- Location
- West Bountiful, UT
So, when I was a little kid, 12-13 years old. My best friend that lived across the street, Casey - big, long, raw boned farm kid, ape length arms, ham sized fists, farm work hard muscle at a young age, good Golden Gloves boxer out of the Montoya's gym on the West Side.
Me and Casey were into beating each other up by any means possible. We were best friends, but he was a bully and had some height and quite a bit of reach on me and wasn't above flaunting his boxing skills on me. He is a leftie, and I ended up fighting southpaw as a habit, myself, self defense against Casey, easy jab with my strong hand against others. He could whip me at will with the gloves on though - his damn reach. But If I could get him on the ground, he was gonna say Affleck Is Royalty before I let him get up. We never really hurt each other, very bad, but we went at it a lot just for fun, mostly with boxing gloves on, until we got a little older and stronger and it just wasn't cool to hit each other. Then we got more into wrestling, which, unlike fisticuffs where Casey could always dominate me, I always held an edge.
Casey had a cousin, who was a professional wrestler. Lonnie Mayne, who went by Moon Dog Mayne on the circuit. Lonnie was 20 years older than us and we both thought of him as an uncle, not a cousin. We didn't ever really get to spend a lot of time with Lonnie, but when we did, Lonnie was always egging us on to pummel each other and roaring with laughter as we boxed and wrestled each other. And he taught us some stuff. Arm bar. Chicken wing. Choke holds. Liverpool kiss. Instep stomp. Break any finger you can get ahold of, never pass up an open nut shot and stiff thumb to the Adams apple type stuff. And he showed us the Sleeper. The real one, not the professional wrestling one. The one where you lock your forearms across a guys temples. The one that makes somebodies head look like a zit ready to pop while they lose consciousness and pee themselves. I never actually performed The Sleeper on anyone, I wasn't that mean. Casey, though...
Few years later, after Lonnie had passed, Casey made a small career out of terrorizing the vatos at West High with The Sleeper. He would hide in the bushes on the south end and wait for them to come out to smoke cigarettes and sell joints between classes and jump out and grab one and throw The Sleeper on him. Laughing his ass off while the poor vato lost consciousness and bladder control. They would scatter like quail if they saw him coming.
But, so, the point. I kinda knew Moon Dog Mayne when I was a kid and he taught me some stuff that came in very useful in my teens and early twenties.
Last month, on The Ghost Town Tour, in the middle of absolute nowhere and nothing Nevada, I found this piece of newspaper in a long abandoned miners shack.
An ad for a Moon Dog main event at the Reno Fairgrounds in June of 1974. That was right in the middle of the time I knew him. He died in 1978.
Just struck me again, what a small world it really is. To find a newspaper clipping of Lonnie in a miner shack in Nevada, 45 years later.
- DAA
Me and Casey were into beating each other up by any means possible. We were best friends, but he was a bully and had some height and quite a bit of reach on me and wasn't above flaunting his boxing skills on me. He is a leftie, and I ended up fighting southpaw as a habit, myself, self defense against Casey, easy jab with my strong hand against others. He could whip me at will with the gloves on though - his damn reach. But If I could get him on the ground, he was gonna say Affleck Is Royalty before I let him get up. We never really hurt each other, very bad, but we went at it a lot just for fun, mostly with boxing gloves on, until we got a little older and stronger and it just wasn't cool to hit each other. Then we got more into wrestling, which, unlike fisticuffs where Casey could always dominate me, I always held an edge.
Casey had a cousin, who was a professional wrestler. Lonnie Mayne, who went by Moon Dog Mayne on the circuit. Lonnie was 20 years older than us and we both thought of him as an uncle, not a cousin. We didn't ever really get to spend a lot of time with Lonnie, but when we did, Lonnie was always egging us on to pummel each other and roaring with laughter as we boxed and wrestled each other. And he taught us some stuff. Arm bar. Chicken wing. Choke holds. Liverpool kiss. Instep stomp. Break any finger you can get ahold of, never pass up an open nut shot and stiff thumb to the Adams apple type stuff. And he showed us the Sleeper. The real one, not the professional wrestling one. The one where you lock your forearms across a guys temples. The one that makes somebodies head look like a zit ready to pop while they lose consciousness and pee themselves. I never actually performed The Sleeper on anyone, I wasn't that mean. Casey, though...
Few years later, after Lonnie had passed, Casey made a small career out of terrorizing the vatos at West High with The Sleeper. He would hide in the bushes on the south end and wait for them to come out to smoke cigarettes and sell joints between classes and jump out and grab one and throw The Sleeper on him. Laughing his ass off while the poor vato lost consciousness and bladder control. They would scatter like quail if they saw him coming.
But, so, the point. I kinda knew Moon Dog Mayne when I was a kid and he taught me some stuff that came in very useful in my teens and early twenties.
Last month, on The Ghost Town Tour, in the middle of absolute nowhere and nothing Nevada, I found this piece of newspaper in a long abandoned miners shack.
An ad for a Moon Dog main event at the Reno Fairgrounds in June of 1974. That was right in the middle of the time I knew him. He died in 1978.
Just struck me again, what a small world it really is. To find a newspaper clipping of Lonnie in a miner shack in Nevada, 45 years later.
- DAA
