Tony LaPointe



Jobber Tony LaPointe did not even have to say to leather daddy Dana Smith "I could fight you all night" for me to fall in love with him, but he did, and I did.  LaPointe appears in exactly one BG East product, Submissions 3, in 1992, and it's one of those one-shot epiphanies (of which BGE has plenty) that fill me with yearning for the matches that never were (LaPointe vs Kid Vicious would have been sweet, for instance), not to mention regret for the lost opportunity of a chance run-in with the guy when I was still young enough to do something about it.

I used to own this number on VHS videotape, I am almost certain of it, but it was stolen or lost or something over the course of the last dozen years or so.  Now classics like this one are coming out on DVD, I am delighted to report.  Coincidentally this one wound up as an extra disk in a recent shipment--so thank you, Jonny (or Steve, or whoever), even if it happened to be by mistake (but no way you're getting it back now, no way).

The Smith-LaPointe showdown is the second best of the four matches here.  The last match (Dick the Prick beating up on a very cocky and very game TNT, who, as you might expect, gives Dick a dose of his own medicine) is the best, the reason I originally bought the tape, because at the time the Prick matched my image of the ideal fighting man, about which I will have more to say, possibly, in a future post.   The opening match is an unintentionally funny bout between Vicious and blank-faced Lukas-Haas-lookalike Cody Collier (pretty, but you can sort of see him counting out the moves, if you know what I mean).  The match after that reminds me how great a heel Cruze was back in the day.

But back to LaPointe, it is the third chapter that features his mat match with uber-daddy Dana Smith--for LaPointe both a debut and, sadly, a swan song.  I told you that he tells Smith that he could fight all night long, but did I mention that he says this after four (of six) submissions to Smith?  And, friends, let me tell you that had I been Smith I would have held the hairy muscle boy to his boast, beating him down again and again and again and again, until the sun rose the next day.

Tony's tough accent would fit nicely in The Departed or, more recently, The Town (both excellent movies, by the way).  As you can see for yourself, his upper body is beautifully proportioned, with a virile growth of dark hair covering his pecs and riding his washboard abs down to the waistband of his tri-colored trunks.  He chews gum as he wrestles.  Big deal if the hair on his head is thinning (so was mine back then, when I still had hair to thin).  Even before I went follicle-deficient, I was attracted to balding men, a sucker for the word "male" in male pattern baldness.

I was mostly drawn to him because something about his face reminds me of servicemen I worshipped as a kid growing up on and around Air Force bases in Florida, Illinois, Oklahoma, Nevada, and Japan.  (In face and physique, Tony mostly reminds me of Mr. Farinola, my hotheaded homeroom teacher in eighth grade at a school for us military brats--who made my heart patter once when he slammed a wise-ass classmate of mine up against the bulletin board.  Damn the man was hot--and the fact that he loved James Bond novels and movies made me a fan for life.)

I can picture LaPointe as a cop up in north Boston, a sort of grimly determined but unimaginative by-the-book policeman, engaged to a devout Irish Catholic--all the time starting things he can't finish.  I can see him as the type who jokingly stirs up a fracas with one, two, or more of the guys at the gym.  Then, once the action gets heated, he's the first to lose his cool and make it personal and real, throwing a few wild punches.  After getting his ass kicked six or seven times, he joins the guys for a couple of makeup rounds of Schlitz at a nearby dive, from where he calls his girlfriend to tell her not to wait up for him because he's drunk and going to spend the night on somebody's couch.   What happens next is anybody's guess--and frankly I suspect he will forget all about it in a day or two.  Yeah, I have known two or three guys like this--and right or wrong it's the vibe I get off this guy, too.  And it's not an unattractive vibe, the way I see it.


Comments

  1. I totally agree. I wish LaPointe had stayed around a while.

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