Cat and Mouse

Cole Cassidy vs Billy Lodi, Catch-Weight 9 (BG East)

At first this appears to be one of the more unusual pairings in BG East history. Cole always reminds me of one of those black-leather-vest gunslingers on Gunsmoke  and Bonanza. Billy, one of the Skip-and-Christian generation of "twink" wrestlers, is the kind of svelte young man with bedroom eyes I can imagine lounging about the house in a kimono. 

However, the pairing is not that unusual. Cole has often taken on idiosyncratic wrestlers like Tarzan Tyler Reese and Jobe Zander, both in the ring and on the mat. He's drawn to opponents markedly different from him in style and experience. And Billy is hardly the mamas-boy he may appear to be, and over the years he's built a reputation for inciting masterful heel types like Kids Vicious and Karisma to attack - cause that's the way Lodi rolls. (In fact, it was his S&M fantasy with Vicious that first drew my attention to Lodi.)

Cole likes to abuse. Billy likes to be abused, just as Annie Lennox told us years ago. Even that's an oversimplification, though. Billy attacks and submits Cole early in this match, demonstrating as much strength and know-how as pluck. Yet Lodi's combat skills always come as a surprise. And Cole is at his best when his rage is stoked - a fact Lodi knows or at least intuits. It's a cat-and-mouse ruse that could potentially keep the fight going forever. The game, as I understand it (and I think I understand it well), is provocation as invitation, and reciprocation as consummation. And nobody plays the game better than these two.

Visit BG East here.