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.