All Work & No Play

Okay, here I go again, trying to get back in the groove of posting regularly to this blog--weekly, monthly, whatever. I've been awfully busy these last few years, so I haven't done as much wrestling as I would like. I wrestled last summer a couple of times during one trip out of town. And then I wrestled during the holiday season when the friend I thought I'd lost was found again.

Regarding him and my last post from Atlanta, emails had been lost, he'd taken a new job and moved away--the usual stuff that happens to relationships in this world of ours. Anyway, another good friend in St. Louis said he'd wrestled my long lost buddy during a recent trip to Atlanta. I got an updated email and got in touch. Turns out that when I was in Atlanta and bemoaning the fact of having lost touch with him, he was only a few miles away! So, he'll come back here to visit family from time to time, and I'll go to Atlanta from time to time. We wrestled this past December, and I'm sure we'll wrestle again sometime in the future.

I'll have to go back and look at where I left off in the chronicling my interesting but limited  wrestling experiences and pick up with those again.

New Post from Atlanta!

I'm sitting in Starbucks--attached to Barnes & Noble--on the north side of Atlanta. Knowing this city a little bit, I'm guessing that some wrestlers are not far away from me here. Atlanta seems to have a lot of them listed in the sites. But I'm not able to meet anybody on this trip, as I'm traveling with a friend. This friend, however, would be a great one to wrestle with, and it was difficult to sleep in the same room with him last night and not say, "How 'bout we wrestle a couple of falls before we turn in?" I tried to work just the word "wrestling" into our conversation throughout the evening--not as easy as it sounds--but got no reaction. I feel certain that it's not one of his interests. Still, he'll always remain one of my dream matches.

At some point, I'll return to the chronicle of my wrestling history, but today I'll just say that I'm missing a friend that I had locally--not in Atlanta, which I'm just visiting, but at home. He contacted me through this blog a couple of years ago, and we got together several times afterward. Last winter, however, after we'd been meeting to wreste for just over a year, we decided to explore a little more eroticism in the match. I'd done this before with other wrestlers, but I'd forgotten how I felt the first time one of my matches took on a more erotic tone. It kind of freaked me out for awhile. I wish I hadn't forgotten this. Like I said, my friend and I decided to let the eroticism of wrestling play out a in this particular match. We mistakenly let it go too far. He didn't seem terribly freaked out as we finished up the match and parted ways, but that was the last time I saw him. He has responded to an email or two since hasn't done even that in several months.

I could kick myself for letting this happen. I should've known better. For years and years I'd wanted a local fried to wrestle. Not only was this guy a friend, he was just the kind of wrestler I enjoy wrestling--big and strong, interested in similar holds and types of matches, interested in similar questions about what wrestling meant to us and why.

Anyway, I wish we could get together again. When I sensed that our last match had made him uncomfortable, I hoped that he would eventually be back when he'd sorted things out a bit. I felt certain that he would, but he hasn't. Now I'm thinking that he probably won't be back.

With my car fixed and running well, I headed west out of Ohio into Indiana. In Indianapolis, I checked into a motel with some good wrestling floor space and called my good friend Larry. He came over and we wrestled for a long time. This was probably the best match we've had. I was a little more experienced than when I'd met him previously, and he was in good health.

One thing wrestling can be to men--when it's not tensely competitive or just a prelude to sex--is play. Larry likes to play. He's a longtime fan of professional wrestling and has even done some that--as a wrestler, I think, and as a commentator. The first time we got together in Atlanta, he showed me a lot about pro wrestling holds, how they work over one another without really working over one another, how they sell the holds to the house.

So this day in Indianapolis we had some good floor space and we were playing, but mixing in a little catch-as-catch-can with our usual pro approach. Part of the play was to imagine that we could be a tag team and imagining how that would work. We also did scenarios for a singles match against one another and how that would work. Larry loves my head scissors, so we came up with a finishing hold for my persona that would be sort of a figure-four-head-scissors-sleeper hold. We played with that, incorporating it into our scenarios, and had a good time. We were playing.

At times our wrestling evolved into more of a submission style. This was something Larry hadn't done in a while, and he really seemed to enjoy it. If I'm not mistaken, after our wrestling that day, he began to move more toward a give-and-take submission style and enjoying that, as opposed to all the performing involved in pro wrestling.

So, could a head scissors be a finishing hold? I think so. In a couple of pro matches I've seen--one on TV and this one on youtube.com--I've seen it work. The TV match was sometime in the '80s, and I was traveling and watched it in a motel room. At the end of the match, one big fellow wrapped his opponent's head up in a figure-four head scissors and won the match when his victim seemingly was knocked out by the hold. And in this youtube.com clip, one wrestler uses a head scissors to win a submission out of his opponent.

As I said, Larry loves the play of wrestling, but I think he would say that nobody he knows loves it as much as our mutual friend GRIZZ. This guy wrestles and wrestles and wrestles. And wrestles. He uses the same hold used in the clip, and he calls it--usually in all caps--the QUADROPLEX. Here he is about to get a submission out of me with that hold, so I can understand how the head scissors could be used to win a match.

I'm beginning to plan another one of these wrestling tours for this year, and I'm hoping that Larry and GRIZZ will be part of the tour. I've developed a great group of friends through this love of wrestling, and I'm looking forward to getting my hands on them again!

Wow! I was shocked when I opened up my blog and noticed that it has been almost a full year since my last post. That's way out of line. I know that I had some readers at one point, but I'm afraid they'll all be gone now. Still, I want to return to posting regularly--ideally once a week, but no fewer than once a month. Maybe some readers will rediscover the blog and come back. I've had some great responses in the past, and one of them actually led to my meeting a local wrestler with whom I've wrestled some of my favorite matches. We first got together just a little over a year ago, and we've wrestled several times since then. (More on him later.) So, the blog has been important to my wrestling life, and I want to rev it up once again.

Youtube continues to be a great resource. When I was young in the '70s--living in Appalachia before cable TV--I used to wait for noon on Saturday when wrestling would hit the airwaves. Once a week. No videotaping either! Now, I can sit at the computer--for hours if I want to--and watch wrestling from all over the world and from its great past. (As you can see, I'm still into the head scissors!)

I plan to do some traveling this year, and I hope those travels will include some wrestling with old friends and maybe some new ones as well.

I'll pick up my wrestling history within the week, or I might post about a new wrestling experience. I've been hoping for one since this past Thursday, but it hasn't materialized yet. Maybe tomorrow or Monday? I'll let you know.

My mini wrestling tour continued in July 2005--

Ohio seems to have a lot of wrestlers. Although I've wrestled, let's see, five men there, I still know of a couple that I'd like to hit the mat with.

Anyway, after my stop in Kentucky during that July trip, I went on up into Ohio for a match with another fellow I'd corresponded with there for some time. When I arrived, I called and told him where I was staying--Motel 6--and my room number. I don't remember how long he said it would be before he got there, but I had time to take a nap. After an hour or so, I was awakened by the telephone, and my opponent was somewhat put out with me for not answering the door when he knocked. I told him that I'd been asleep but that, knowing my sleeping, I was sure I couldn't have slept through even the lightest knocking. He continued to be ill about it as we rechecked the name of the place and the room number. Obviously if he was calling me in the room he had at least partially correct information. As it turned out, he was at the wrong Motel 6!
While he was on his way to the right location and right room, I fixed up the floorspace as best I could to allow for a little wrestling. Sadly, I don't remember many particulars about our match. He weighed in, I believe, in the 190s or low 200s, making him one of the lightest men I've wrestled. And he was a scrappy grappler and fun to wrestle. He wore white trunks, which I remember because we took several "hold" pictures after the wrestling was over.

The next morning, he came by again. I think we did some more wrestling, but what I remember most is that I was having some problems with my car and he took me to an auto parts place and fixed it for me. A great guy, for sure.

After the match with Pup, I know I did a handful of repeat matches with friends. I met Larry in Nashville at some point between 2003 and 2005, and I wrestled Chris when I was in his city in October 2004 and April 2005. In July 2005, I went on a little wrestling tour and had three matches within the space of a few days.

The first was in a motel room in Lexington, Kentucky. I wrestled a man named C----. At roughly 270 pounds, he was difficult to move around, and I either strained or pinched something in my right shoulder. (As I write this, I have the same feeling in my left shoulder from a great match I had yesterday.) C---- really looked like an oldtime wrestler--broad shoulders chest, big belly, blue speedos. He was strong too, especially in his legs. But he wasn't very experienced or very creative in his wrestling, and I think I could have taken every fall from him if I'd wanted to. Although seemingly in trouble early on in the first two falls, I ended up winning both by submission. C---- wasn't in very good shape and became winded easily, so we spent a lot of time between falls just sitting on opposite sides of our "mat" and talking about wrestling, family, life in general. We traded some holds, and I showed him some head scissors variations I like. After a long talk-break, we did two more falls before he had to leave. In the first of these, I let him get me in a head scissors to see what he would do with it. He gave good squeeze, added an arm bar, stretched me out pretty well and got my submission. The final fall I won with a similar combination.

We are torn between flesh and spirit, between desires for dominance and submission, between fears of intimacy and fears of distance . . .

I recently learned something that might be a fun explanation of my obsession with the scissors hold. Apparently our Zodiac signs have bodily parts associated with them, just like they supposedly have certain personality characteristics attached. What's the bodily part associated with my sign? Thighs!