Clobberative Effort

Kayden Keller and Ash DeLeon vs Kenny Starr and Rocky Sparks, Tag Team Torture 22 (BG East)

Cleancut heels Kayden Keller and Ash DeLeon make short work of shabby babyfaces Kenny Starr and Rocky Sparks and paradoxically take their sweet time doing it, making sure Kenny and Rocky feel the experience to the bone. I'm not a fan of tag team matches, but even I can see that BG East does them with more attention to detail than any other underground wrestling promotion. Wrestling Arsenal has written eloquently about the form and largely contributes to whatever understanding and appreciation of the form I have acquired over the past ten years.

There is no clearer definition of the heel-babyface dichotomy as Keller and DeLeon's smug superiority and Starr and Sparks's deer-in-the-headlights vulnerability. Wrestling Arsenal taught me that often the real drama is not in the ring but outside the corners where the wrestlers' partners anxiously and often helplessly wait for their turn to fight. As Keller, with typically austere brutality, mangles pretty Rocky, DeLeon itches for his turn at the hairy-chested blond while Kenny fidgets at the opposite corner.

When a nearly crippled Rocky at last tags his partner in, we get another dramatic turn that I feel in my crotch as Kenny hubristically insists on wrestling DeLeon instead of the man in the ring. Talk about naming your poison! Yeah, request the well-rested guy to take on, Kenny. Keller wrily grants the babyface's (death)wish and tags his partner in. For his part DeLeon is more than happy to rip into hunky Kenny Starr and proceeds to do so with a nasty sneer and a taste for carnage.

BG East's catalog description of the match characterizes the divide between the two teams in terms of standards of operation. The team of  Sparks and Starr is disorganized and unpracticed, barely knowing one another well enough to work as a team. They hop into the lion's den with no strategy or exit plan. By contrast, the team of Keller and DeLeon have top-down organization, with Keller as man-in-charge and DeLeon looking up to him worshipfully. Thus, Keller and DeLeon work as a hierarchal war machine while Sparks and Starr are partners by chance with no game plan or sense of who's in charge.

At BG East, tag matches reach their erotic climaxes when all four men are in the ring and each heel mounts his trembling prey, choking the babyfaces out, making sure that each face has an unobstructed view of his partner's doom as the lights go out.

Visit BG East here.