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Saturday April 15 2017 - A bit of my past history: How it started	Anecdotes
When I was 14 (back in June 1994), I saw my first bearhug on TV. It featured a big goon known as Duke "The Dumpster" Droese crushing the lights out Reno Riggins [+]. Something happened that day and I fell in love with the bearhug. It was the very first bearhug I ever saw. I replayed it and re-watched it so many times during my childhood. Then I secretly kept recording on VHS tapes the WWF Superstars shows on a weekly basis hoping that Duke would give bearhugs to more of his opponents. Why did I do this secretly? Well, because my mom would tell me it was bad to watch people fighting and I didn't want the rest of my family to suspect that I might be gay. A year later, I recorded a WCW show and stumbled on an inverted bearhug that Dave Sullivan gave to Dino Dimeglo. I was surprised to see that you could come up with a different variant to the bearhug. Being inverted meant that you had less chances of getting out of it and that you would struggle some more... I promptly followed Dave and was ecstatic that he used his bearhug relatively frequently. It was however how he did it that made it captivating for me. He'd jump repeatedly, squeezing rapidly using a bouncing movement that made the hold looked really painful... or in my case, really exciting. Another bearhug that marked me later on was from a Mexican match where Cien Caras bearhugged Rayo de Jalisco Jr. in a reverse-inverted bearhug. I remember ordering this tape because back then, there was no such thing as YouTube, and I was very curious how this looked like. I've only read about it in several reviews and I knew I wanted to see this bearhug. My heart was beating fast when I received the VHS videotape and when I was viewing the sequence leading to the bearhug. I felt that paying 30$ for a tape for 5 seconds of bearhug was totally worth it. Not long after that, it was a video from a Japanese adult wrestling company (I believe it was PAPW) that really confirmed to me that it was more than just the bearhug that was appealing. There was a twist to it that you'd never see on TV. One of the wrestlers from PAPW regularly took his opponents in an inverted bearhug and sometimes, he'd use his right hand to grab a hold of his opponent's prized possession... Squeezing him multiple times, grinding him and hearing him panic, pleading for mercy, before letting him go. Video games also had an impact on my preference for bearhugs. In 1994, 16-bit arcade cabinets were still popular and one of my favorite video games was Saturday Night Slam Masters. I saw Jumbo, a pretty big wrestling character apply the bearhug. I inserted coins myself to control the character and had him bearhug Scorpion, a slim, yet agile wrestling opponent, but made sure he did nothing to defend himself against Jumbo. The bearhug sequence was short: 3 squeeze and Jumbo would throw his opponent away, but that was all what I needed back at the time. I even creamed my pants once just for that short sequence. Nowadays, emulators can easily be manipulated to repeat that sequence until the opponent submits. The arcade cabinet Wrestlefest also played a noteworthy role when I was young, but for some reason, I didn't see this one often around my area. All the wrestlers in that game were beefier and the bearhugs they had were also very nice, considering the quality of graphics during that decade. In order for me to have access to that cabinet, I would have to travel to the US. My family would often go down south for long road trips to visit relatives, we'd stop at service areas and I'd occasionally bump onto Wrestlefest, or Pit Fighter or The Avengers. It came to a point that stopping at service areas was my favorite part of the trip. Pit Fighter had a piledriver that you could almost consider a bearhug, but it was rather rare so I was just as happy to see the regular beat up sequence where the good guy lost to the basic, generic and easiest goon of the game. Or, an unfair double-team sequence. The Avengers had a bearhug that technically lasts forever until your energy reaches 0 (you would have to insert coins if you wanted to extend that time). If I was lucky enough to fall on Wrestlefest, I was too shy to play it, so I only observed in excitement other people playing it instead. The bearhug submission hold in that game was a move that was rather difficult to pull off because you could only apply it if the opponent was low on his energy gauge. Back on to real video content, BG East wasn't really big yet, but I did remember when the CAL video company was around. I had my eyes for Mike Pope and read the description of his videos promising scorching hot and long held bearhug submissions. I couldn't afford them because they were 100$ a pop (yes, per match, per tape). If that happened past 2010, most of their content could have been found on YouTube, or pirated in one form or another, or made available through peer-to-peer file-sharing networks... but no, we were still in 1994-1995. Switching again to pro, I had spent time researching for the big heavyweight guys that were known to use the bearhug as a finisher. I was obssessed with Ted Arcidi [+] and Bill Kazmaier [+] who were at the top of my list, with good reason. These guys were so dreamy for me (still are for me today, actually). Their bearhug content were largely inaccessible because it was produced between 1986 to 1992. I didn't watch wrestling yet at that age, so the only way I could access those matches was through more custom VHS videotape orders. My most memorable matches from these two guys were the ones where Ted Arcidi bearhugged Tony Garea to submission and where Bill Kazmaier made Mike Thor submit in an inverted bearhug. All of the above were consequential milestones that directed me towards this one project: about four years after (in 1998), I founded this site. It all started with a very primitive picture gallery page housing a few bearhugs that I've gathered from various websites. I couldn't share the videos yet. Nooooooooooo! With 56k dial-up screeching modems, it would have taken hours to download a video clip. But the feedback I received just from the bearhug pictures alone was enormous and overwhelming. People were telling me that they thought there were the only ones who enjoyed this hold. Many asked me to tweak the site to include wrestling personals, to allow other wrestlers with similar interests to contact each other. At the beginning, the process was entirely manual. People would send me an e-mail and I would write out their profile in a file and upload it to the site. If someone wanted to make some changes, they would e-mail me again and it would take me up to a year to update it because the process was tedious and I was procastinating... It's only in 2008 (10 years later) that I learned enough about programming languages, databases and other information technology concepts to be able to have everything automated so that people can edit their profiles themselves. You can see from the site statistics and demographics that the amount of profiles back then jumped from 158 wrestlers in 2000-2007 to 524 in 2008 and then doubling up for the following two years, because I no longer had to do everything by hand. 7 years after that, in 2015, I created this blog to separate the site-related posts from my personal wrestling life. Fast-forward to today, I realize that bearhugs require so much strength to be effective. Hence, as the years went by, I grew fonder of other holds like the body scissors and the torture rack. Mind you, I still love bearhugs, especially if someone is strong enough to make me feel something. The body scissors is just higher up on the scale because I have an easier time finding opponents that are stronger in the legs than in their arms. Most people tend to have a stronger body scissors than a strong bearhug. After all, your legs supports your whole body whereas your arms don't really need to carry anything throughout the day. The body scissors has also worked for me very well against bigger opponents: I get to see them struggle in it and occasionally, give up (yes, I'm THAT mean). If done correctly on me, you'd probably hear me laugh because the body scissors can produce an enjoyable type of pain. The rack also has a warm place in my favorite holds: because it is impressive when a smaller guy can bend a bigger guy. You can clearly see the size difference. I will however give credit to Lex Luger for making me fall in love with the rack. It was always astounding to see him lift his adversaries, no matter their size, then watch him in awe as he flexes them repeatedly over his shoulders. The fact that he continued racking them after the bell rings and after the referee tells him to release made it even hotter. This particular video on YouTube sort of explains what I'm trying to say. It's one of my favorite rack from Lex: AJ Styles here is completely defenseless. He was already beaten-up, double-teamed, exhausted, lost the match, yet, they would bully him some more by racking him even though the bell already rang. (The YouTube link goes up and down so putting in a few personal notes here so I can retrace it again in the future: NWA TNA Weekly PPV #83 February 25 2004) The rack is one of the few holds that I usually prefer giving than receiving. The reason for this is that very few people know how to do this properly and the risk of falling, hurting or tumbling through an improper rack is significantly higher than any other wrestling holds. I even remember EvilDark almost injuring his shoulder in the process. With the bearhug, you can just wrap your arms around your opponent and the lifting is optional. Voila. With the rack, you'd have to feel comfortable enough to put a good amount of weight on your shoulders and you should be experienced or feel confident enough to distribute the weight evenly to keep your opponent balanced and aligned in the air. If you lose the trust of your opponent or if he struggles and make sudden movements, you both can easily get injured in the process. Yes, this is one of the holds you usually don't try at home. In another life, this page may have been the "Torture Rack Submission Page" instead of the "Bearhug Submission Page".
Blog ID 122

Date created:	2017-04-15
Date modified:	22:14:18.376063
Revision number:	90
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