How to Catch Heat

Dylan Bostic vs Matt Angel, NSPW Last Stand 2018 (North Shore Pro Wrestling)

Dylan Bostic pulled this same crap in a match against Chet Sterling in North Carolina about a month after he had faced this challenge for the TV title in Quebec. I was there and posted about it here. The guy is a master class on the art of generating heat. In both cases, he feints wrestling moves and in the last second turns them into closed-fist punches. In both cases, he plays the same trick again and again, making everybody hate him a little more with each new jab. Then he puts his hands behind his back, daring his opponent to strike back. When Angel/Sterling finally repays him blow for blow, the crowd bursts into cheers for justice accomplished. Dylan oversells the payback by half, making the fans feel both righteous and superior.

When I first wrote on Bostic almost ten years ago, he brimmed with "goodness and light." To me he seemed like the ideal babyface hero. How he has changed! By 2012 I saw he had become "clean cut and rotten," a cruel parody of sportsmanship and good character. Such a shift in character is difficult to pull off in pro wrestling - it's not so much a question of whether fans can go with the sudden change, but more whether the wrestler has the acting chops to pull it off. So many can't. Dylan's transition is textbook perfect, beginning with his transformation. He got his tan three shades too dark, went platinum blond, and carefully maintained the right level of belly fat that begs for a hard punch (and kept it as prominent as a gun in a Chekhov play - building suspense).

I've mentioned timing a couple of times this past week. GIFs tend to distort the overall timing of a match, but watch the full 20 minutes and notice the rhythm of the assaults. I imagine most observers respond to them as I do, feeling them somewhere between the throat and the groin, getting uncomfortably tense until the misdeeds are repaid - in part, if not in full - and experiencing a rush of feeling for the act of comeuppance.

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