Young Blood

Cody Blayde vs Bryan Idol, Wrestling with Pride 2 (BG East/NewPro Wrestling)

Among the half dozen reasons I regretted not attending last month's Wrestling with Pride 2, the one that hurt the hardest was missing the chance to see Bryan Idol in a live show. The guy fascinates me - his truculence, his hair, his torso, his fight face. He currently plays a role in the fantasy fights twz again  and I write like love letters (and have been doing so for a decade). In our make-believe fight club (The Dump) he's at war with Mikey Vee, but he has his sights on a match with Paul Perris.

At Pride, he takes on fetching  newcomer Cody Blayde. Bryan has a height, weight, and experience advantage over the kid. In fact, the battle is posed as a fight between experience and aspiration. Idol comes to the ring with a decade's worth of indie pro matches behind him. He can basically fight and win on instinct and muscle memory. Along with hopes and dreams, Blayde comes with training, to be sure, but he's still green enough to have to plot out each move consciously and deliberately.

The entrances alone offer a study in contrasts. Cody comes bounding out, eagerly slapping hands with the fans at ringside, inviting them to adore him. He is lithe and energetic, beaming with enthusiasm. Bryan enters like a rock star, his studded leather jacket open revealing his well-tanned chest and abdomen, self-assured, smiling smugly, all swagger, as if he expects everybody to shit their britches at the sight of him, not giving a flying fuck whether the audience likes him or not. His face and body, lightly weathered by experience yet immune to diffidence, reflect his certainty of success. (Had I been there, I might have thrown myself at his feet. The man is a god.)

Announced as "The Battle of the Blonds," a title that would have excited me if I weren't already at the peak of excitement, the match begins with Cody clapping to rouse the crowd and Bryan approaching with fists halfway up in a boxer's stance. Idol snatches up Blayde in a side headlock, swerves behind, and plops the kid facedown to the mat. That's what experience can do. With all the arrogance that makes him beautiful, he calls out to the crowd, "That's why I'm the best wrestler here. That's why I'm the best-looking wrestler here. You guys aren't good enough to be watching me." (Can this be love that I'm feeling?)

The two wrestlers show off their muscles. Both are beautiful. Idol, though, pairs his beauty with toughness. While Cody is distracted, earnestly engaged in a side chest pose, Bryan strikes him from behind and follows up with further bodily harm. Cody turns the tide with a flying dropkick that inspires Bryan to scuttle out of the ring to shake the cobwebs out of his head. Cody flies over the ropes and lays Idol flat at the feet of the ringside ticket holders. The two then semicircle the ring, throwing punches.

Back in the ring, Bryan reclaims the advantage by artful use of the ropes, guillotining Cody on the top rope then diving off the middle rope with a forearm smash to the jaw. He jerks the youngster up by his multicolored hair and, holding him by his arms, drives his knee repeatedly to the kid's ribs and then employs a vertical suplex to slap Cody onto his back. Again he uses the ropes to inflict further trauma, which the ref forces him to break after a four-count. Idol responds by merely moving Cody to another side of the ring to choke him for a different section of the audience.

One brutal punishment follows fast on the heels of another. The crowd is feeling Cody's pain and hating Bryan's guts. The more Cody resists, the harsher the beatings get. As the crowd chants, "Cody! Cody! Cody!" all at once the kid grabs a hope spot, delivering payback. Whether the spot is fleeting or a bold advance towards victory depends largely on how well Blayde fights fire with fire and how well he discharges the strengths of young ambition against a jaded and often crooked adversary. The finisher is a piledriver that lands with sublime orgasmic energy. A stunner and a beauty of a slam dunk ending!

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