There was a movie that came out in the late eighties the featured
Sylvester Stallone fighting evil rich fat cats greed and dirty
tricks by arm-wrestling for justice for his son and himself. No
kidding. The thing is that the plot is absurd and contrived to
somehow try and build an emotional conflict that can only be resolved
by arm-wrestling and that was the most awesome thing any of us at the
Santaquin Middle School had ever seen. Literally the finest movie
since Tom Cruise fought communists with shirtless beach volleyball
and one-liners. After the movie had time to percolate down to video
rental and then cable television and many of the boys and girls had
seen it we got right to work on arm-wrestling at any occasion. The
rules were the regular ones except you could not go 'over the top', the cheating move that Sylvester Stallone used in the film ' Over the
Top' to win a truck. That maneuver involved re-positioning your hand to a higher
position to increase your leverage and thereby dominate your opponent. Before home room everyday for a
couple of months we were going around to different desks arm
wrestling and then talking about arm-wrestling. We settled out that
Andy was probably the best arm wrestler and then the passion fizzled out as
there was no point in retrying to challenge the son of a tow truck
driver who did real work when he was not at school. I don't think I have arm-wrestled ten more times in my life since that spasm of arm-tacular battle. Got it out of my system I guess.
