Cool as a Cucumber, Deadly as a Ninja

Jake Jenkins vs Cliff Johnson, Catalog 6 (Rock Hard)

He has never once failed to light my wick, but how did I ever forget how absolutely stunning Jake Jenkins was when he first crossed my radar over six years ago in this Rock Hard match, his underground wrestling debut? His career spanned ("spans"? please say it isn't over!) three great internet promotions: Rock Hard, BG East, and, most recently, though briefly, Thunder's Arena. In each venue he has been a clear standout - in sex appeal, in toughness, in versatility (great heel, fantastic babyface), in expressiveness, in technique, in strength, in suffering, and in triumph - though (amazingly, in retrospect) almost self-effacing in his commitment to each fight drama he is booked for. I never catch him trying to draw attention to anything but the fight itself.

I say almost self-effacing, because, with all respect and admiration for Cliff Johnson in this 2011 match, Jake commands 100 percent of my attention from start to finish. Cliff could have stepped out of the ring to take a phone call, and I would not have noticed. That said, Jake's style is decidedly easygoing ... to the point of offhandedness at times, yet with no loss to the power and impressiveness of each and every performance. Jake is a natural. Even though he speaks fluent smack, he doesn't need the logorrhea of other wrestlers to draw attention to himself. He draws attention to himself by simply being Jake Jenkins.

In my first review of Jake, I pontificated on wrestling as a ritual, more than sport and more than entertainment for gay men like me. I still think it has a spiritual dimension appending to its eroticism, and while I did not put it this way at the time, for the past seven years Jenks has been its Jesus, its Rama, its Adonis, its shepherd-warrior David, its Heimdallr, its Percival, its Dick Grayson, its Elvis, its St George, its St Sebastian. Even if he never steps foot on a mat again, he will remain an almost mythological figure in underground wrestling - like Mark Lander before him - and though I doubt his impact on the genre will be widely recognized in the world at large, it will, I suspect, be rediscovered and reappraised not once, but many times over the decades, especially since there are few archetypal wrestlers today that he has not at some point taken on in the ring or on the mat.


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