Monday, May 24, 2010

Today I have my first wrestling match since this past November, and I'm so distracted with anticipation that I can't get anything done at work. So I thought I would just write a long overdue blog entry (and imply a promise that during the summer I'll be more faithful with this).

A couple of months after my great meeting with Larry, I had one of the worst wrestling experiences of my life. If you remember, I wrote recently about this really tough guy that I had no business wrestling. He was far too big and far too good for me to be able to do anything with. But he was a generous fellow. He taught me some stuff, and although he allowed for little give and take in our match, he at least encouraged me and showed me some tricks.

My match in February 2002 was with another bruiser of a fellow. We'd had a fairly good planning session online prior to my arriving in his town. I knew that our styles and interests didn't match up exactly, but I'd grown accustomed to these things working out fairly well once my friendly opponent and I were in the same room together. Maybe I'd grown overconfident in the way my matches had generally worked out for the best. Maybe I'd simply grown complacent.

This bruiser's name was Steve, and he lived in a relatively small college town in the South. I can't remember if he taught at the college, but I think that he did. He was, like me, married, and so I felt comfortable that wrestling's potential for eroticism wouldn't get out of hand--or maybe "in hand" would be more to the point. I'd picked up on no particular erotic subtext during my conversations with Steve, and that held true.

Let me be as brief as our wrestling was that day. This guy was big and powerful and plowed me under for three short falls in a row. When we weren't wrestling--if you can call what I did that day by that name--he was enjoyable enough to talk to. But when we locked up he took me down for three quick falls in a row. To my memory, it seems that all three falls lasted less than 30 seconds each before he was sitting on my chest, almost in a schoolgirl pin position, and I was helpless to do anything but submit.

Man, it's embarrassing just to think about. I was absolutely no challenge to him, even in those brief moments when I tried to be. He remained mostly friendly throughout, but I could tell that I'd disappointed him. My screen name at that point had included the word "moose," and after he had destroyed me, he suggested, with a little laugh, that I change the "moose" part to "wuss."

So, ultimately, this was a match in which my opponent sought no common ground with me but instead followed his own agenda to win by complete domination. What he did that day I don't think of as wrestling, but I'm certain that he thought the same about what I did.

More than any other encounter I've had, this one showed me the threat inherent in what we do when wrestling in some motel room or in some strange home (or church or school). If we meet somebody with an unknown or inflexible agenda, if we meet that somebody unprepared to respond to that agenda's being forced upon us by superior skills or strength, we put ourselves at significant risk. I was confident that Steve was a good guy, and in this, fortunately, I wasn't disappointed. But what if he hadn't been a good guy? What if he'd brought all that firepower against me with a serious intention to do me some physical or psychological harm?

I've kept this in mind and been more careful in making my matches since then, so much so that I sometimes have gone the other way and wrestled guys that even I could call "wuss" (but I don't). Whenever I sense that a man wants to get really rough with me, I back away completely or, more often, push him gently to reveal how much he's willing to compromise his style to accomodate mine. I try to make it clear that our match doesn't have to be just about me, that I'll try to meet him somewhere in the middle, but that I'm not an aggressive man and can't match his intensity. This has worked out well so far.

This afternoon I wrestle a man almost my exact match in age and weight, but as usual he has more experience than I. His profile says that he likes to wrestle submission and freestyle, and I sense that he'll be competitive. But we talked on the telephone last night, and I feel like we're going to get along just fine. We're wrestling "semi-competitive" and "3/4 speed," all with good strength to the holds. Now I just have to hope that "semi" and "3/4" aren't terms too relative.