Fingers and Toes
John Silver vs Tracy Williams, Break the Barrier 2017 (Beyond Wrestling)
The match features a strong contrast of fight styles, featuring two wrestlers who are favorites of mine. John, a composite of Petey Williams and Macho Man Randy Savage, works on a large scale, diving off the top ropes, blasting away at his opponents with every muscle in his tautly built body, with a range of facial expressions that are readable from the cheap seats. Tracy, by contrast, is the American Zack Sabre Jr., Brooklyn edition, directing his attention to the fine torments of finger- and toe-bending, with a minimalist performance style.
I love both, but I slightly prefer Tracy Williams for style. The style is well suited to video; the mugging of John Silver is probably better suited to the arena. A part of me loves the grandiose and the slapstick. You can't love pro wrestling without a taste for the overwrought. But Williams' minimalist style intrigues me, pulls me in. It's not like the wrestling I as a teen watched on a snowy black-and-white TV, where the small gestures would have been invisible. It's more like the wrestling I practiced with friends.
Two developments brought this style of wrestling to the foreground, both of which I once viewed with skepticism. One is the reformatting of wrestling to suit television as opposed to a live audience. Closeups and camera movement now record the details of expression and assault that were once undetectable, hence useless in the arena. Another development is the hybridization of wrestling with other martial arts, which employ micro-assaults like finger-twisting as legitimate tactics. These developments appeal to my idea of wrestling as a private and intimate encounter - suited to small enclosures, garages, wrestle shacks, motel rooms, and so forth - apropos my experience of wrestling friends. Thanks to new technology and the emergence of mixed martial arts, this level of detail and intimacy are possible even in arena wrestling.
So here we have Williams, who works with fingers and toes, and Silver, who works with fists and boots. That it's possible to book these two guys together attests to technical changes in wrestling entertainment over the past 25 years. Maybe that's what the beyond in Beyond Wrestling means, breaking barriers between basement mattress wrestling and jumbotron spectacle.
Visit Beyond Wrestling here.
I love both, but I slightly prefer Tracy Williams for style. The style is well suited to video; the mugging of John Silver is probably better suited to the arena. A part of me loves the grandiose and the slapstick. You can't love pro wrestling without a taste for the overwrought. But Williams' minimalist style intrigues me, pulls me in. It's not like the wrestling I as a teen watched on a snowy black-and-white TV, where the small gestures would have been invisible. It's more like the wrestling I practiced with friends.
Two developments brought this style of wrestling to the foreground, both of which I once viewed with skepticism. One is the reformatting of wrestling to suit television as opposed to a live audience. Closeups and camera movement now record the details of expression and assault that were once undetectable, hence useless in the arena. Another development is the hybridization of wrestling with other martial arts, which employ micro-assaults like finger-twisting as legitimate tactics. These developments appeal to my idea of wrestling as a private and intimate encounter - suited to small enclosures, garages, wrestle shacks, motel rooms, and so forth - apropos my experience of wrestling friends. Thanks to new technology and the emergence of mixed martial arts, this level of detail and intimacy are possible even in arena wrestling.
So here we have Williams, who works with fingers and toes, and Silver, who works with fists and boots. That it's possible to book these two guys together attests to technical changes in wrestling entertainment over the past 25 years. Maybe that's what the beyond in Beyond Wrestling means, breaking barriers between basement mattress wrestling and jumbotron spectacle.
Visit Beyond Wrestling here.
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