Boy Wrestler











"What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; 
there is nothing new under the sun." Ecclesiastes 1.9


Hakim Zane vs Ace Perry, 24 October 2015 (White River Wrestling)

The vigor and optimism of youth going against the wiles and cynicism of the veteran. This has the marks of a grand theme of classic pro wrestling. The angle probably had to await the day when a sizable pool of young, fresh-faced pro wrestlers became available: sometime near the end of the 1970s would be my guess. But the concept predates pro wrestling, dating back to the Torah and the stories of Jacob and later his son Joseph; the Deuteronomistic story of David and Saul; to the Iliad, Achilles versus Agamemnon; to Norse mythology, the thunder god Thor's epic wrestling match with the (female) personification of old age (he loses--his one and only loss). It runs like a thread through the age of chivalric romance (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Book 1 of The Faerie Queene). It mostly fades away in the seventeenth-century, reemerging as social satire in the next century: Voltaire's Candide and Fielding's The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. Then it becomes enshrined in a Zeitgeist all its own: Romanticism, traces of which survive to this day. Here it is again as the indefatigable Ace takes all the hard knocks "The Mad Dragon" can deliver and, through his purity of spirit and boundless energy, at last nails the lid down on the surly veteran blocking his way.


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