The Devil Inside

UCW has a history of attracting wrestlers willing to go to absurd lengths to win matches and keep us folks at home entertained: Joker, Eli Black, Quinn Harper. We're talking some serious crazy here ... and some of the most unselfconscious and uninhibited underground wrestling you're likely to find anywhere. The other leagues have their fitness models, gym bunnies, and wispy, flirty twinks, and I must say I do love them all (well, most of them). But UCW wrestlers are, as a rule, regular guys who love  roughhousing, throwing caution to the wind, hurting and getting hurt, more than getting chemical peels, doing endless reps, following fad diets, or shopping for pretty gear. If anybody puts the "underground" in underground wrestling, it's UCW, which has proudly and defiantly branded itself as the "working man's wrestling site" from the beginning.

Hunter Day and Billy Gunn are two relatively recent additions to the UCW boys' club. They have radically different physiques and personalities, but both are gifted potty-mouths who will do anything, anything, bend rules, make up their own rules, take dumps on the rules, with no other end in mind (not even winning) but to mess with their opponents' and fans' heads. They are nearly indefatigable in combat, with sharp white-trash instincts for fighting dirty and fucking the other guy up. They're punks, and they revel in stirring shit up, and they look absolutely at home in UCW's no-frills cinderblock arena. Hair pulling, stomping, ball twisting, gut punching, biting, spanking, nothing is out of bounds.

In the company's most recent release [#349], we're not told why Hunter and Billy want to tear into each other so badly; they just do, and the urge alone is enough for them. Hunter and Billy "click," and they know it. At one point in the first half of the packed 27-minute match, Billy tells Hunter, 'We can be ... we like the same things ... we can be FRIENDS," punctuating the last word with a forearm smash to Hunter's face, followed with a heel to the balls. Both are ready to exhaust themselves, even imperil themselves, just to make the other guy suffer. Last summer, somebody (I forget who) compared Billy's fight style to the movie Deliverance, which I was reminded of when, in his latest match, he plays a bent game of "piggy" with Hunter's toes. Throughout the fight Hunter supplies some of the most urgent and sensuous grunts and groans I've heard in a long time, even when he's the one dishing up the hurt.

The end is something else, raw, vile, humiliating, and you will never hear the name "Tiger Woods" again without the image of it flashing nastily back into your consciousness. It's an act of vengeance that doesn't stop even after the victim submits and the bell sounds. Axel has to physically tear the two men apart from each other, and the loser is pleading for somebody to call an ambulance. Serious shit all right. This is UCW's most brutal match in a long, long while, and I was surprised (even a little shocked) by how much I enjoyed it.