Rated G for Grrrr

The Facebook "Like" page for this blog "has been unpublished and it cannot be published again." Not a word of explanation, not even the usual boilerplate about the company's "community standards." It strikes me as ironic that Facebook, which started out as a "Hot or Not" game for Harvard undergrads, now presents itself as an arbiter of morality and good taste.

It was disheartening techno-puritan crap like this that prompted me to end the blog early last year*--along with the usual fatigue of keeping up a stream of patter about my limited expertise on the subject of wrestling. The blog did not stay "ended" long enough to suit someone. That much is now apparent.

Fuck them. Fuck the internet.

But on to other things, specifically ...











Eli Black vs Chase Michaels, #487 (UCW)

Chase starts things rolling with an abs challenge, blow for blow, to determine whose grille-work more effectively staves off the pain of a hard-driving fist. Eli appears to win this one right off the bat, folding Chase in half and cutting off his oxygen for a good five seconds. But Chase wants another try, and the contest briefly continues. This time Eli's punch topples the tall newcomer to his elbows and knees. "You win," Chase concedes, barely able to push the words out of his mouth.

Now the wrestling starts. Eli deftly turns Chase's attempted takedown to his own benefit. But Chase immediately takes over, angrily smashing Eli's unprotected ribs and attempting to raise him for a piledriver, which Eli foils spectacularly with an over-the-shoulders body slam. "Slimy little bastard," Chase mutters. Eli objects only to the "slimy" part, pointing out that he hasn't even broke a sweat yet. (Chase, however, is already a torrent.) With the cool, calm, collected assault for which he is justly famous, Eli kicks his stricken opponent around the painted circle, with hardly a flicker of human emotion on his face.

Barely three minutes into the match, and Chase is huffing and puffing. Eli takes him for a one-shoulder airplane spin and drops him hard. The tactic is devastating for Chase, but it also throws Eli off balance, who staggers and sways as the room appears to whirl around him. A headscissors follows, with Black's sinewy legs tightening against Michaels' temples. As if by miracle, Chase breaks free and compresses Eli into a small package, one hand tugging at the heel's wavy hair.

Here commences give and take action that lasts nearly the full 24 remaining minutes. Both men are in tiptop shape physically--and Chase puts up a bigger fight than anybody could have predicted, especially following the beatdown he receives for the first five minutes. Eli is not used to having to fight this hard to prove his alpha-superiority to other wrestlers on the UCW roster. He was clearly expecting to "phone in" the rest of the contest till this dramatic pivot in the match.

So far I've enjoyed pretty much everything I've seen these two fighters do. Here, Chase explodes any expectations I might have had of his performance against a kill-machine like Eli. Much of this match is persuasively real--the pain and desperation seeming far too hardcore for a choreographed work. If these guys are pulling their punches, I can't see it. If these guys don't really want to kick the total shit out of each other, you can't prove it by me. And if the sudden, un-telegraphed piledriver finish doesn't actually knock somebody out cold, the victor storming off without even pausing the second or two it would take to proclaim his hard-fought victory, it sure fooled me.


* I refer to Google Blogger's threat of taking down blogs with "offensive" material, which they purportedly backed down from, only to disappear poet and novelist Dennis Cooper's entertaining and intelligent blog earlier this year.


Comments

  1. Mark Elliot zuckerberg ceo Over the years I have defended you and Facebook to a lot of detractors. My efforts have probably had minimal effects on your bottom line, but I am in a sense a Llliputian and you are Gulliver. One of the things I have found most attractive about the Fb Empire has been your insistence on 'one identity'. My conviction has been for along time that there is great benefit about being oneself, opening oneself to all the great riches of insight that can only come if one admits the complexity of the world.

    Therefore I was greatly disappointed to find that you had made 'unavailable right now' the content of my friend Joe's page. I have not been a fan of Ringside at Skull Island because it has links to homoerotic wrestling matches, of which there are plenty everywhere, but because of his exploration of his own growing up years as a gay boy in the south, when and where wrestling matches and the occasional Tarzan movie were the only opportunities for us to see men depicted any way other than husbands and cowboys. His story has been helpful for me to understand my own 'one identity'.

    Making Facebook a place where only the correct flavor of the week posts are allowed is cyber bullying at its worst. It says to whole groups of people that they are too marginal to be even allowed in the agora. I realize that Facebook is a private corporation, and is within its rights to censor whomever it wishes. I have sometimes told people who have complained about details of their news feed that they are, after all, free to start their own social space. But I had expected better of Facebook.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks, Dale. I am moved by your show of support. I hate having Ringside ousted from Facebook, but it's their business and you can never have too many kittens.

      Delete
  2. Eli Black looks tough and sadistic in this bout. Tough competitor and opponent. I'd love to fight or wrestle him in submission grappling or pro-style wrestling. Anything goes.

    ReplyDelete

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