Take Me in Your Arms and Drive Me Slowly Out of My Mind

Scrappy vs Sparrow, Mat Rats 74b (Thunders Arena)

The whole damn match is good, but I'm obsessed by a two-minute stretch near the end of Sparrow's now long-ago debut at Thunders Arena. None other than Scrappy breaks the new guy in, and the two - two of the greatest personalities in all underground wrestling - are well matched, Sparrow slightly taller and heavier, but not so much as to make a difference. Scrappy hurls himself at Sparrow, and the wrestlers clutch each other, sweat rolling off Sparrow's shoulders, as chest to chest and belly to belly they writhe and squeeze like sumo wrestlers or antagonists in a 1960s sword-and-sandals epic or early-1970s rasslers on TV. The hotness of this standing embrace excites me like few things I have seen in wrestling, partly because it reminds me of the way Tarzan, Sumo, Steve Reeves, and Terry Funk shaped my youthful erotic impulses and the way buddies and I started off a bedroom match back then, a steely embrace and a grunting struggle to take each other down and land on top.

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