Laying It On Thick

Caleb "Scrappy" McNair vs Joey McCoy, Catalog 13 - The Muscle Boys Never Back Down (MuscleBoy Wrestling)

Boy oh boy, this is tasty! Joey and Scrappy are among the top 10 of underground wrestlers who really really really know how to sell wrestling* so hard I can feel it in my bones. Every twitch, every grimace, every bead of sweat, every dry gasp is an outburst of hyperrealism that few wrestlers - even technically proficient ones - can muster.  There's not a driblet of understatement in Scrappy's or Joey's DNA. Their emotive skill shines whether taking a bump or giving it. 

Wrestling is never gayer than when the emotions of rage and misery get ramped up to Baby Jane proportions. These boys do it without a wheelchair in sight. Scrappy is the more muscular of the two, so his responsibilities involve strongman tactics such as raising Joey up by his throat (2nd shot above), snapping Joey's vertebrae against his shoulders (5th shot), or bouncing the guy's butt off the ceiling (10th and final shot). Joey's smaller and nimbler, so his high spots involve running circles around the strongman, mussing up the pretty boy's curly locks (eighth shot) and tying his bulgy muscles into knots (6th and 9th shots). Ordinarily I favor nonchalant wrestlers like Mark Lander, Chase Michaels, or, more recently, Braden Trelisse, but I think this match is a hoot. Scrappy has never been so suavely menacing, and Joey is the definition of spunky comeback kid.

The excess of feeling is fantastic - it's as if emotions could take the form of fireworks or meteor showers - hard to take in, but always rapturously too much - and it grabs me by the balls to witness astonishment, arrogance, panic, outrage, revenge, and exultation as gaudily displayed in wrestling as in Japanese kabuki or Greek tragedy - on top of which there's the visual feast of Scrappy's torso and movie-star profile.

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* The others are Rex Bedford, Kirk Donahue, Shawn Duncan, Jonny Firestorm, Quinn Harper, Paul Hudson, Drake Marcos, and Wolf Boy.