in Poetry 31 Words

hickenbottom brawn

My favourite wrestler is Shawn Michaels
Huge, muscled men, twice his size, he tackles
The ‘Heartbreak kid’ is his nickname
Getting beaten black and blue, thrashing it out for fame.

#limerick

17 thoughts on “hickenbottom brawn”

  1. And I have three scads screaming for my fingers’ attentions and here you are giggling me into apoplexishness with these varied and fun forms. There exists at University of Florida a chair in the Master of Fine Arts literary program a lad, Padgett Powell (sometimes Padget), a novelist of some note, with whom a spent a lazy late Winter morning digging in for newly captured Gopher Tortoises (Gopherus Polyphemus) at a near-Sanford, Florida international airport during a relocation program – he is an amateur herpetologist and thus was hoping to see an Eastern Indigo snake. But, bored with unsuccess he came to my portion of the program: digging in new starter-burrows for the soon-to-be released tortoises. We talked lazily soaking up the sun of our youths – mine in Sanford and his in nearby Ocoee – of watching with something approaching religious return-zeal Saturday morning wrestling on television. Championship Wrestling From Florida. My brothers and I practiced all but the really dangerous moves out in the front yard after lunch (and before we were old enough to have jobs). Padgett and I agreed: the morality plays in bits and pieces over those formative young-boy years may have had more to do with who we became than all those Sunday School lessons so dutifully taught the next mornings. Thanks, Yassy, for the shove down memory’s mat!

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      1. As with so many of our performer-heroes, their pure feet sometimes show themselves holding up clay selves. I was unaware of UW’s death. The instances of no few wrestlers of professional mien dying of their craft’s “demands” recalls to me the wonder how many young men and boys were lost to the bull’s horns on Crete and beyond. We humans truly are strange and wonderful creatures.

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      5. It’s a challenge, but a good forearm across the chest is just what Doctor Death prescribes! I shall give warning if I see the guys – in all white – with butterfly nets, young lady!

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  2. Pingback: hickenbottom brawn — yaskhan – richwrapper

  3. My school older: my favorite heels Ole Anderson and his brother and one of them’s son Arn; and my alltime fave “Mr. Wrestling II – who in a previous incarnation was known as one of the two Crusaders: during a best-of-three match his partner was injured in the first fall (really. And he actually had to retire thereafter) and the Crusader said he’d continue and won the next two falls (Champ.WrestF/Florida circa late 1960s. Then there was Buddy Colt who came back from a broken neck after a single-engine private plane crash nose first into Tampa Bay in the late 60s or so to show up as a referee on the NWA (out of Tampa) touring ‘rasslin’ matches parading through armories, high schools, Salvation Army – what irony! – gyms in the late 70s in Central Florida). Lou Thez and maybe Jimmy Backlund (before he was a WWWF champ in his pre-steroid days) and Mike Graham were my “face” faves.

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      1. I sometimes catch the MMA stuff – when free undercard matches on FOX here – but have given up on the glitter and glitz that seems to have taken over. Besides, watching blacksnakes mate and squirrels chase each other and eagles tilt-a-whirl aerial fighting for territory so much better. I used to cover high school, collegiate and amateur freestyle and Greco-Roman wrestling for newspapers decades ago and that ever was so much better – actually knowing the people competing in real and not staged events. Just like I’d rather watch a backyard baseball or football game than a youth league, then go on down the line to junior high (now gone in favor of more “modern” middle schools, high school and then collegiate…but professional any sports is tedious and commercial, even my once-beloved Olympics. The advent of girls individual and team athletics in American public and private (opposite of English meanings) schools has been a great boon, as was so-called racial integration: only one race – homo sapiens sapiens and that, provably, is a piss poor slow race indeed, can’t seem to get over itself!

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