Chelsea hosted a wrestling match gathering meet party competition soiree game thing. I apologize: I’m not hip to the language of wrestling. I like the sport of wrestling, but I’m not around it enough to know the lingo. Several schools got together on a Saturday and wrestled for a while. Can I call that a wrestlemania, or will I get sued? Ah, who cares:

Chelsea hosted a wrestlemania (but not THAT Wrestlemania).

If you’ve never been a wrestling spectator, there’s one important truth you need to know: there’s lots of yelling.

Yeah, the spectators do some yelling, too, but most of it comes from the coaches. They yell instructions.* Most of the instructions sound like they’re intended to bring some sort of pain or humiliation to the opponent. This is an actual phrase yelled by an actual coach: “Push his head down!” This resulted in the wrestler’s pushing his opponent’s face into the mat. Which…well, I guess that’s cool as long as he didn’t plan to use that face at some point in the future.

*(Okay, let me clarify: good wrestling coaches yell instructions. There once was a wrestling coach who kept yelling “Just wrestle!” Let’s just say it wasn’t effective coaching.)

Here’s another important truth of wrestling: at some point somebody’s body will bend in a way it really shouldn’t.

Wrestlers will talk about leverage and other noble-sounding notions, but to my novice eyes, it looks like a wrestler’s goal is simply to bend his opponent in strange ways so as to convince him to pin himself in order to avoid pain. It’s almost like a self-defense class that turned into a sport.

For the record, the position in the above photo resulted in a stoppage immediately after I took the photo. A good wrestler will turn his opponent into a pretzel, but the refs are careful to make sure the pretzel doesn’t get injured.