AN ANNOTATED LIST OF BRET HART’S SIGNATURE OFFENSIVE MANEUVERS
Michael Chin
Backbreaker: Lift
2 your opponent from the waist and guide her back until your bodies form a lowercase t. Drop her back over your bent knee.
Bulldog: Wrap your arms around your opponent’s head like a football. Hold tight and run until you drop.
Clothesline: Run at
3 your opponent—who may be stationary or, themselves, running in the opposite direction—then leap before impact. Knock her down with your outstretched arm.
Elbow Drop: Fold your arm, holding your wrist in the opposite hand, point of the elbow extended. Pitch forward to drive your elbow into her heart.
Figure Four Leglock: Take the left foot of your prone opponent
4 in hand and spin, bending your opponent’s leg at the knee around your shin. Place your opponent’s left ankle over her right knee and lie back, positioning your knee pit over your opponent’s right ankle, pressed down on her knee. Press up on your palms for additional leverage.
German Suplex: Wrap your arms around your opponent’s waist and lock your hands together, palm to palm. Pitch backward, heaving your opponent overhead so the back of her head, neck, and shoulders hit the mat. Hold on, press up from your feet, extend your abdomen in the air. Bear your weight on your neck.
Hammerlock: Take your opponent’s wrist in your hands and pin it to her back. Pull upward, toward your opponent’s neck to generate pressure on her shoulder.
Hart Attack: This move requires a tag team partner. Have your partner lift your opponent from the waist and hold her, as if in celebration, if she were a tired-legged child in need of carrying. Deliver the clothesline as previously described. Every body falls down together
5.
Headbutt: Lean back and smash your temple into her temple or into her floating ribs if she’s already bent.
Leg Drop: Stand over your prone opponent and lift your leg as close to perpendicular to your body as possible. Drop your leg on her neck.
Piledriver: Position your opponent’s head between your thighs. Lift her until you stand straight, the top of her head at your pelvis, her legs in the air. Drop.
Ring Post-Assisted Figure Four Leglock: Position your opponent’s pelvis to the ring post, body seated or supine in the ring. Bend one of your opponent’s knees against the ring post, pressing the same leg’s ankle over her opposite knee so her legs take the shape of a closed-top four. Leap, to position your knee pit over her ankle, over her knee, and fall back
6 to hang upside down.
Sharpshooter7: Stand at the feet of your prone opponent and lift her legs by the ankles, leaving her back flat on the mat. Thread your left leg between her legs and rest your foot on the mat. Cross your opponent’s ankles and tuck them under your armpit. Turn, so your back is to your opponent, your opponent on her stomach and lean back so her body bends like scorpion’s tail.
Side Russian Leg Sweep: Rest your right arm over your opponent’s shoulders, behind her neck. Grapevine your right leg around her left. Tuck your right hand under your opponent’s chin. Lean forward. Throw yourself back.
Snap Suplex: Hug your opponent’s head tight under your left arm. Plant your right hand at her hip. Leap, and when your feet hit the mat, lift your opponent in a sudden, jerking motion to send her flying over your shoulders, crashing to the mat. You’ll fall, too, but from a lesser height, with a controlled impact.
Superplex: Same principle as the snap suplex, only slower and from the top rope.
Victory Roll8: Seat yourself on your standing opponent’s shoulders, one leg to either side of her neck, pelvis to the back of her head. Pitch forward—roll. Land seated, legs over her upper arms, her ankles in your hands, her body, her soul, her life at your mercy.
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1 Bret Hart was Mr. Bosh’s favorite professional wrestler. This came up conspicuously early in his time teaching my first-year comp class at Taylor College, spring 1994. It didn’t seem conspicuous at the time. It did seem conspicuous that he knew to pronounce my name correctly, Camilla—the two l-s making a y sound—Rodriguez with a rolling r. Even before he mentioned Bret Hart, he explained, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, that he’d watched a lot of lucha libre.
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2 One of my earliest memories of Mr. Bosh was him lifting the edges of the big world map that had covered the chalkboard. The kind of map that rolled up like a scroll. Old. Heavy. I had, in preceding years, watched high school teachers fumble, pulling up and down, map stuck in an overextended position, so we saw the yellowed blank space we weren’t intended to.
Mr. Bosh understood the physicality of this map—maybe his instinct, maybe the map acquiescing to an irresistible force. Regardless, the map rose on the first try, snapping up into a tight, rolled-up configuration, rattling the framing structure. Mr. Bosh—he’d told us all to call him Adam, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it—took a yellow piece of chalk and wrote
BRET HART or
LEX LUGER. Boys—wrestling fans—cheered. I was not yet a wrestling fan. I did not know these names.
He led us through an extension of the compare-contrast exercise we’d engaged in between Jay Gatsby and Tom Buchanan. I can’t remember how the map had factored into that debate. I remember the room coming to life for the debate between the merits of two contenders for the World Wrestling Federation Championship.
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3 Mr. Bosh came running, barreling at Johnny Reds in the space outside the dining hall, where Johnny had thrown the first punch against another boy. Anything at all might have set off a fight between testosterone-fueled boys. Johnny was my res hall president, an office earned by being an outgoing personality and, more to the point, the only person to run. I knew Johnny to be an asshole too, after much talked about escapades, sleeping with a series of girls from the hall. I imagined this fight was more about bully posturing than anything the other boy had actually done to incite violence.
I hadn’t realized how big Mr. Bosh was, not only a foot taller than me but broad chested, broad shouldered, as he rushed past and tackled Johnny to the sidewalk. Mr. Bosh looked back at the other boy and warned him not to try anything—preemptive because, with his bloody nose, Green Day t-shirt askew, it didn’t look like he meant to try anything. Mr. Bosh held Johnny’s arms to the ground. Johnny squirmed, ineffectual.
A Campus Safety officer escorted Johnny to the principal’s office; another checked on the other boy and asked if he wanted to press charges.
I stood by as Dan—I’d come to know him as part of Mr. Bosh’s cohort of PhD students and graduate instructors—clapped a hand down hard on Mr. Bosh’s shoulder and said
Goddamnit. I anticipated a reprimand—that even when boys fought, it was not appropriate for faculty to put their hands on one.
You beat me to it. Dan cracked a smile. Mr. Bosh did too.
Nice tackle, though.
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4 The first time I watched wrestling, an episode of
Monday Night Raw, I recognized Bret Hart on sight—the pink singlet, the sunglasses, leather ring jacket all as Mr. Bosh had described them in such reverential terms.
I did not recognize his opponent.
I’d learn, when I asked Mr. Bosh about it the next day, this was a convention of televised wrestling. A
squash match wherein an established talent showcased his best offensive maneuvers against an anonymous talent—maybe a rookie learning the ropes, maybe a career
jobber who lacked the charisma to be a star himself, but had the acuity to sell punishment and make the star look like a world-beater.
Mr. Bosh caught my elbow after the explanation. He winked. “I’m glad you watched.”
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5 We were together there, in the classroom, a larger group of us than had ever been part of the English Department lit mag before.
The faculty advisor, Dr. Easton, was out on maternity leave, so Mr. Bosh took over. A lot of us liked Mr. Bosh by then. The boys knew whatever he was talking about, they could bait him into making it about wrestling. Then there were the girls I’d heard talking about in the bathroom while I was peeing. Pretty girls leaned close to the mirrors fixing the makeup around their eyes, saying
Mr. Bosh is kind of hot, and proceeded to talk about what he’d look like in wrestling trunks. (
I bet he has abs.)
These girls came to the lit mag meeting but, to my surprise, didn’t flirt with Mr. Bosh or hover close by, instead stationing themselves in a back corner to giggle amongst themselves, making Mr. Bosh walk all the way to the back to hand them their submissions to read. I’m not sure they opened their packets.
I read mine. Dutifully. A backdrop of wrestling talk, because of course the boys got Mr. Bosh going and Mr. Bosh talked about a WrestleMania party which I came to understand he was hosting at his apartment.
I tried to focus on the poem in front of me. A poem about a flower losing its petals that symbolized a girl losing her virginity. It was either too subtle or too poorly executed for me to wrap my head all the way around it. No telling if the author meant it as artistic expression or a dirty joke they hoped might sneak its way into a school publication.
Mr. Bosh knelt at my desk. “Some of the guys are coming over for WrestleMania next Sunday.” His face was close to mine. I could feel his breath on my forearm. “You want in?”
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6 Mr. Bosh showed me a clip of Bret Hart executing his ring post-assisted figure four leglock. He had me sit on his desk and for a moment, I thought he meant to demonstrate the hold on me, my legs hanging over the desk like the legs of the anonymous wrestler Bret faced had his hanging over the edge of the ring apron. But he only wanted me to sit close to the TV cart where he plugged in the wavy-lined VHS tape. Mr. Bosh stood behind me, told me to watch the opponent’s left hand as he put his left hand on my upper arm. The wrestler’s hand grabbed Bret’s ankle as he fell back into hanging position. “It’s a free fall,” Mr. Bosh said. “He holds Bret’s ankle to support him. Otherwise he’d smash his head against the floor and concuss himself.” Mr. Bosh said the words softly. He was standing close enough all he had to do was whisper, his chest to my back. His hand sliding down to just above my ankle, where my jeans rode up and my skin was exposed. His fingers were hot to the touch
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7 Everyone wanted to try the Sharpshooter at Mr. Bosh’s house. The hold struck just the right combination of factors. Complicated enough to feel like you had some remarkable technical knowledge, while also not so complicated the boys couldn’t figure it out. It was safe, too—unlike strikes and throws that were prone to really hurt someone. The Sharpshooter only really hurt if someone leaned back, applying full pressure.
One boy tried it on another, on a royal blue wrestling mat it wasn’t clear if Mr. Bosh had put out for WrestleMania décor or if it were part of his routine furniture. The vinyl exterior was smooth and cool to the touch.
“The Sharpshooter would never work in a real fight,” Mr. Bosh said, “because it’s near impossible to get on someone who isn’t a willing accomplice. But, if you got it on and you cranked it, it’d be pretty darn effective.”
I didn’t participate in these boys taking turns. I scooped a small serving of French Onion dip on one of the party plates—WWF-themed, they looked like something out of a six-year-old’s birthday party—a handful of celery and carrot sticks and kept to myself while I waited for the show to start.
Bret Hart started the show. I sat in a metal folding chair that looked like it was straight out of a pro wrestling brawl. Boys sat on the couch and the floor. Mr. Bosh paced behind us all, cheering on Bret against his brother Owen. Owen won.
It was a part of the story of the event—a contrivance I didn’t fully understand then and have forgotten the bits and pieces I knew of since—that Bret wrestled twice that night, in the opening match and in the main event, challenging for the world championship.
Mr. Bosh was on the couch by then and told me to sit next to him, the pretense that I must have been uncomfortable sitting the whole show long on the folding chair. I was. There wasn’t much space on the couch. Another boy on Mr. Bosh’s opposite side, only two-thirds of a cushion available for me, but I did sit, close to Mr. Bosh. At the opening bell, Mr. Bosh squeezed my shoulder in his hand.
Bret won. An unlikely finish when his much larger opponent, a sumo wrestler, meant to jump off the ropes and squash him, only to lose his balance and crash to the mat, allowing Bret to steal the pin while the champion was still dazed from the fall.
Bret was the champion then. Mr. Bosh’s living room erupted as the celebration played out on the screen. A cavalcade of wrestlers charged the ring to lift Bret up on their shoulders, the conquering hero.
The party cleared out. Mr. Bosh encouraged boys to take leftover pizza and wings and potato chips and pretzels back to their dorms.
The show was over at 7.
I cleaned up, stacking greasy paper plates, combining the dregs of Barg’s, Mountain Dew, and Pepsi into a single solo cup to pour it all out at once in the sink.
Mr. Bosh bumped into me on the way to the sink, Hefty bag slung over his shoulder. The back-wash-laced soda spilled over both of us, a sticky mess. He laughed, so I laughed too.
“I didn’t see you try the Sharpshooter before,” he said.
I said I hadn’t. I tried to sound cool when I rationalized that I wasn’t about to have one of those boys tangling his legs with mine, lying on the floor. He laughed about that, so I laughed too.
The next thing I remember, my back was on the mat. Mr. Bosh stood over me, his palms large, his fingers long enough to wrap all the way around my ankles. He commented on how skinny my legs were as he crossed one over the other, his left calf thrusted between my thighs.
He fell on top of me. Face to face. Chest to chest. I could hardly breathe.
“You were supposed to turn over,” he said.
“You were supposed to make me.” I felt grown up, arguing back at an adult, but not in a serious way. Like we were feeling one another out. I thought better of the resistance a beat later. “I’m sorry, Mr. Bosh.”
“Why don’t you call me Adam?”
What little distance remained closed. Tip of his nose on the tip of my nose. Not enough space between our lips to do anything but breathe him.
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8 Three years after I’d graduated, I came back to my college town for a weekend with the girls I’d shared an apartment with senior year. We went out for sushi at a new place on Main Street. We ordered a sampling—a Crunchy California Roll, a Tiger Roll, a Spicy Tuna Roll, a Rainbow Roll, a Spider Roll. Right before the waiter left, Rachel added on a Victory Roll.
I wanted to talk about Bret Hart. That he’d used his victory roll to defeat Bam Bam Bigelow and win the King of the Ring of tournament, but that that same move had been his undoing when he wrestled his brother Owen, because Owen saw it coming and sat down mid-roll, trapping Bret in an inescapable pinning combination.
The mention of a victory roll, the thought of Bret vs. Bam Bam conjured Mr. Bosh from the ether. I’d heard he was still around, adjuncting. No word on whether he’d ever finished his dissertation. I’d have to ask him to get that level of intel. He stopped at the door—at first, I thought, because he saw me—and held it open for a girl to walk in behind him. I didn’t know her name, had never met her before, but I did recognize her. Freckled fair skin, chestnut brown hair, skinny legs. Eighteen, nineteen years old.
Mr. Bosh looked around him, a little furtive, though he still didn’t spot me. He wasn’t looking for me, but for other faculty, administrators. He didn’t stick around. He gave his name to the boy at the counter who produced a plastic bag, tied tight by its handles. Mr. Bosh put the order on his credit card, then took the bag. It looked full. Heavy. Mr. Bosh carried it in one hand and took the girl’s hand in his other. They both giggled on their way out the door.
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