Fake Fantasy Is a Reality

Maxwell Jacob Friedman vs Matthew Riddle, Welcome Home - Night 2 (Beyond Wrestling)

This is the moment this 2018 match came to life: Riddle kicking the shit out of MJF outside the ring. It happens near the video's midpoint. It captures a lot of fantasies built on a single memory of high school - when muscular C beat the crap out of chubby bully D in the locker room - which my imagination has made more elaborate over time. Fake details accrued, borrowing from other life experiences, movies, et cetera. Probably this match will lend more details (C was not a high kicker, for instance, but he packed a mean and jet-fast punch - oh, did I mention both he and D were naked? - true story).

The bad doughboy has long been a fascination of mine even before Wrestling Arsenal coined the term. Even more than I like bad doughboy vs good doughboy matches, I love good well-built athlete vs bad doughboy, like here. There's no moral to this story, just a memory from a locker room far away and long ago. Doughboys are themselves great athletes - note MJF's broad shoulders and overall shapeliness - and they are fascinating performers in the squared circle, where their girth becomes part of the mythology of wrestling and a tempting target.

Riddle is a little noisy for the particular fantasy I'm thinking of. (C was quiet and circumspect, shocking everybody when he suddenly pounded D into the wet concrete floor.) Still, I like the wild-man type - part of my cowboy and jungle lord fantasies and other genres. What precedes and follows the above incident in the Riddle-Friedman brawl is less interesting to me - pretty routine and not momentous - but it does have the asset of a sudden ending.

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