Welcome!

Welcome to Fall Wrestling. I’m Lee Casebolt. You may know me from twitter or Hybrid Shoot. If you’ve been around a bit longer, maybe from Total MMA or even Deathvalleydriver. Or possibly you wandered in some other way. However you got here, I hope you’ll find something that holds your interest. This place is dedicated to the study and promotion of catch as catch can wrestling, but it’s best to think of that as a trunk with many branches and almost as many roots. I’ll be spending time on amateur and pro wrestling, grappling martial arts and MMA. There’ll be mini-bios and profiles, product and match reviews, some technical and historical study… basically anything that lodges itself in my brain and won’t leave until I write it down. I hope to get up a post every day, on average. (Some days will definitely be more productive than others.) There may be a podcast or youtube channel in the future, but I shouldn’t get ahead of myself. I hope to introduce you, the fan, to some people and things you weren’t familiar with. The topic is broad enough that I’ll be a little shocked if anyone other than me is actually interested in all of it, but if you got here in the first place there should be plenty for you to like.

Cards on the table, right from the start – this blog is a cash grab. I want to be upfront about that in a very not-pro wrestling way. I am very much hoping that you, gentle reader, will send me, your humble scribe, money in some form. At the time of this writing, I haven’t settled on which crowdfunding service I’ll be getting signed up with yet, but there will be Patreon and/or Ko-Fi links around here somewhere. There will be a storefront of some kind – probably Cafepress – and I would very much appreciate it if you’d buy yourself or someone you love a shirt or a coffee cup or whatever strikes your fancy. 

What’s that money for? Well, there are some operating costs, of course, and hopefully we’ll cover that. If things go well, maybe it’ll cover some of the new material I’m buying. But there are a zillion wrestling blogs out there, and you don’t need to pay for a new one. But if things go very well, you will be helping me fulfill a dream I’ve had since I was a kid.

I am a weirdo because One of the ways in which I am a weirdo is that being a fan of pro wrestling was my bridge into being a fan of amateur wrestling, judo, and the martial arts in general. Despite spending my childhood trapped in a world without cable or any local promotion to speak of, and exposed almost exclusively to the WWF except via Apter mag or VHS rental, I gravitated towards the technical wrestlers - Ricky Steamboat, Bret Hart, Curt Hennig, etc. My first question when I understood wrestling was fake was "who tells Andre he has to lose?" My second was "what if it wasn't?" I live in Iowa. There are badass wrestlers all over the place. Surely someone somewhere could put together a card that has real athletes really competing, but let them use the broader scope of throws and holds of pro wrestling instead of the much more limited techniques allowed to amateurs.

So why not me, and why not here? We’re going to start a wrestling promotion, friends, or at least make the attempt. A real, competitive, professional wrestling promotion where wrestlers can win by pinfall or submission and get paid for trying. Here’s the deal – I’m going to write about wrestling, in all its many forms. I’m going to dig in to the history and the science and the art of it, as best I can, and share that with you. Along the way I’m hoping I’ll stumble into a catchy turn of phrase or two that looks good on merchandise. If all this meets with your approval, maybe toss a few bucks this way and, in a year or so, you’ll help revive what I genuinely feel is the highest evolution of sport.

Because I am, fortunately, not the only person to have this idea, the very first thing on the table is a series of profiles on the participants in the upcoming 2018 Catch Wrestling World Championship tournament, ably previewed at Catch Wrestling U. Coming tomorrow – a close look at the Warmaster, Josh Barnett. He’s easily the most famous of the field, and considered the favorite to win it. But should he be?