Sorry folks, it's been a while since my last story but there's a lot going on in my life right now. Also apologies for the unseasonal title of this one, When I first started this story, many months ago now, I had high hopes for it. I’m afraid I got a bit bogged down in the film technology I’ve been dreaming up and the fight sequences lack the detail that I’d originally intended. Despite that I’ve decided to post the story as a continuity link between Terri’s fight with Judy and the events of the following year, some of which I'll be posting soon. I hope you enjoy it.
Christmas 2020 was unlike any Christmas we’d known before. The threat of Covid hung heavy in the air and, although the blonde buffoon had relaxed travel and socialising restrictions in the interests of saving the economy and maintaining his popularity, it was pretty clear there any socialising you did was done at your own risk and you were a dammed sight safer not doing it at all.
It would have been nice to party with the girls or catch up with my step sons, who I hadn’t seen in months, but in the end Erica and I decided to keep ourselves to ourselves and just invited Gabi over to stay with us for a couple of days. Which gave the girls and opportunity to treat me to a truly German Christmas.
A week or so before the big day we all got emails from Paige inviting us to a special online gathering on Christmas afternoon. The invitation read:
“Merry Christmas ladies I have something special to show you all I hope you’ll be able to join me virtually for a couple of hours on Christmas Day afternoon from 2pm, love Paige”
At 2 o’clock the three of us gathered round the TV screen and Erica logged in to the meeting link that Paige sent us. For the first time we were able to view the other guests who were also attending Paige’s little soirée. As well as Paige, who was with her mother and Jill, we also saw Cassy, Clare and Jay, Christine with Francesca at their villa in Andalucía and, somewhat to my surprise, Sian and Shannon in their Pennine farmhouse. Later we were also joined by Jane and Jasmine, Leah (from her new home in South Africa) and Gilly, who I hadn’t seen in years.
For a while there was a chance for general chitchat, or at least as good as it gets with these virtual environments, but then Paige got serious and called the gathering to order. The common thread between us was that, with the exception of the host and her ‘family’, everyone had been active at CLAWS in the late 1980s. There was a reason for this, as Paige explained:
“Ladies I’ve been busy playing around with old film again and I’d like to share a preview of what I’ve done with you all this afternoon. You’ve all seen what I did with the footage we got from Wolfgang of Gabi, Lena and others in action back in the late 70s. I’ve now applied the same technology to some of the earliest CLAWS’ films from the 1980s.
It was a bit trickier than the Munich films as you used a variety camera techniques that were a lot more complex than Wolfgang’s simple setup. A lot of these films were made using freehand cameras rather than ones fixed on tripods or fixed cameras that panned, or even a mix of both.
It’s taken me a while but I’d like to show you some things which I think will stir up memories for you all. I have four fights to show you and something special to finish with.
This first match was filmed using two cameras on tripods, one above a neutral corner and one mid-way between the blue corner and the other neutral corner. Unlike Wolfgang’s films, both cameras had operators and were able to pan and zoom.”
With that she switched us from the gallery view to the pre-prepared video link and a film began to stream across the screen. It began with the familiar Wild Cat Productions logo and a caption saying:
“The following films have been digitally recreated and enhanced from original films made in the 1980s.”
Then, much to my surprise, a second caption:
“Ellen vs. Clare – title fight, October 1988”
The titles finished rolling and there I was in all my glory, wonderfully restored to high definition by Paige’s clever software, stood in the ring in the blue corner. God I wish I still had that figure, my blonde hair was shoulder length hair and straighter than I remembered it and I was wearing nothing but a smile and some calf length leather boots. Booties! I’d forgotten the booties. We all used to wear them back then. I think Sian’s aunt made them for us if I remember correctly.
The camera panned across to the red corner and there was Clare, similarly attired (if 'attired' is the right way to describe someone wearing nothing but boots), her long straight blonde hair loose and stretching almost down her bum. Her boobs were bigger than mine but she stood a few inches shorter than me. In the centre of the ring stood Jay, clad in her referee’s outfit of black knickers and a black and white striped polo shirt. She beckoned us to the centre of the ring and introduced us to the camera and then, with no more ceremony, the bell rang and we began fighting.
I watched enthralled as we struggled for supremacy. The video is crystal clear and you can see every feature and blemish on our naked bodies. This is old school CLAWS, the best of five falls fought over eight 3-minute rounds with one-minute breaks in between. There’s nothing sexual about this fight (other than the obvious fact that we were both butt naked and looking hot), Clare and I were always very evenly matched and serious about our wrestling. This was our second encounter and I was at my peak. I was 26 years old and defending the title. We had met earlier in the year when I’d defeated her by three falls to one. This match will be closer.
I took the first fall with a pin in the second round but she came back strongly with a pin in the third round and a Boston crab submission in the fourth. I equalized in the sixth with a grapevine pin but it was only in the final minute of the eighth and final round that I finally managed to wrap things up following a couple of well executed clotheslines that left Clare rather dazed. She got groggily to her feet as the count reaches nine and I closed in on her. I grabbed her by the neck and crotch and hoisted her into the air before turning her head down and body slamming her to the canvas. Dropping to my knees I pinned her shoulders and planted my derriere firmly in her face as Jay counted the pin.
The final bell sounded. I stood up and helped Clare to her feet. We hugged and Jay announced the result, a victory for yours truly by three falls to two.
Then the spell was broken as Paige stopped the video and switched back to gallery view and everyone applauded.
“What do you think?” Paige asked.
“Excellent,” said Clare, “the only thing that would make it better is if I’d have won.”
“Hey,” I said, “I think it’s fine the way it is.”
For the next few minutes everyone congratulated Paige on her work (and Clare and me on an excellent fight) and discussed the highlights. I remembered the fight like it was yesterday. I also remember watching the video once and being disappointed that it didn’t really capture the essence of the fight. This version did and I was keen to learn how Paige had done it. Paige then took a moment to explain her work on this video.
“One of the problems of older cameras is colour consistency. Much of the material we got from Wolfgang is on 16mm cine film and the colour is all over the place. I’ve already developed the software to compensate for that and the video tape handycams that CLAWS used are more consistent anyway. The main difference with this film is that while all Wolfgang’s films were made with two cameras mounted at the same height and at right angles to each other, this film was made with one camera on a tripod about a neutral corner and the other one lower down on the other side of the ring. Add to that the panning and zooming and it gets a lot more complex. I could have just modified the software to compensate for that but I figured there would be other combinations so I rewrote the program so that it could cope with any combination of camera positions. That made this next one easier as well…”
With that she switched back to the video stream and another film. The second match was also familiar to me, because I had filmed it. It took place between Jane and Gilly at the end of 1987 and marked Jane’s return to action after the injury that had led to me joining the club six months earlier.
The thing I remembered most about it was how hard it was to operate the camera while keeping out of the way of both the fighters and the referee.
Paige explained the setup:
“Here we have one static camera on a tripod and a hand-held camera in the ring. I must say congratulations to Ellen here for some excellent camera work.”
Poor Gilly, in only her third fight, was completely outclassed by her veteran opponent. Jane may only have been a couple of years older than Gilly but she’d been with the club for almost 10 years and had some 47 bouts under her belt. It was all credit to the strawberry blonde that she managed to last five round before eventually losing by three falls to nil. Jane for her part was ecstatic at her victory. She had genuinely thought her fighting days were over so coming back so convincingly was a huge boost.
Sadly, it was a false dawn for Jane, two more matches followed, a hard battle against Clare which aggravated her injury, and a rematch with Gilly which saw her submit the match after one fall. It would be another year before she got back into the ring and began her inexorable climb up the rankings until she took the title from me and left me sexually humiliated before leaving for the NBFC.
This film had the same video quality as the previous one but every so often as the picture panned around it would jump slightly. It was hardly noticeable but Paige had an explanation.
“The first job here was to work out where the cameras were relative to each other. To do that I wrote a programme that looked at the position of a fixed point that was almost always in shot. Fortunately for me the ring has a logo in the middle of the canvas. Knowing where that was meant I could work out where Ellen was at all times. Then all I had to do was use that data to update the main program’s position information. The problem is that Ellen’s camera doesn’t always see the logo so there’s a lot of extrapolation going on, which is why it gets a bit jumpy and jittery at some points.”
The third match was an earlier affair, from late 1986, and showed Cassy successfully defending her title against Sian. Although this was still a tough fight, it was far more sensual that the previous two. Sian took the first fall with a cross press in the second round. Cassy responded by gently stimulating her more sexually charged opponent at every opportunity. Sian did her best to fight her urges but Cassy was well versed in arousal techniques. A face sit pin levelled the scores in round three, a powerful head scissors put the champion ahead in the fourth and fight ended in the fifth with Jay counting a pin while Sian’s face was buried deep in Cassy’s pubes.
While the image enhancement in this film was as good as the earlier two, far more of it was from a single camera rather that a blend of both or panning between the two. I’d never seen the original video release but I had no doubt that Paige’s version would have used the best camera throughout. Once again Paige explained the camera work:
“For this match two hand held cameras are used, with Jane filming from outside the ring and Leah in with the action. Essentially the cameras are two moving targets and working out their relative positions in difficult. The software knows where the cameras can’t be and calculates their relative positions based on their most likely physical positions. That takes a ton of computing power. Unfortunately, it gets it wrong as often as it gets it right so we have to watch each panned and merged shot to check if it makes sense visually. If it doesn’t, as you’ve seen, we switch to a single camera view.
There are a lot of people around the world trying to crack this problem and a lot of money to be made when they do. I’m closer than most but I’m still a long way off. If I succeed, you can all come and live on my private island with me.”
She grinned and everyone laughed but I had no doubt that Paige had set herself a personal goal and, if anyone could do it, she would. The final fight was the one that ultimately led Sian to leave the club. Paige explained:
“This match has only one tape. A hand-held camera filming inside the ring. If there was a second reel it’s gone missing. Perhaps Sian can tell us?”
“If it’s the one I’m thinking of, no, there was no second camera.”
“I thought not. All I could really do here is enhance the images of what was already a pretty raunchy encounter. I hope you enjoy it.”
The fight was a title match between Leah and Christine which ended in a knockout when Christine’s constant attentions forced Leah to orgasm. It was a defining moment for the pair, just months before, when she had been training me, Leah had confided to me that she thought Christine was discovering her gay side. The erotic nature of this fight between the openly gay Leah and the secret lesbian Christine confirmed it and also marked the start of their 12-year lesbian partnership which ended when Leah caught Christine ‘in flagrante’ with her second, Sonia, following her loss to Emma in a boxing match.
The fight started seriously enough with the girls throwing each other around the ring and applying various holds. But once Leah trapped Christine in a head scissors it rapidly degenerated into a grope fest. Over four three-minute rounds the two women did their utmost to sexually arouse their opponent. No attempts were made at submissions or pins. In the event that one or other woman did receive a count from the ref, they quickly broke the hold so that they could continue fondling and groping each other. Fingers and tongues were deployed on all sensitive areas. By the end of the fifth round both girls were in a state of high arousal and lay on the canvas rather than returning to their corners. In the sixth round Christine took control and the fight ended with Leah on all fours and Christine ramming three fingers into her pussy repeatedly until the aerobics teacher screamed out her orgasm and collapsed face first to the mat to be counted out.
Sian’s camera work was close up and graphic, showing the redhead fisting the brunette and love juices pouring from Leah’s pussy as she was counted out. Even unenhanced it was easy to see why the US censors had taken a dim view of it. With Paige’s fairy dust added to was quite something to behold. Every bead of sweat on the fighters’ bodies was crystal clear. Sian stayed close to the action throughout the fight and during the breaks ran the camera over every inch of the combatants’ bodies.
When the film ended Paige switched back to gallery view revealing some rather pre-occupied and dishevelled observers who had clearly been getting excited by the footage. A breathless Jay, who I assume had been busy fingering herself (and indeed had I and my two companions) said:
“Sian, I forgive you. I’ve never watched the film myself; I was just annoyed that you got us banned from the US, but that was spectacular.”
“Well,” said Paige, “I can see you all enjoyed that. Before you go, I have one final treat for you. This is something I’ve put together for the person who has supported me in all I’ve done. Who has kept faith in me throughout, who has paid my college fees and bankrolled my start up, “Pandora Image Processing”. My surrogate aunt – Gabi Marshall.”
We all applauded and Paige continued:
“The images you are about to see were all recorded at Marshall’s in the 1990s when we had two manually operated cameras on tripods. Aunt Gabi, this one’s for you. Ladies, I give you ‘Gabi Marshall – the League Years.’”
What followed was a 30-minute montage of beautifully reprocessed highlights from Gabi’s time fighting in the wrestling and boxing leagues at CLAWS. Although she was only active for five years, Gabi fought almost 60 fights and the film showed highlights and lowlights. Gabi being knocked out by Jenny. Gabi taking the wrestling title from Jay. Gabi knocking out Suzi. Gabi losing the boxing title to Leah and taking the wrestling title from Maggie. Gabi beating me hollow in my last league wrestling match. Gabi being knocked out and losing her title in the 10th round of her last league wrestling match against Christine. And finally, Gabi knocking out Suzi to retain her boxing title – the first CLAWS boxer to retire undefeated.
After the film finished there was more applause and praise for Paige from the women who had seen their finest hour brought to life by the video wizard. Gabi, in particular, was vocal in her praise and gratitude to Paige. For the previous half hour, she had sat enthralled, one hand down the front of her jeans, alternately whooping with joy and grimacing at the remembered pain of encounters from almost 30 years before.
Finally, after two and a half hours, Paige brought the session to a close:
“Ladies, thank you for indulging me for the last couple of hours. I’ll leave you now to get on with your celebrations. Have a wonderful Christmas and let’s hope we can have a great New Year. Here’s to 2021, it can’t be any worse than 2020.”
If only she’d known…
