Harley Race's Head Scissors

 I wish the video weren't so jumpy, but I do love to see Harley Race jump into a head scissors. This one's applied to the great Dory Funk. (If the video doesn't go directly to Race up in the air and locking his legs around Funk's head, you can jump to it at 35:44.)

My Favorite AC

First contact via blog comments: "Hey Ringer, I've been reading your article for a while and share many of your same thoughts and feelings about the matter. I am married with a child and attend church regularly and struggle with the issue of enjoying wrestling. I live in was wondering if you would be interested in meeting for a match?"

My response: "Sorry, but I missed your "live in" somehow. Where are you? If it's geographically possible, I'd be interested in meeting for a match.

And thanks for reading! You can contact me at wrestling-life@hotmail.com."

My follow-up response: "Got your email, "Anonymous," and sent one back to you."

His initial email: "Sorry, I typed the comment early this morning before leaving for work.  I reside in the Kingsport area so not too far away.  I noted from reading some [of] your articles that you generally meet at Applebee's so thought I might see if you were interested in meeting up for a match sometime.  As I said, I have read your article for a while and had alot of the same thoughts and feelings and thought it could be interesting."

My response: "Thanks for the note. Again, I'm glad you've gotten something out of the blog. It certainly helps me. My wrestling experiences have been almost all good ones, and as you can tell from the blog, this is due in part to the fact that I'm cautious in setting up matches. So, if you don't mind, before we begin looking for a time to get together, let's have a brief email conversation.

You know a good bit about my wrestling interests from your reading. Other things that might not have come out clearly in the blog are that I'm 49 years old and I currently weigh 255, and I don't generally wrestle men significantly younger (in their 20s) or significantly smaller (say, under 190). The rest you know or have a good idea about.
 
Tell me a little about yourself--age, size, wrestling interests.
 
Applebee's has been a good place to meet in the past, although now that I think about it, the meetings there haven't led to my favorite matches . But I'm sure that wasn't the fault of Applebee's.

I look forward to hearing from you again at your convenience."

My follow-up: "Hi there, I'm hoping I didn't write anything wrong in my last email to you, as I'm interested in talking sometime."

[crickets]

I guess sometimes--most times--contacts like this just don't work out. I never heard anything back from this contact after my last response above.

Uncle Bill's Nipple

A significant part of my wrestling obsession is an accompanying obsession with heavyset men with bellies.

Not grossly obese men. Not men with fat tires around their waists. Not men with hanging bellies that make them look for all the world as if they’re pregnant. Not men with flabby breasts that lay flaccid atop their bellies. Not men whose breasts seem only the wall of their chests with nipples painted on them.

No, some apparent muscle in the breasts seems necessary. Some apparent muscle in the belly—“table muscle”—seems necessary as well. The belly must have some contour and not appear carried like a bag.

Whence this obsession? This desire even?

One of the oldest images in my mind is of a morning in my grandparents’ house. The dining room table is covered with breakfast—plates of biscuits and bacon, bowls of gravy, cups of coffee, dishes of butter and jelly. I’m under ten years old, but I can’t be more accurate than that. I walk into the dining room, perhaps having just gotten out of bed. I come to the edge of the table, closest to where my uncle Bill sits. He has wavy red hair on a round head, a clean-shaven face often red from laughter. He is shirtless, and for whatever reason, his nipples are hard and large. Beneath them, his strong belly balloons partway out over his thighs. Maybe he’s wearing khaki trousers and is barefooted. Again, I’m not big, but I must stand tall enough that I’m at least a head above his shoulders as he’s seated, maybe even a head (or almost a head) above his head. Whichever the case, I’m able to look down at the table and move my gaze back and forth from the delicious food on the table to his naked upper body without having to move my neck or change the position of my head.

I can’t recall seeing my father or other uncles without at least their undershirts on. Was Uncle Bill’s the first naked man’s body—partially naked, at least—that I’d been close to and able to observe closely, if covertly, in my life? I have little or no interest in men’s genitals, but their shoulders and breasts and bellies captivate my attention—if they have the look.

Did this moment next to Uncle Bill contribute to my obsession with wrestling—pro wrestling in particular? I don’t like all the clothes that amateur wrestlers wear. I don’t like when pro wrestlers wear anything on their upper bodies, even if it’s just a singlet with a single shoulder strap. I don’t care for wrestlers who have thin physiques (think Greg Gagne). I don’t care for wrestlers who are heavily muscled (think Lex Luger or Randy Savage) and seem more like bodybuilders—unless they also have a belly I like.

Now and then, Uncle Bill’s nipple pops into my mind, and I wonder if it—and that moment of seeing it—have had some influence on my erotic personality and interests.

So, friends, from Compton's Encyclopedia, this is the head scissors that so many of us are turned on by.

Some years ago, I met one of my favorite opponents for the first time in the basement of an old middle school. Upstairs a basketball game was going on. I met this big man outside the game. He worked at the school, which was near where I live, and he guided me through the dark to a back entrance. We stripped down to our trunks and wrestled. At one point I had him in a head scissors like Bockwinkle and Race begin with below. And suddenly the image of this old Compton's head scissors came to mind, and I could immediately envision how to switch from my standard head scissors to this luscious one from the encyclopedia. I said to my guy, "Hang on, I'm gonna try something." And I made the switch, natural as you please. Man, did my body thrill at finally being able to feel what I'd looked at and fantasized about for so long! 

Here it is as applied by Gene Kiniski on Giant Baba. Unlike the other holds below, in which the wrester in charge makes a quick switch from a standard head scissors to the "head scissors and arm hold," watch Kiniski go straight to the hold.

Hey, ref, how 'bout you get out of the dang way?!

Harley Race v. Terry Funk

Race's version of the hold is elevated, rather than lying heavily on Funk's body like the other holds depicted here.

Watch Race make the switch, which is done here slowly enough so that we can see how the grip with his legs changes from one version to the next.

Below is the head scissors in a match between Warren Bockwinkle and Wilbur Snyder. I think it might be my favorite, although the Race/Funk version is darn hot.

Watch this to see how Bockwinkle makes the switch between the two head scissors versions. I'm guessing that this is how the head scissors in Compton's developed. Although I suppose Black in the picture could have put White directly into the hold like Kiniski does Baba above.

Don't you wish we had a video of the Compton's Match?

I don't want to spoil anybody's MvM fun, but if you're into female wrestlers . . .

She's got it going on!

 

The Head Scissors and Johnny Weaver

I'll not say anything about being away and just be back without further comment (but with a hope that somebody is still out there reading).

At times when I need to be accomplishing the most, I procrastinate too often by scouring YouTube wrestling videos in search of any head scissors holds that matches might include. I've found a lot, but I've wasted a lot of time as well.

This morning, I was going through some old shows of the wrestling program I grew up watching--Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling. Back in the day, in pre-cable times, I could watch this once on Channel 4 out of Greenville, SC, after Saturday morning cartoons and before Saturday afternoon college sports. Then I could see it a second time that night, after the 11 o'clock news on Channel 13 out of Asheville, NC. I watched both shows always in hopes of seeing a head scissors and always in hopes of seeing my favorite wrester--Johnny Weaver. So, again, I was going through some Mid-Atlantic shows from 1981 and '82, and this one show just opened with the first match already in progress. Not only that, it opened with a head scissors already in progress. It gets better. Although I didn't remember the wrestler in control at that point in the match (I later learned his name was Ken Timbs), I quickly realized that the wrestler being worked over by the head scissors was Johnny Weaver.

Here's a screenshot of the match as it's picked up in progress:

I was immediately excited.

Weaver then rolls toward Timbs's feet and then onto his knees and works himself free of the hold. He lunges to take Timbs in a headlock, the counter to which puts him right back in the head scissors.

But then this shot of Weaver in the head scissors and looking, more or less, at the camera--at me--made my insides squirm and my crotch suddenly throb. Although brief in the video, this is such a visceral image for me.

Reader, I masturbated.

I've had these images up on my screen almost all day, and the throbbing has continued.

Here's a link to the video.

An Historic Find

Back in the late 1960s, a traveling salesman came to our house and sold my parents a set of Compton's Encyclopedia. This was great for my schooling, of course, and those books played some small role in making me what I am today.

But I'm not thinking only about what I am today as a writer and a knowledgable human being. I'm also thinking about why I'm here, writing on this blog and imagining wrestling. Wrestling shows for a young man from a rural area in the 1970s came on only Saturday morning and Saturday night. Once wrestling became elevated to the status of an obsession, my hungry eyes and imagination were fed the other six days of the week through print: sometimes in the pages of wrestling magazines at the drugstore or anytime I could get a moment alone via the brief entry on wrestling in the last volume of the Compton's set ("WXYZ").

That wrestling entry featured a full page of black-and-white photos that pretended to portray the progress of a match between two young wrestlers (165-pound class), nine pictures from their ready position to the pin. Who knows how many times these pictures aroused me over those years when I was still at home? Who knows how many times I masturbated to the one wrestler's head-scissors-and-arm hold on his opponent? How many times until I destroyed them? Although I don't remember the exact event, I know that at some point, my heterosexual Christian guilt hit me so hard that between one moment of satisfaction and release and the next time I felt the need, I ripped the offending page out and threw it away or burned it . . . something.

But then, my cousin had the same Compton set (with different covers) and the same pictures in volume "WXYZ." So, I didn't lose all access to that B&W dream match completely, but such access became limited. Few were the opportunities afterwards to sit with those pictures and revel in the way they excited me.

And then, eventually, they were gone forever.

Well, maybe not forever. Given the amount of stuff that's out there on the internet, I eventually began looking around to learn if somebody similarly affected had uploaded that one beautiful page. But, believe it or not, I've never found it out in cyberspace. Not in the B&W flesh at least. Once I found simple line drawings of more or less the same images, but those didn't satisfy and, instead, made me remember the old pictures with an even greater sense of loss.

Then yesterday I was in my office and received a call from a retired colleague (call him J). He asked if I still ran the fundraising book sale that annually supports a local organization. The mother of this colleague had died fifteen years before, and he was just getting around to clearing out and selling her house -- a house that contained a lot of books collected by his father, mother, and himself. I told him that a younger colleague of mine (call him S) now managed the book sale. When I got hold of S, he said we ought to kill an hour and make a run to see what was available from the estate's shelves.

To cut this short, I remember standing above a box of various books, looking down at them while J, S, and I talked. Suddenly my eyes focused on a set of dark-bound books -- Compton's Encyclopedia. My breath caught, and I immediately bent down out of the conversation and grabbed "WXYZ." I got hold of my excitement and pretended to flip through casually past "World War I" and "World War II" and then to "Wrestling," expecting to see those line drawings. But there, beneath my eyes again after at least forty years, two lithe young men wrestled through nine B&W pictures. My response to seeing these was immediate and visceral.

I was breathless trying to figure out what to do, as I was sure that S wouldn't want this old -- but not antique -- set for the book sale. So, after holding the book for an inordinately long while, I put it back in the box and bided my time. Then, when J took S into the house to show him something, I quickly retrieved the book and used my phone to take pictures of those beloved pictures. I realized later that J and S might have seen me through the windows, but I was beyond caring. (I wouldn't mind having S ask me what I was doing, as I'd like to open up a wrestling conversation with him and then grapple with him in some grassy clearing off a mountain trail. But that specific image is a tale for another day.)


I suppose that as I grew to well over two hundred pounds, I lost interest in the 165-pound class, but I was still thrilled to see those fellows from long ago -- called Black and White, according to the color of their trunks. And I was particularly thrilled to see Black work White into that head-scissors-and-arm hold again.

Mr. Wrestling II vs. Tony Russo [1985-03-02]