I was digging through a stack of old DVDs… (Do you remember DVDs? That’s how we used to watch wrestling. I still have some.) Anyway, I found a great old tag team match on BG East’s video, Tag Team Torture 8 and really enjoyed it so I decided to blog about it.
These guys wearing black and white gear and nearly making out are the Heels — Heller and Cassidy. Nice bodies! Their opponents are a pair of delicious jobbers named Alan Day and Brendan Byers. I’ve nick-named them the Lean Lads because they’re cute, pencil-thin youngsters.
The Lean Lads get to shine early in the match, confounding the big dumb Heels. This early Bearhug by jobber Brendan got it up for me, because of Cassidy’s pathetic display of weakness, giving all the power over to Brendan by rag-dolling like a bitch while his partner Heller watches in disgust. Schwinggg!
Cassidy soon takes control of Brendan thanks to some rough bullshit. As Cassidy tries to rip his arms off, Brendan kicks his white boots around, his ultra-slim torso bent and contorted over his torturer’s stiff knee. White gear is the perfect choice for good boy Brendan.
As Brendan sells his agony, we catch a backside view of his partner Alan Day, standing outside the ropes eager to get in the ring (see below). Watching from behind the partner in the Baby-Face Corner is one of my favorite view-points in all of wrestling.
One of the themes of this match is the eagerness of the outside partners to get in the ring and get involved. This is especially apparent when Cole leers at Alan Day from Heel Corner — that creep has such an obvious boner for the boy in blue.
Later this tension will be resolved when all four wrestlers forget the rules and get in the ring together. That’s when this match really earns the $25 or whatever I paid for it ten years ago.
Here is that tension again, this time with the horny Heel trying to coax the Lean Lad into the ring by threatening him. I used to do that too, trying to get other guys in my college dorm to rassle on the floor with me by throwing little punches at them. “You want some of this, brah?? Huh??”
At last, Alan Day tries to save the day by rescuing his partner from a Backbreaker and the orgy begins. Cassidy traps Day in a Xerox copy of his partner’s Over the Knee Backbreaker and I’m suddenly making moaning sounds that I hope my neighbors can’t hear.
The imagery of the two partners doing everything in sync, locking on the same hold at the same time, just enthralls me. I think I respond to this display of their one-sided power — that they are winning so easily (and give zero fucks about the rules) that they can put their jobbers in identical holds for the fun of it.
The Heels continue their mirror-image assaults, racking both their jobbers over the top rope and hammering on their lean, stretched-out torsos. Cassidy focuses on attacking Day (of course) leaving his partner to dominate Byers in the far corner. It’s as if they paired off at a swingers party and went to make out in different rooms.
It’s getting brutal as the jobbers are suspended in identical Tree of Woe positions and just tenderized like Rocky punching on the frozen beef carcasses. The Lean Lads prove to us that the “toughest guys in pro wrestling are the Pretty-Boys” if they can endure a beating like THIS!
Cassidy locks his preferred Lean Lad — I mean his OPPONENT — in a stunning Figure 4 Leglock while his wing-man, Heller, was off Torture-Racking the other jobber.
All that bumping and grinding by Cassidy as he dry-humps Day’s leg gives the scene a sexual vibe.
The Heels play a few rounds of that back-and-forth game where they take turns applying some painful maneuver and then debate who did it better. We’ve seen this trope before in Underground Wrestling and it’s always a turn-on.
Two partners applying the same hold in a row to learn from each other (or to entertain each other) is another power display, implying that they can turn this “match” into a fun game, with the two jobbers serving as nothing more than props or game pieces for the Heels to use in their play.
There is just something homo-erotic about two partners who enact Tandem Offense, vibing off each other through mimicry. This desire to act identically with another man, to observe his movements and mirror them, implies that he is more than just a co-worker to you. You have your eye on what he’s doing, you want to be just like him.
Cole and Alan have a hot singles match in Florida Fights 1. If you haven’t seen it yet, I recommend it.