I reluctantly left Tulsa in the morning and my wrestling partner there to travel east, hoping to make Nashville sometime before midnight. But that afternoon, I intended to make a stop in Arkansas to wrestle with Tarzan Tim. He and I had been chatting a good bit online at that time, and I was looking forward to tangling with him.
A couple of things were great about wrestling Tim. First, he has one of the top two or three best wrestling bodies I've ever gotten my hands on. Once I got there, the other great thing was that we were going to wrestle in his garage, with the big door open. I'd always liked the idea of wrestling outdoors, and this was close to that. His house was out in the woods, so we were able to have the door open to the sunshine and air without having to worry about being watched.
But Tim had just had some surgery done on one of his wrists. With an awareness that we had to be careful about that, we dressed out in our trunks and hit the mat in the garage. The first few minutes was just about perfect, but then something happened. I'm not sure what. He pretty quickly went to some groping that, in those days, I wasn't very comfortable with. I asked him to tone it down a bit. I don't know if that offended him or disappointed him or turned him off. I don't know if he or I accidentally did something to his injured arm that made him suddenly realize that maybe this wasn't the best activity to engage in at this point in his physical recovery.
Whatever happened, the wrestling stopped. He just stopped and let me know we were finished. I was terrifically disappointed and so thrown off my game that I forgot my wrestling shoes at his house. Somewhere along the road to Nashville, I called him about them, and he agreed to mail them to me. Which he graciously did. We've corresponded some since then, and we seem to be good with each other.
Still, that truncated match remains one of my biggest wrestling disappointments, because it left me wanting to hit the mats with Tarzan Tim again. One of these days . . .
