Iron and Steel Scrap

Rob Steel vs Artemis Iron, Catalog 30 - Holiday Surprise (MuscleBoy Wrestling)

Few things are hotter than two muscle giants pounding each other in close quarters. These two look like gladiators who just stumbled out of a 1960s Samuel Bronston spectacle into MuscleBoy's padded confine. Rob Steel wowed me in his two previous MBW matches, taking on Johnny Greco and Tripp Evans. This time he faces a man his own size. Artemis Iron has twenty pounds on Steel, but both stand at 5'9". Undaunted, Steel takes it for granted that he can beat the newcomer.

It so happens that just minutes before sitting down to blog on this match I picked up National Geographic's Gladiators: The Real Story of the Ring at the supermarket where I stopped for popcorn and sodas in preparation for an evening of French crime movies. The young crossdresser at checkout gave me a knowing look. Such are the tiny fissures in normative heterosexuality in the little Southern city I live in. The single-topic magazine ends with a comparison of Hollywood gladiators and the real fighters in ancient Rome. It turns out that some things the blockbusters got right and some things are pure invention, like I didn't know that.

Steel versus Iron makes me rub my knees together. I expected Iron to roll over and play dead. I soon forgot why I expected that because Iron and Steel punch it out from start to finish for almost the full twenty-six minutes. The advantage shifts from one to the other, the way I like a match to be. This is a splendid exhibition of old-school manliness, and the two take turns being the beater and the beaten, enacted with the simplicity of a full-page Physique Pictorial layout. There are matches that I mourn not having been physically present to watch, and this is one of them.

MuscleBoy uncocks another winner as the month and year draw to a close. If you like red meat as I do, you don't want to miss this fight.

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