Although I don't remember exactly, my guess is that after the bad experience of February 2002 I was gunshy of wrestling for a time. I'm not a great wrestler--that's easy to see and fairly easy to admit. At the same time, I enjoy wrestling and like doing it when I can find somebody who is interested in (and able to) back off his intensity and skill levels to match my own. By the time a trip to a mid-Atlantic state in November came up, I was ready to try some more wrestling.

November 2002 found me on the road again and anticipating a wrestling match. Traffic was bad around the major southern cities along the I-95 corridor, and I was running late to get to the hotel, where I was to meet my "opponent"--call him "Chris"--later that evening. When I finally arrived and checked in, I was afraid the evening had grown too late for him to leave his home several miles away and meet me.

But I called, and he came. I've been in the congested area through which he drove several times, and I'm pleased that he agreed to get out of the house and come meet me. We've been good friends ever since. He's the only wrestler I've ever visited overnight, and I always feel welcome in his spare room. When I'm in his city, which is at least once a year, we rarely fail to get together. Half the time we don't even wrestle, just get together for dinner and conversation. Over the years since November 2002, I've spent more time with him than with any other wrestler.

When we wrestle, we have a great time. Chris is a skilled and tough wrestler. I outweigh him by 50 pounds, but if he wanted to wreck me in a match, he could. But he also has great fun wrestling, so we have a great time. That first night in my hotel room, we wrestled fairly easily due to a lack of space. Still, we got our good holds in. He was more than patient with my head scissors passion, and he indulged me by submitting to my various versions of the hold and by applying a series of good strong head scissors to me. I can tell when wrestling Chris that he can get intense, and sometimes we've ventured into that area. But he's always in control and willing to engage in the play of wrestling as well as the competition of it.

Since that evening in the hotel, we've wrestled several times in his wrestling space at home. We've watched wrestling videos together. One of my favorite things that go along with wrestling Chris is that he always lets me wear a pair of pro wrestling boots that he has. They're plain black and made of great leather. He bought them off of eBay, where they were advertised as being once the boots of the great Bobo Brazil. Regardless of my wrestling skill, I feel like a real old-time wrestler in my black trunks, black mask and Chris's black boots. One of these days, I'll try to talk him into selling the pair to me.

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.

After my wrestling match with Tom in that cold Midwestern city, I believe that I went through my longest period without an opportunity to wrestle. If I'm not forgetting somebody, this dry spell lasted almost two years. But when I finally did get back to it in November 2001, I went into the match with an opponent I was thrilled to be wrestling and came out of it with friend for life.

Where to begin? Long before November 2001, I came across a site called Rec Pro Wrestling (or something close to that). The site offered lots of pictures and several videos, and I spent a lot of time exploring it. I think I discovered Bill Hughes there. And the site was where I first learned about other wrestlers that I've been in contact with since—some I've wrestled and some I haven't.

My favorite on Rec Pro was a big fellow named Larry. He was everywhere there, wrestling a lot of guys and, I imagined, having a blast doing it. But he was so omnipresent and advanced, I thought I was in no way ever going to get my hands on that man. I thought many times about trying to find an email address for him so that I could send him some fan mail.

Then one day in 2001 the unthinkable happened. I don't remember now what wrestling directory I was part of at that point—maybe something connected with Rec Pro, but that doesn't seem right. Anyway, I got into my email that day and found a message . . . from Larry! I wish I still had that email, but I'm sure I've lost it somewhere along the line. The bottom line was that he'd seen my profile and was interested in getting together for some wrestling. I remember writing back—Larry still laughs about this—and opening my email with something like, "This is the Larry?"

Larry was living in Atlanta at the time, and as it turned out, I had to go there on business that November of 2001. We made a date and got together in my hotel room for some wrestling. I was giddy to be wrestling with him. He was patient with me, teaching me all sorts of fun stuff about pro wrestling and exchanging holds with me. We had a great time then and have wrestled three other times since—once in Nashville and twice in the Midwestern city where he lives now. He's always been a great teacher and a generous wrestler, allowing and encouraging my penchant for the head scissors. When we talk on the telephone, which we do every few months, he's always kind enough to tell me he'd like to be in that head scissors at that moment. Needless to say, the feeling is always mutual.

Larry has had some health issues over the years that I've known him, but he's nearly recovered from it all now. I recently saw some pictures of him in action again, and I was thrilled to see him—and only a little jealous that another man was on the mat with him and not I.

After my match with R, I think I went more than a year without wrestling. I traveled to a large Midwestern city in December 1999, and there I wrestled a fellow named Tom. Probably I ran across him online sometime that autumn and convinced him to meet me for a match. Not that I recall his being reluctant to meet.

He arrived at my hotel room door at the appointed time. I remember that he was a handsome man about the same age as I was then—right around 40. If I remember correctly, his hair was kind of a light brown, but he was dark of skin and eye. Again, I'm stretching my memory here, but I think that he was around 5'10" and in the neighborhood of 210-220. When he took off his shirt to wrestle, he was broad in the chest, maybe medium hairy and had great pecs. He didn't talk much, and we had a good quiet wrestling match there on the bedspread in the space between the bed and the wall, just beneath a window looking out on the city.

The one thing I remember is that I used a lot of head scissors variations on Tom, and he indulged me and remained patient. I seem to recall working him over with a figure-4 head scissors, sitting there leaning back on my hands and just being able to look over the windowsill at the city. After such a long break from wrestling, I enjoyed having my hands on Tom and my legs wrapped around his head in various ways. I don't remember any particular holds that he used. Maybe he was a jobber. But I kept him in a head scissors for so long that when we were finished wrestling I thanked him for being so patient with my special interest.

I've had very few matches that I didn't enjoy. And I haven't often gotten the impression that when a wrestler and I parted ways he was disappointed for having wasted time on me. But I think that Tom must've been disappointed in our match. He didn't talk much, as I said, but I don't remember any great enthusiasm from him for the experience we'd just shared. I might be remembering this all wrong, but I generally can recall those impressions that have been part of my matches and their aftermath.

I lost touch with Tom pretty quickly after we wrestled—another reason that I think he probably didn't enjoy the experience much. But I've always wished we could get together again and maybe make it more about him this time.

Life is hectic at the moment, but I still found time to discover this great little match. As usual, the head scissors caught me. Check it out at around 3:20.

I'm guessing at the date of this next match, but I'm thinking it was October 1998, just a few months after my strange meeting in the choir room of a Methodist church in the South. This October match took place in the southern mountains, near where I was living at the time. On AOL, I'd come across this fellow from Texas. R and I enjoyed chatting online and emailing back and forth, and we really had a strong desire to wrestle each other. But as is often the case--almost always the case, the fact that almost half a country was between us, our getting together seemed unlikely. The match that ultimately developed from this contact was nearly as strange, in its way, as the church match.

At some point, R emailed me--or we talked on the telephone, as we used to do often--and said he was coming up near my area to see one of those big Bill Gaither singing extravaganzas. He would be close enough to come my way and get a motel room for the night where we could wrestle.

The October day finally arrived. So did he. And so did I.

We did some pretty good wrestling on the top of the king-sized bed in his room. I got to play around with my head scissors variations, and he got to do the holds he liked, which I don't remember right now. The only negative thing in the match was that he was a talker and constantly talking through the wrestling. He didn't trash-talk, for which I was glad, but he talked all the same. When he had me down in a headlock, for example, he was constantly saying stuff like, "Wanna rassle?"

Like the big guy from New Jersey that I'd wrestled in the spring and the choir director in the summer, R wanted to wrestle naked after we'd wrestled in our briefs for awhile. I'd become fairly comfortable with this (although as I write, I don't think I've wrestled naked since), so I had no problem with it.

But something different was present in this match. R had brought in a little TV with a VHS player. To my amazement, he had a video tape that was I-don't-know-how-many minutes of nothing but head scissors holds. Couple that with the heightened eroticism of wrestling naked, and I found myself in a new situation. Before when wrestling naked, I was either just trying to survive or afraid of getting caught. The nakedness never really seemed that much different in those cases from wrestling in briefs, and to my knowledge I never got a significant erection.

But again, this was different. At a crucial point, I had R in a figure-4 head scissors, and I sat there leaning back on my hands, his head caught between my thighs and calf and the TV full of head scissors right there in front of me. And suddenly--talk about your significant erections--my penis was hard between the back of R's head and my lower belly. The wrestlers wrestled on TV, head scissors after head scissors. The wrestlers wrestled on the motel bed, R shifting all around and struggling to get out of my head scissors. Too much stimulation!

For the first--and only--time, I ejaculated during a match. I couldn't stop it. And when it happened, I was stunned and embarrassed. I released the hold immediately and lay back, my face burning. R was unruffled. He came up and lay beside me and, mostly through body language, indicated that he now wanted me to jerk him off. I couldn't do it. I was finished. I apologized and got up to go clean myself off.

When I came back, I got dressed. Not wanting to run out on him, I took him out to Arby's for supper before I headed home.

It would be over a year before I could bring myself to wrestle again.

You'll find an awesome figure-4 head scissors at 7:22!

And the hold continues to dominate throughout parts 2 and 3!