Let’s get one thing straight: this isn’t about sex work, unless you count the blood, sweat, and tooth fragments exchanged on dirty mats and in piss-reeking locker rooms as transactional. This is about catch wrestling. The unglamorous, bone-deep legacy of the hookers, the real ones. The ones who didn’t work for crowds but for dominance. No showmanship. No high spots. Just the grind.

In the old carnie slang, a hooker was a legit shooter, someone who could end your night early, quietly, and painfully. The term hook refers to a submission: joint locks, neck cranks, ligaments screaming while your opponent makes sounds like a deflating tire. No tap-outs. No second chances. You got caught, and if they liked you, they let go. If they didn’t, you didn’t walk right for a while.

That’s the Hooker part.

The Hacksaw? That’s mine. That’s the name I give to a particularly mean cross face. Not that soft smother-and-smudge you see in light rolling. I’m talking about an active cross face. One you earn by digging your knuckles into that little pocket between jaw and cheekbone, like you’re hunting for the person they were before puberty, and then sawing your forearm across their face like you’re trying to take it home with you.

The Hacksaw isn’t a submission. It’s a statement. It says, “You’re not special. You don’t deserve comfort. And I’m not here to make friends.” It’s one of those dirty tactics that sits in the gray zone—half control, half punishment, all message. A throwback to the days when wrestling wasn’t about belts, but about control, cruelty, and consequence.

Now, why use it?

Because pain is a motivator. When you’re rolling with someone who thinks they’re tough, or worse, someone who is tough. You need more than clean technique. You need vehemence. You need artifice. You need a weaponized version of ugly. And few things are uglier than a cross face turned into a belt sander.

It’s functional too. That kind of grinding pressure over the sinus cavity, orbital bone, or jawline? It disrupts breathing. It inflames the eyes. It redirects attention. You want a limb, you want a choke, sometimes you’ve got to make them give it to you by making the alternative feel like hell.

Catch wrestling was never polite. It was birthed in carnivals, honed in bars, and kept alive in whispers. We carry that forward not by sanitizing it but by embracing its brutality. There’s value in pressure. There’s power in pain. And there’s honesty in making someone regret ever rolling with you.

This ain’t for everyone.

But if you’ve ever found joy in the way someone flinches when your forearm crosses their face…
If you know what it means to break someone’s posture with nothing but pressure and spite…
If you see submission as extraction rather than negotiation…

Then welcome to the program.

You’re not just a grappler.
You’re a Hooker with a Hacksaw.