Backyard's Back









After four tries, I realized that there's hardly any way to start a sentence with "I'm not a pedophile, but ..." that does not sound like a screaming confession of pedophilia. So let me say this: youth is beautiful and enormously sexy. At 58, I see beauty in young men and women they cannot detect in themselves--and that, when I was their age, I was blind to in myself and others. The only homely youth are the ones who, through excessive sobriety or self-loathing, have decided to turn prematurely middle-aged. For the truly beautiful, youth is hardly ever a handicap. And, for me, nothing is so beautiful in young men, ages 14 to 24, than to see them shirtless in ardent struggle against one another.

I had come to believe that the backyard wrestling phenomenon was over, that today's youth were far too sensible--or too protected by their "helicopter parents"--to engage in such a reckless and risky activity as amateur pro-style wrestling. Yet OCWOBackyard, a YouTube channel, features (at this writing) 29 videos, and, along with a Facebook page, is the online presence of Online Championship Wrestling Organization, a Miami wrestling company that debuted in 2009 (or 2010, depending on the information source).

The company's business aspirations are at this point unclear to me. The full-match videos, six to twenty-five minutes of rambunctious horseplay, are free for download from YouTube. No DVDs or downloads for sale, that I can find, no T-shirts, no comic books. And yet the battles measure up to a good 90% of the stuff you and I pay about $15 a pop to watch. 

At this point, any attempt I might make to hype or analyze these performances would be an act of desecration. In my opinion, they capture the "drama of incipient manhood," the dawning awareness of two facts: life is a struggle, and sensuous energy is, in and of itself, ecstatic--and, for someone like me, a third fact: the combination of struggle and sensuous energy is life-affirming and (thus) erotic. But I should take the matter no further--mainly because I know so little about OCWO, its mission, its sponsorship, its politics, its business model, but also because saying too much more at this point might spoil its pristine simplicity and fantasy with the grizzled encrustation of my own romantic idealism and nostalgia.

The caps above are taken from a September match, featuring fighters Creed and Matt Steel.

Comments

  1. The trouble with OCWO, hot as some of the older teens are, such as Creed and Matt Steel featured above, is that the wrestling is too acted, too much the product of amateur theatrics and like all amateur theater, tiresome for its lack of credibility or intensity. Never for a moment does the wrestling look real, though many of the posed holds do hold some erotic potentiality.

    MAwrestler

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  2. Wow, thanks for posting this. Matt Steel is hot. I live in Miami. Too bad they don't sell tickets to their live events. :)

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  3. I agree that Matt Steel is incredibly hot--his definition and muscularity shows hours spent in the gym, and probably on the wrestling team at school as well...I agree that they should do real, submission style free fight wrestling matches like at cugrappling/fightgarage/uiw..would be intense and very satisfying to all of us...

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  4. Thanks for posting this information. Matt Steel looks great! Perfect body!

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  5. Yeaaaah! This match is on my YouTube Favorites list. I think Matt has potential as a pro. But indie only. The majors wouldn't allow him to show what he's got. They'd cast him as a face and let "names" chew him up. In the indies, he just might get a shot at heeldom and at least some mind-blowing wins.

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