Hard Feelings, 1992

Chuck Young vs Paul Perris, Canadian Musclehunk Oil Wrestling 2 (Can-Am)

What you're looking at is a 29-year-old sex fantasy. I blogged about it seven or eight years ago. At the time I had no access to downloads of the match, and I could not make GIFs yet . I have purchased this match three times from VHS to DVD to mp4. (How is that for customer loyalty?) There are moments in it that I can call to memory in a second. I wanted to make and share these GIFs with you to illustrate how much fight Chuck and Paul put into their oil match, an underground wrestling angle that's usually played cute and flirty. 

All the swimmy elements are here - those moments that resemble an underwater ballet or, here in particular, an underwater fight to the death in an old Tarzan movie. These slippery boys want to kill each other - or pretend to. Among the great joys of this match is escalating payback for wrongs rendered earlier in the match. Revenge is a hot, lusty toy to play with - and potentially tragic, too, as Aeschylus showed the world some twenty-six hundred years ago. This match portrays the passion of getting even, while sparing us the buckets of blood. For men, young men especially, a fight settles matters and releases hard feelings, preferably with no lifelong or life-curtailing damage. Sane fighters want to hurt but not break the other guy. I don't think I'm being toxically masculine in suggesting that such fights are healthy. (Rule #1, don't fight somebody who wants to do you lasting damage. Rule #2, fight guys you respect and trust and you know respect and trust you.)

These guys are not delicate or defenseless. These guys are thick and heavy and close to each other in size and weight. The punches are obviously pulled, but the fervor is as real as real gets. This is the sort of grunt and groan battle I love, dragging out for as long as it takes (in this case, 25 minutes) for one man to be down and stay down and the other man to walk away. I like it even more when the battlers collapse into each other's arms, unconscious. 

This is Can-Am at its peak. The early 1990s was underground wrestling's defining moment.

Visit Can-Am here.