In the March of 1998, I returned to Ohio for more wrestling. (I blogged my original trip on 4/6/2007.) I wrestled K again, but an added attraction was available this time. The fellow I'd chatted with on the computer during my first trip, the fellow who told me about K and helped me get in touch with him, was also in the area. He and K lived together. As things worked out, I would get a chance to wrestle both of them on the same visit, although we wouldn't be in the room at the same time, which was something I'd always thought would be interesting—to watch two other me wrestle right in front of me.

K is a big fellow like I am—weighing in somewhere in the upper ranges of the 200s. We wrestled again during this trip and had a fine time doing so. Like before, I was unable to get a single submission from him. Nothing stops him, it seems. Nothing I can do, at least. We wrestled, we talked, we wrestled some more. It was on this trip that he told me one of the most interesting things that I've heard from another wrestler, something that has haunted me in the years since. He was talking about when he learned that he was gay. It's a simple story with complicated consequences (at least in my view). He was dating this girl, and he was spending time at her house, like daters do. Maybe they were getting along all right—going out to dinner on the weekends, going to movies, maybe over to Cincinnati to the amusement park, sprawling and cuddling on the couch to watch TV. The things that dating people do, you know. My guess is that at some level he felt comfortable with this "normal" experience.

But she had brothers. Maybe he knew them from high school or work or the local bar. Maybe he just met them when he first came to pick her up. I picture it like this: as he grew more comfortable being in their home, he began to horse around with these guys, these brothers of his girlfriend, and this horsing around included some wrestling in the back yard. But what K discovered was that he had a strong physical reaction to this wrestling, different from and stronger than the reaction he had cuddling on the couch with their sister. As might be expected from a smart man like K, this situation—reactions, feelings—wasn't swept to some dark corner of his mind, nor did he try to ignore it altogether. Eventually, as he analyzed it, he came to the understanding that he was gay. How his life progressed from his time in that house to our wrestling on the motel floor, I don't know. But I enjoyed the time we spent together, and I learned a lot about wrestling life from him.

Something different happened with J. He and I had been online friends for some time. We shared a lot of interests and similar professional situations. We had chatted online for a few years and done some fun cyber-wrestling. But when we met in person I couldn't enjoy wrestling him. I had tried to convince myself that I was a wrestle-anytime-anywhere-with-anybody kind of guy. Such a guy, I believed, without a physical agenda or preferences for certain looks and such, couldn't be in it for anything but the wrestling. To that point, however, I hadn't wrestled anybody under 200 lbs. J weighed in in the 170s. He was all sharp points, all bones and muscles without any of the big belly and big thighs I associated with wrestlers from my days of watching it on American Saturday mornings. J was a good wrestler, but try as I might, I couldn't enjoy wrestling him. It wasn't being stabbed by his points—knees, elbows, etc. I recognized that I had a wrestling fantasy and along with this recognition came the realization that I had a body type I liked to wrestle, which in turn suggested that I had a body type that I was attracted to.

This hasn't led me to conclusions and understandings K came to partly through wrestling his girlfriend's brothers. Maybe I'm not gay. Or maybe I'm not brave enough or honest enough to follow through with considering the full implications of this. Maybe it's just as simple as having a wrestling fantasy and that big men fulfill that fantasy, which is all in fun (with a little homoeroticism thrown in). Maybe not. Maybe it's far more complicated than I'll ever understand.

An Email

Here's an email that I wrote this morning to a friend of mine. Like many friends I have these days, I've never met this man. We communicate solely via email and blog. These are means of communication for which I'm grateful, but at the same time it's a shame that we might never meet in person.

Great to hear from you, Xxxxxxx. I hope life is going well for you in every way, and I'm glad that you're still checking out the blog and keeping in touch from time to time.

The play has bogged down for the moment but only because I've been getting back into a mystery novel I've had under construction for some time. Although I don't always write about wrestling, the novel features a good bit of it as well. I'm currently at around 207 pages.

I agree about the intimacy issue. Wrestling is an intimate activity, no question about that. The assumption often is, then, that to enjoy that intimacy outside sanctioned events--organized wrestling bouts, amateur or pro--suggests homosexual activity or, at least, homosexual desire. But to me this isn't the case. To enjoy wrestling, to enjoy the intimacy of physical contact with another man, isn't, for me, homosexual in nature. I recognize the obvious homoerotic in wrestling, but I understand that as being different from the homosexual. In fact, much pro wrestling foregrounds the homoerotic, and fans are, oddly, either oblivious to it or, what's even more intriguing, comfortable with it.

Interesting stuff to think about!

All best--Xxxxxxx

For Bill

Check out the body scissors beginning at around 4:00. You get a lot of the variations in a single sequence.

My readers know how much I love a good head scissors hold. So you can imagine how thrilled I was to run across this match on YouTube!

Watch for another match story coming soon.

Another Match Remembered

As I've been tracing the history of my matches wrestled over the past 13 years, I've gotten up through January 1998 (blogged 10/2/2008). Flawed as my memory has become after all the years and miles, here's what happened when I wrestled a big strong fellow named Ray.


He was coming through the town I was living in part time, and he contacted me via email. I checked out his profile. Wow! Here's a guy who was big and strong, a guy who had apparently won some kind of award for wrestling. At first I was quite excited about this potential match with a big guy--6'3" and 265. But as I thought about his experience and his size, I wondered if this was the right thing to do for a guy who was still basically a newbie.

At some point, Ray asked for my telephone number, and I gave it to him. He called and came on with a really strong sales pitch. Now, I'm not much on salesmen, so his rapid-fire delivery seemed like another negative. I was all ready to decline to meet him when he turned up both the friendliness and the pressure.

I buckled.

On the night that he was in town, I met him at his motel. I was nervous, but he was a nice guy and now that match was sold he was less pushy. We had a good chat and cleared our space for wrestling. He changed into his singlet--the first guy I wrestled with real gear--and I into my no-fly briefs.

From the moment the bell rang, he was all over me--strong wrenching holds, twisting me this way and that, working me into whatever hold he pleased. I seemed absolutely powerless. I've got some weight and a little bit of strength, but I was no match for Ray.

Thankfully he was a good man along with being a good wrestler. He released me as soon as I submitted to this hold or that--and I submitted often, once to a head scissors so powerful I thought the top of my scalp was going to pop off. He wasn't really a teach like some others have been, but he had a level of enthusiasm for wrestling that nobody I'd met so far could match.

It was this enthusiasm of his, I think, that also allowed me to experience something I don't believe I'd yet experienced--wrestling naked. Once we'd gone several falls--all of which he won handily--he simply asked if I wanted to wrestle naked. Without giving it much thought, I said, "Sure." So, we stripped off our singlet and briefs and wrestled some more. Everything went mostly as it did before, although I got him in one halfway decent head scissors. I was able to hold it for a few seconds, but then he was out of it making me submit to who-knows-what hold of his own. Wrestling naked seemed like no big deal, and so I've never been afraid to do that since, although it hasn't come up that often.

When it was over, we had a friendly parting, and I walked away glad for the experience but in no way anxious to take Ray on again . . . ever.

An Observation

I often think that I can no more know God than I can reach up and scoop a snowball out of a jet trail.

Wrestling Drama

I don't know if this blog has any readers left. Life has been so busy of late that I haven't had time to post anything here. That is to say, "wrestling life" has had a more metaphorical meaning of late, and it has kept me on the defensive, trying to avoid a pin or a submission.

Today, however, with a lull in my "have to" work and some other future work not yet pressing, I decided to close my office door and try some writing. Oddly enough, I started looking at this one-act play I started some months back—maybe more than months. I've never written a play. I've seen several and I've read several, but I've never tried to write one. But over the years, the "scene" of to two strangers, known only to each other through the Internet, meeting in a motel room to wrestle has seemed to me one of the oddest things I've come across—and not only come across but participated in.

And in thinking back across the many such meetings I've had, I began remembering the conversations I've had with these men as much or more as the wrestling we've done. My friendly opponents and I have revealed some surprising things to each other over these years. At times I've believed that we experienced a greater intimacy with each other than I've been able to achieve with friends in the "real world." But my friend Mike (a friend and a friendly opponent) points out—and rightly so—that while I have experienced a certain level of intimacy with these men, the thoughts and secrets revealed create a broader sense of intimacy that is ultimately false. Sure, these men know things about me that nobody else knows, but the bottom line is that such intimate knowledge is, in reality, a very small part of what is to be known about me.

So, I thought I'd write a one-act play to recreate such a meeting and to play with some of the ideas generated by this tightly focused intimacy and what it might reveal about—and how it might affect—life outside that rented room. Being much more a writer of fiction, I could probably pull this off better in that genre. But I want to try writing this play simply because it's a play I'd love to see!