The GOLDEN AGE

by Belly Boy

The mid-1960s to mid-1970s was a golden age of bellypunching on TV. The few fetishists I know seem to confirm my recollection that you could hardly watch an evening of TV without seeing at least one.

Violence always has been part of TV programming, part of its limited vocabulary. But in those days of three networks only a few types of violence were permissible on the air. That forced the shows to rely on the same few allowed violent acts. One of them was the bellypunch. And so many shows offered a convenient contextual license for it: Westerns, detective and crime shows, superhero adventures, the old gangster and noir films on UHF, hell even "Star Trek" couldn't seem to get through an episode without a bar-room brawl on some alien planet.

I clearly remember "Batman," 1964, 65, when I was 4 and 5. It was the big thing with little boys, but the writers had way more time slot than plot, and so they seemed to use action scenes as filler, and drag them out. There was an obligatory "heroes beat up the henchmen" brawl scene toward the climax. Bellypunches abounded, of course. Sometimes after someone got a good fold-you-in-half stomach punch, they'd cut away to one of their goofy comic book visual sound effects, which was part of the show's schtick. You'd see a big word "OOF!" flash on the screen, in plump, soft letters with droplets flying off them and a cartoon tongue hanging out of the first "O," like the mouth that's making the sound, the bellypunch sound.

Then there was the British import "Avengers" series, which had a different envelope than the American shows. A beautiful woman, Mrs. Peel, doled out belly-chops in batches as she coldly dispatched the bad guys. And occasionally bad girls. (I believe Diana Rigg, as Mrs. Peel, never took one herself. But her successor in the show, Linda Thornton, did on at least two occasions.)

Factor in that old staple of weekend afternoon TV, professional wrestling, and you've got the perfect storm of bellypunching (this-world version). Wrestling then was in its pre-steroid heyday of pot-bellied fighters, including and especially among the pack of soft-bellied "squash jobbers."

Professional wrestling jobber is as close to my ideal career as exists in this world. Along perhaps with fist-fight stuntman. The "jobber" is ring slang for a fighter who gets hired by the match (job) rather than having a contract, and is paid to basically lose and get beat up in public by one of the marquee names in the wrestling federation, to boost the star's career. The soft-bellied, can't-take-it-in-the-stomach "belly jobber" is one of the natural forms of that, especially if the star is a brawler.

The federations and circuits I want to work for would be full of brawlers, and each of them would have at least one slutty, sexy "valet" or "manager" in his corner, cheering him on, doing everything in her power to make sure the jobber gets thrashed and humiliated.

It turns me on to imagine having that for a career. To have to explain to girls in singles' bars what it is that I do for a living!

I remember one wrestler who had huge shoulder and upper body muscles and wild curly blond hair and a bully's sneer. He was the type of fighter who would walk right up to a jobber at the start of a match and just punch him in the belly. Not give him even a full second of dignity in the ring. Something in his eyes I recognized from the older boys who really had bullied me in my life. And he was so much bigger than them, and a known bellypuncher.

Not for nothing do people talk of verbal bullying as feeling like a punch in the stomach. The words are thrown like punches and they are aimed at your soft spot, your insides. They are meant to leave you breathless and silent and suffering. They are punches in the belly of your spirit. Verbal bullying is emotional bellybeating.