Here are some classic Leglock images I had accumulated on my Hard Drive that I may as well post for your viewing pleasure.
We start with the good old Hamstring Snapper, where the attacker presses his foot in the victim’s groin, grabs an ankle, then falls backward so the leg is snapped like a catapult firing a projectile. The move appears vicious because the attacker uses his entire body weight for leverage against the trapped leg. The cruelty of the move — the intention to deliberately injure — is reflected in the caption that the magazine’s writer appended to the photo:
“England’s Billy Robinson attempts to snap the hamstring muscle of The Super Destroyer Mark II.”
Something about hearing or saying the word “Leglock” really trips a trigger in my brain. To see two men with their hairy legs entangled in a knot — a sensual image to begin with — and to pair that with words like: “caught in a punishing Leglock” is for me a recipe for excitement and arousal. It just seems so close to sex.
It seemed painful enough for a wrestler to use his own legs to punish his victim’s leg — muscle against muscle, bone against bone. But often the Heel wrestlers would amp up the cruelty by using the metal ringpost or the hard objects at ringside to twist, bend, and break the victim’s leg.
The poor Baby-Face’s agony was proportional to the stiffness of whatever object his leg was being entangled around. The more creative the Heel when it came to torturing that injured leg, the more exciting the match.
That Nigel McGuinness pic reminds me of a match I saw in the 60’s as a kid. There were two young wrestlers in the ring and, of course, the bad guy had black tights and black boots and the good guy just the opposite. Both we’re really hot.
Anyway, the bad guy gets the good guy flat on his back and, like Nigel, splits the guy’s legs apart. After a while of howling in agony and flailing about the Good Guy decides he better do something to extricate himself from this never-ending agony and slowly starts to inch his way up to a sitting position.
Having been caught in this hold a number of times I can speak from experience that as you start to raise yourself the pain dramatically ramps up in intensity. I can still see the agony on this guy’s face as he inched his way up to a sitting position and he was literally dripping in sweat.
It was a hot, humid summer and from the looks of the crowd I doubt the arena was air conditioned. The beads of sweat pouring down his chest and disappearing in the waistband of his trunks was phenominal. Since he was wearing white trunks you could see the sweat stains encircling the waist of his trunks.
At any rate, just when he’d reach the sitting position and could finally do something to fight back the Heel just head-butted him in the chest/stomach and sent him crashing to the mat on his back. In my own experience that was excruciating as there was a quick but massive eruption of pain in your inside thigh muscles that really takes your breath away.
He attempted this escape several times before he finally wiggled his way out but I can’t seem to remember how he did it. Come to think of it, I think he seemed to walk a little bow-legged until his inside thigh muscles recovered. He eventually trapped the heel in a body scissors and punished him with that hold for a very long time. Guess it was good therapy for his injured thigh muscles.
At any rate, I remember that match vividly because it was the first time I ever saw a wrestler endure prolonged punishment in a single hold and I was hard the whole time. Since I was watching it with my buddy (we were only 10 or 11 at the time) I didn’t know that he had filed that hold away for future use. As it turned out I was the one he first used it on and he could read me well enough to know when I was at my limit and just kept me shy of giving to punish me as long as possible. I do know that I was in that hold a lot longer than the wrestler enduring it in the match we watched. It still makes me wince a bit when I think back on it.