The back room of a burger joint in Greece seems an unlikely arena for hand-to-hand combat.
Yet there the warriors were, men with ham hock forearms and chalk-powdered hands clasped in a vise-like grip, facing off over platform tables. In the throes of battle, beads of sweat bubbled to the surface of their foreheads in unison. Grunting ensued.
These are Thursday nights at Bill Gray’s on Latta Road, the proving ground for the EZ Rollers Arm Wrestling Club.
Peter Brana, 33, said the evening sessions are “like therapy” for him and other “pullers,” as arm-wrestlers are called.
“You come every Thursday, you get aggression out. With someone pulling on your arm and you fighting against it, you’re getting a lot out,” he said. “Like all those emotions, everything you want to let out but you can’t, you’re letting out on the table.”
Interest in arm-wrestling was on the upswing before the pandemic, buoyed by AMC’s reality television series “Game of Arms,” a broadcast deal between ESPN and the fledgling World Armwrestling League, and tournament purses as high as $100,000.
But practitioners of the sport say its popularity has exploded since the health crisis, spurred by people — mostly men — who stumbled on online arm-wrestling videos while in isolation and began training to stave off boredom.
The EZ Rollers have been around since 2017, yet all but a handful of the nearly two dozen pullers at practice said they were introduced to the sport in the last two or three years.
One of them was Gunnar Coston, 25, a drummer in a rock band called Wicked, who goes by “Guns” around the club.
“The adrenaline is absolutely insane,” Coston said. “It’s so awesome. It’s like driving a race car.”
For a young man, the sport has the potential to reap other benefits. “You look cool in front of the girls, when they do come,” Coston added.
Which is how often?
“Not often,” he replied.
Pinpointing participation in the sport is difficult. Unlike other sports, arm-wrestling has no governing body that tracks registrants. Holding the sport together is a loose network of independent clubs, nonprofit associations, and promotion companies that host tournaments — mostly in barrooms, hotels, sports parks, and casinos.
Denise Wattles, executive director of the United States Armwrestling Association, which claims to be the largest promoter of arm-wrestling events in the world, said she has seen an uptick in attendance and interest since the pandemic.
“I do think a lot of it has to do with the videos on the internet and word-of-mouth,” she said. “And boys and men have to have something to do or they’re going to get in trouble. That’s just the way it is.”
Arm-wrestling has been around in some form for millennia. Historians of the sport trace the earliest record of a match to a painting on an ancient Egyptian tomb dating to 2000 B.C. The sport feeds something primal in its competitors.
Many pullers say the allure of arm-wrestling is in its showcase of strength and the chance it provides to engage in one-on-one combat in a controlled and collegial setting.
“It’s kind of the intensity of the UFC with the safety and the group concept of golf,” said Walter Crowe, 55, who joined the EZ Rollers two years ago and makes the weekly drive for practices from his home in Erie County.
“It’s the mano-a-mano . . . without all that risk,” he said. “You don’t have to be so limber. You don’t have to be in shape. You just have to be tough.”
The sport has its share of arm sprains and breaks, but injuries are something most pullers can’t afford to risk. The vast majority of arm-wrestlers don’t earn a dime from their avocation and balance training with day jobs.
Among the arm-wrestlers atop Puller Magazine’s North American rankings are a car dealership owner (Jerry Cadorette), a corrections officer at a maximum-security prison (Dave Chaffee), a restaurant manager (Jordan Sill), and a geologist (Geoff Hale).
Members of the EZ Rollers include a day trader, a real estate investor, and a marketing student. They range in age from their teens to their 50s.
The club’s most celebrated arm belongs to Brandon Ellsessor, a 32-year-old hulking ironworker from Wayne County. His biceps measure 20 inches, just shy of the circumference of a football. The word “Determination” is tattooed on his right forearm.
Ellsessor is internationally ranked and recently competed for the welterweight world title in the acclaimed “East vs. West” tournament in Turkey, where he lost to Davit “Monster” Samushia, from the country of Georgia.
“They paid for all my expenses, I didn’t lose any money, I got paid to compete, so it went good right off the bat,” Ellsessor said.
He recalled the largest prize he ever took home to be around $1,500. But, for him, arm-wrestling is not about the money.
“I love the fact that it is a one-on-one combat sport,” Ellsessor said. “I like combat and I like strength, and I like depending on myself and not a team.”
Not all arm-wrestlers are behemoths. Success has more to do with strategy than brawn.
There is the angle of the pull, the roll of the wrist, the position of elbows on the platform.
Levi Miller, 23, said pulling was more like chess. “You can get really competitive, but it’s also a very technical sport,” he said.
Some pullers articulate their fingers “over the top” of an opponent’s hand, a move made famous by the 1987 film of the same name in which Sylvester Stallone plays a trucker who arm-wrestles his way into a new rig and his estranged son’s heart.
Inherent in the sport is a bonding effect between teacher and student, old and young, father and son.
Miller was arm-wrestling with his father on one platform table in the room. The father-and-son combination of Jim Jackson, 51, and 13-year-old Jimmy, whom the EZ Rollers call “The Beast,” occupied another table.
Like all the warriors, they shook hands before their matches as a sign of respect, then clasped palms, braced their bodies, and pulled. As the arm-wrestlers swayed back and forth, Bill Gray’s customers sipping on sodas periodically stopped to watch the spectacle through windows.
Giovanni Leone, 22, a Rochester Institute of Technology marketing student, had just finished warming up when he took note of the spectators. He was out of breath, sweating, and rubbing his sore forearm.
“We get a lot of bystanders here and I think that’s why there’s potential in this sport,” he said. “People obviously love to watch it. So if people can kind of understand the competitive sport, maybe it can become more of a mainstream sport.”