Blond Bombshells


 










Take a stock car racer. Grow his hair to his shoulders. Bleach a strip of his hair, anywhere will do but preferably touching the forehead. Better yet, bleach all his hair. You've just made an old-school wrestler, a sexed-up grunt-n-groaner, typically a heel, especially if you call him a Fabulous Blonde or Hollywood Blonde (the silent but feminizing "e" of "blonde" cinching his trickiness, cowardice, and good-for-nothingness). Or, best yet, slap the epithet "Gorgeous" on him. Go classic.

Guys like these were huge in the 1970s on the Southern circuit, with shimmering straight hair or ludicrously baroque curls. Blond contrasted with their dark sunlamp tans or framed a gory gash in late-70s splatter battles. Blond wrestlers became self-parodying cliches in the 1980s and early 1990s--Hulk Hogan, Stunning Steve Austin, Shawn Michaels, Chris Jericho--briefly passing from favor as baggy-pants skateboarders-slash-backyard-wrestlers threatened to take over the game, then coming back with guys like Edge, Brian Kendrick, Dolph Ziggler, and the second coming of Chris Jericho.

A wrestler already a blond, by nature--"dirty blond" best of all, in other words somber, woodsy blond, instead of bright platinum--was, more than likely, a babyface, probably a rookie, possibly a perpetual "rookie." A hairy chest doubled the chances he was a good guy--witness Terry Allen (aka Magnum T.A.) or hot-bodied Tommy Rogers. Smooth-bodied good guys with dirty-blond hair tended to occupy the in-between zone between hero and villain, sophisticated, mysterious, fatal, Kevin Von Erich being the closest pro-wrestling ever got to a "Hitchcock blonde."

I've always thought of myself as going for the tall, dark, and handsome type. But my tastes are complex and constantly in flux. I'm smitten by long-hair blonds in the squared circle, less the slim and svelte twinks you see a lot of in gay wrestling videos (my favorite twinks tend to be sharp-jawed, feral, usually dark-haired, horndog looking boys, often with buzzcuts--I think I just described Mark Lander), more the guys with athletic builds and crooked leers that dare you to smack them in the face--Jimmy Dean at Can-Am (of course), Troy Baker at BG East, Impact at Thunder's Arena, Max Anderson at NHB-Battle, and (deep breath) Josh Steel at Rock Hard Wrestling.

(There are also the non-blond blonds, guys like Alexi Adamov, whose non-blondness always comes as a shock to me, since I always think of him as a blond. And not a dark blond, I mean a bright golden-blond blond. Don't know why. I'm repeatedly baffled by the photos that confirm his decidedly dark hair.)

The stereotypes of blonds as airheads and sex kittens somewhat diminish their seriousness as ring contenders but magnify their pop and heat with fans. Enough of them have claimed top titles to destroy the stereotype, if it weren't for the fact that the stereotype is so much fun for us fans, because their golden locks reinforce and magnify wrestling's sex appeal, and pro wrestling (like comedy) is 99.9% about stereotypes.

Photos (top to bottom, left to right): Brian Kendrick, Caleb Konley, Kevin Von Erich, Lenny Lane and Lodi, Magnum TA and unidentified opponent, Mr. Kennedy, Nathan Cruz, Shawn Michaels, Test and Chris Jericho, Tommy Rogers and unidentified opponent, Steve Austin and Brian Pillman

Comments

  1. Replies
    1. don't forget charkotte's own kyle sebastian:
      http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-XMt5nmmLk4

      Delete
  2. Wow! What a wonderful post. Almost all of these guys used to feature in my fantasies.

    I grew up in a family of mostly blue-eyed blonds, so by and large, my ideal of masculinity was in that mode. My first bodybuilder crush was Larry Scott. Now, it wasn't hard and fast (groan!). The sexiest of my cousins was blue-eyed with black hair. The blondness came from my Dad's Mom, the black from his Dad.

    Now, my ideal is reddish-blond with the hazel version of Elizabeth Taylor's luminescent violet. But I'm fairly eclectic in my tastes.

    Having studied French, I'm pretty insistant on the blond/blonde distinction, too.

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