Part of this excitement dates back to my days in elementary school. Remember National Geographic, the good boy's Playboy? My school library carried NG, and I looked at it often. But really, my reasons had little to do with the easy availability of beautiful photographs that sometimes included the bare breasts of women living in remote Third-World villages. I saw those pictures, sure, but for a boy with a mind like mine, the places the magazine could take me--be bare breasts there or not--drew me to its place on the shelf time and time again.
Even then, wrestling was a particular fascination, already eroticized in my prepubescent brain and body. Thus, one issue that drew me to itself again and again featured a story on Alexander the Great. Most of the photography connected to the article focused on landscapes through which Alexander moved to create his empire, but a couple of photographs were sort of reenactments of the man's life. One photo in particular showed Alexander wrestling with another man in lush green grass. Both men's bodies were taut and their sun-bronzed skin shiny with sweat, and, as I remember, both wore black briefs intended, I suppose, to suggest loincloths (although most like the real Alexander and his opponent would have wrestled naked).
This image is framed and hanging in a back gallery of my mind to this day.
Now, be assured that, while we wrestled in black briefs, my friend and I own no taut bodies, and the only portions of our skin that could be considered sun-bronzed are our arms and heads. We found a spot in tall clover and weeds, not lush green grass, and spread out three fairly small pieces of cloth for a mat. (Alexander and his man wrestled on no mat.) But we wrestled outdoors, two heavy white bodies against the blue and brown of the mat cloths and the not-so-brilliant green of the clover and weeds, beneath the mid-morning sun, an outbuilding a few feet away on one side, a thickly wooded hillside rising a few feet away on the other, our cast-off clothes hanging in a group of nearby saplings.
Not the perfect recreation of that old NG photo but a great experience--except for the fact that my skin is sensative to the grass, and that evening I noticed that my back was a swirl of red welts that were a reaction to a wonderful morning of splendid wrestling in the grass!
* * *
As I finished this entry, I decided to query the amazing Google
for an image of "Alexander" "wrestling." Lo and behold, the old NG photo showed up on the 6th page of results from the image search. It was also used as part of a blog, and here is what the writer wrote about it: "The final photo is from an article from 1968, 'In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great'. A Turkish oil wrestling contest takes place amid the ruins of Ephesus. Here, back in the Western end of Eurasia, Turks act out the roles of ancient Greeks and Macedonians in the imagination of the reporter. "
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Interestingly enough, I found myself thinking of Turkish oil wrestling myself after our bout in the field. What largely I found myself musing is that Turkish culture does not find it even remotely odd or homoerotic or anything of the sort for a group of men of widely varied shapes, sizes and ages (not more than a normal percentage of Adonises, if any, among them)gathering in an open field (often in a county-fairesque atmosphere), oiling themselves and one another up, and wrestling. They don't find anything unusual about two or more men practicing for such an event at home or in open fields elsewhere. It's an acceptable pasttime at family gatherings; the men might wrestle (or not) while the women pass the time doing womenly things. (I'm being realistic, not sexist...) Turkey is not the only culture where this is the case (Mongolia springs most readily to mind); yet here we felt constrained to find a spot where a curious glance would neither disturb the peace of our activity or our community nor misconstrue our motives or intentions in the pursuit of sport and contest. (sigh...)
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