D was that our wrestling excitement would devolve into sex. I didn't want that, and neither, it seemed, did he. But what if the wrestling got me so excited that I couldn't help myself? How would I explain it? Mutual masturbation among boys is one thing; adult sex between men is quite another. But the desire to experience wrestling was stronger than my fear of the possible homosexual experience, so I made my plans and followed through. . . .

Friday, December 8, 2006

I did a little neighborhood wrestling as a boy. I wrestled with my cousins and with other boys living close by. Sometimes I'd have a friend over when wrestling was on the local TV station, and we'd wrestle in the floor of the living room, acting out for ourselves what was happening on the show. Sometimes the wrestling was a pile of boys outside in the grass, tumbling together down the slopes of our hilly yard. Often these matches were one-sided affairs, with two or three of them coming against me at once.

But even then I knew that something I felt as we wrestled and laughed together was different from what they felt.

As I approached puberty, I used to spend the night from time to time with this one boy. We were ten, eleven, twelve years old, and we slept in the same bed at his house. Our bodies were beginning to awaken, and we began to explore our sexuality with mutual masturbation. When it was his turn to stimulate me, I would hold him in a headlock while he worked me with his hand. The suggestion of wrestling did nothing for him, but it did a world of good for me.

This "boy" and I still know each other, and we're both in our late 40s now. We've never talked about those nights long ago in the bed at his house or in a tent pitched in one of our yards. But here I am, wrestling with this psycho-sexual obsession with wrestling, and he--thrice married, thrice divorced--has recently been dealing with something of an addiction to sex (all heterosexual experiences, as far as I know). Those nights of exploration seem now harbingers of the lives we've lived since then.

Beyond these boyhood explorations--not that uncommon from what I understand--wrestling faded from my social life. My neighborhood friends and I stopped wrestling as we became teenagers. We still spent the night together, but the sexual explorations stopped, replaced by talk about sports and girls. I always thought about wrestling them--the boys and the girls--but kept it to myself. When one of my boyhood friends, the one most interested in TV wrestling, became my first college roommate, I imagined us stripped down and wrestling on the floor in our room, but that never happened. He might have wrestled if I'd asked, but I was all too aware of wrestling's effect on me and didn't want to expose myself to the humiliation of having an erection while wrestling with another guy.

And so, nothing more happened with wrestling for more than 20 years. I thought about it. I watched it on TV. I looked for in on magazine racks and library shelves. But I never wrestled woman or man outside my own dreams. . . .

Thursday, December 7, 2006


Sometime in 1994, maybe early 1995, I got hooked up on AOL and entered the 1990s. The online environment was a wonderland, an amusement park, Las Vegas. Before long I discovered the chat rooms--the public ones, I mean. And, of course, before long again I discovered the private, member-created chat rooms. I remember one night--the night--when I sat at my desk downstairs in the house where we were living and came across a room that changed my life--"wrestling m4m." I sat and looked at it for a long time, thinking about it and wondering what went on in there. Finally a shaky finger clicked the mouse button that would take me into the room. Like often happened in those days, a message popped up to tell me that the room was full. Despite my initial hesitation, I wanted in badly now. Eventually I got lucky, and I was in, the conversation and the comings and goings in the room scrolling up the screen.


I won't go into all that happened, all that was to be discovered, in that room. Suffice to say that I sat there as in a dream and discovered over and over again what I'd discovered in that library not long before: I wasn't the only wrestling-obsessed man in the world. In fact, lots of us were out there in cyberspace. Many were gay; many claimed to be bi or straight. And like the man--young or old--who cut the head scissors pictures out of the book in the library, lots of us were into that hold. Or other basic good ones like the bear hug and the headlock.

I spent a lot of time on AOL, one month running up a bill of over $225 when we couldn't afford such a thing. But it paid off, and I developed friendships. I remember the first was a fellow of Memphis. We talked a lot, and as we did I could feel a thrill running up the insides of my thighs, and excited weakness that seemed trying to pull my thighs together around the Memphis man's head. Sometime after that I ran across "Luke," and we were lots and lots alike. We chatted long and often and eventually did lots of cyberwrestling. I wrote some stories based on these matches--"Jacobs vs. Weaver." These went out on the Internet and were popular for a while. Anyway, Luke would be the bridge between online wrestling and real wrestling. Although he wasn't the first I wrestled, we got together as soon as we could and ultimately wrestled twice. And we might again one of these days.
All this online exploration led up to my first man-to-man contact with another wrestler at New Year's, 1996. . . .

Monday, December 4, 2006


And so I grew up obsessed with wrestling.

I watched it on television every time I could. Many of these years were before the advent of cable, so the wrestling I saw mostly came to me on Saturdays. When I had my driver's license, I traveled sometimes to high school gyms around where I grew up to watch matches I'd seen advertised on the Saturday shows.

I had an old set of Encyclopaedia Britannica that featured a nice photo page of wrestling. The page held eight photos from a match between "black" and "white" (known by the color of their trunks. My favorite was a picture of black holding white in head scissors and arm hold, a variation of the picture posted above. I don't know how many times I masturbated to this hold. The wrestlers themselves were thin and without what I considered the real "look" of wrestlers, but the hold was great.

Somewhere along the line, I'd discovered a couple of photo/video sources for images of women's wrestling--films of classic matches from the 1930s through the 1960s, private matches between California or New York women, apartment wrestling and catfighting. I knew some men must be out there who liked to watch women wrestle, but I considered it to be more a case of some men preferring this to the poses of the girlie magazines.

I was over 30 years old before I made the discovery that the world held other people who were interested in wrestling in exactly the same way that I was. I remember being in a library that was new to me and going--as I often did--to the section where the wrestling books were shelved. I picked up one book and turned to the index, looking for the page numbers where I would find pictures of my beloved head scissors. With the numbers in my head, I began thumbing through the pages, and lo and behold, every head scissors picture in the book had been razored out! What a wonderful and creepy feeling came over me! Somebody else loves the head scissors, I thought. That was exciting! At the same time, however, I felt a twinge of fear--Somebody knows my secret. The paranoid notion that somebody had cut out those pictures knowing that I'd come looking for them didn't survive long. Somebody else loves the is turned on by the head scissors. But this was 1993 or 1994, and at that time I had no way of learning any more about the person who had removed the pictures. That would have to wait for my first encounters with the Internet, a few months, maybe a year, beyond that library discovery.

But something important had happened. In that library moment I realized I wasn't alone in the world.

Friday, December 1, 2006

Women wrestlers were a rarity when I was growing up, but they appeared on the television shows from time to time. I always got excited when at the beginning of an hour of TV wrestling the announcer would say that ladies were on the card that day. Joyce Grable and Debbie Combs were my favorites. Both used my favorite hold--the head scissors--a good bit, especially Grable. As I watched them wrestle, my chest and throat would get tight, and my erection would push hard against my zipper. My fantasies at night often featured these women instead of playboy bunnies or actresses or models. I think now that it wasn't their bodies that turned me on so much as it was their wrestling, their bodies in contact, wrapped up together in holds like head scissors, body scissors, headlock, hammerlock and bear hug.

It was all about the holds back then. I liked the basic stuff, those holds used mostly to wear an opponent down rather than "finish" the match. They provided skin-to-skin contact and an opportunity to feel the dominant position of the one wrestler and the "suffering" of the other. Today's matches move so fast that I can get no sense of these things in them.

The holds turned me on when the men wrestled too. Watching a man work over another with a head scissors got me almost as worked up as watching a woman work the same hold. I guess through this, I also came to admire certain qualities of a man's body. The old wrestlers were mostly thick in the middle and the chest and the legs, and that became my ideal wrestler's image. (And when I grew up to look a lot like that myself, I was pleased.) Bodybuilders have always shown up in the wrestling ring, although not, like today, to the exclusion of almost every other body type. But the bulked up fellows--and the opposite of these: the thin men--never appealed to me. Put a man in the ring who is around 6' and weighs anywhere from 225 to 275, and I'll watch him wrestle all day.

While I'm on the "look" of wrestling and wrestlers, I'll also add that I developed particular prejudices about their gear as well. Women or men can wrestle barefoot or in boots; it doesn't matter to me. Women almost always wore a one-piece leotard without leggings, and that worked for me. Men could wear singlets with one or two shoulder straps, but my favorite was the simple pair of trunks. I never liked leggings. I think that, being a fan of the head scissors, I always wanted to see these holds skin-to-skin, and leggings of any kind got in the way of that.

I know how weird this all sounds. And for years I thought I was the only one who had these strange reactions to wrestling. Few people had any inkling of what was going on in my head (and elsewhere) when I watched wrestling. They didn't seem to respond to it as I did, and so I thought I was alone in the world.

Wednesday, November 29, 2006

As far back as I can remember from this distance—some 40 years—wrestling always had a psycho-sexual effect on me. Whether fake or not, wrestling's body contact and the images of dominance and submission stimulated me on a visceral level. To see a wrestler working over an opponent with some controlling hold excited me. Sometimes a wrestler would keep returning to the same hold over and over again until the other was slapping the mat in frustration or even begging to be released. I feel stirrings even thinking about it.

Of course, wrestling in those days—the '60s and '70s—was so different from what it is now. Today's wrestlers make no pretense about "the show." And they run their matches on high speed, filling them with high-flying moves and constant motions. Holds seem rarely held for longer than a few seconds. Wrestling has always thrived on its sense of story and drama, but since our attention span has all but wasted away and our perception has become overwhelmed by our MTV sound byte culture, the dramatic tension is gone and all is slapstick melodrama of the most ridiculous sort.

I don't watch it.

But 30 or 40 years ago the fans had patience with the matches they watched. Matches had time limits of 30 minutes or an hour, during which the wrestlers took time to feel each other out before deciding on a plan of attack. Certainly wrestling matches have most often pitted a good guy (a "face") against a bad guy (a "heel"), but once upon a time fans believed enough in wrestling—or were willing to suspend their disbelief enough—to enjoy what seemed to be real wrestling between two skilled ("scientific") wrestlers. No rule-breaking or streetfighting in these latter matches, just hold after hold. In matches of any kind in those days and earlier (40s and '50s), a wrestler might even secure a hold and work it for several minutes, almost an entire match sometimes.

This was good for me.

Tuesday, November 28, 2006

I always wanted to be a wrestler. I have the size for it--6'1" & 240 lbs.--and the athleticism. And I had my chance once upon a time. My high school started a team when I was in the 10th grade, but that kind of wrestling didn't interest me. Besides, I don't have the required threshold for pain or the required aggression.

Pro wrestling of the 1960s and 1970s--that's what already had me by then. I spent my Saturday mornings (late mornings, just before noon) watching local wrestling on one of the four channels our antenna could pick up. Same thing on Saturday nights after the eleven o'clock news. Most people who like this kind of wrestling like it for its good vs. evil aspects. The cleancut American wrestles the evil Russian or Iranian. The fair and friendly by-the-rules wrestler has to try to overcome the rule breaker. These fans watch wrestling for the same reason that many fans watch NASCAR (to see the wrecks) or hockey (to see the fights). They enjoy the story that each wrestling match tells of the feud between the fair and the unfair, the struggle between good and evil. Like good theatre, pro wrestling offers us a chance to live vicariously through its good or evil characters, to experience a sense of catharsis as its tensions are resolved.

But, unfortunately, I'm not like most fans.