Leaderboard

Y'all were talking about bullies a couple pages back... I got it a good bit in 4th-6th grade. I was short and chubby and kind of a goober. In 7th grade, for whatever reason, my brand took off. A lot of kids just started thinking my nonsense was funny, for whatever reason. Erin Burney decided she liked me and she was a trendsetter, so it was dope. I was still a fringer who got shoved into some lockers, but it was better. In 8th grade, however, my life flipped turned upside down. From the end of football season to the spring, I grew almost a foot. It was almost visible. My joints hurt and my mom wouldn't but me long pants. But there was one upside; I was now a monster. Andrew's Beatdown Revenge Tour was in full effect. Lockers were crammed full of bullies, trash cans were emptied on bullies, the works. One kid, though, smartened up. David Cates. One day he bought me a sundae cone and said he was sorry. He said we should hang out. Be buddies. Our moms both taught at the neighboring high school so there was adequate backstory. The rest of the year I sauntered behind him like Big Daddy Cool behind HBK. We even did the thing where I raised my hand over my head and he jumped to high five it. It was exactly as lame as it sounds. But 13 year old wrestling nerd me loved getting to be real life Diesel for a year or so.

I have never used a steroid in my life, but have ridiculous traps and have had them my entire life. I remember when I was a kid I was at the pool and my cousin pointed at me and said, you look like a ninja turtle, which at the time i thought was a huge compliment. Now it's just extremely difficult to buy dress shirts that fit both my 18.5 in neck and my short little arms. I'm 5'7" and I'm in my best shape around 190 lbs. Fire hydrants have pictures of me in their walls like body builders have posters of Schwarzenegger.

"To: [email protected] Subject: Bum rushing your mother"

I wear an AEW backpack to work every weekend so I'm that kind of nerd that's out and open about what I like (now). I fully admit that before AEW came around, I definitely hid it (and wasn't as invested either). @Matt D will be happy to hear, though, that I've had a Seth Rollins shirt for a few years now and I always wear it out in public. ? Although, since about 2016, and especially since January 6th... well, the "Redesign Rebuild Reclaim" catchphrase, along with what looks like a crosshair type logo... big oof.

My advice is embrace your DVDVR message board community and sign up for Secret Santo and make some pals here. But I'm pretty biased on multiple levels.

Jumping on the name train here I was NickMD until Tromatagon thought I was a legit doctor. So to help avoid confusion I changed it to what I have now. Niko's my name in Greek and...well...I used to live in Baltimore. I was considering changing it but I don't think NikoForestHill has the same ring to it so this it is. As for people that know me I'm lucky in that all my friends like wrestling in some way. Even the non-fans in the past found something that they liked (one guy really loved Regal's heel work in WWE and some of Vince's schtick) Nowadays they all stopped with WWE and are all AEW fans to various degrees. Which is great as it makes the shows a great reason to have people over and drink some oat sodas. As for my parents they loved watching Bruno back then though they tried to get me out of wrestling in middle school. It wasn't until years later when they realized I'm a functioning adult who kind of has a clue so they're cool with it now. And it also helped that I adore Bruno so when he got inducted it was really cool to watch his induction with them.

My namesake. Favorite theme/wrestler at the time of joining the board

When you were asked to turn the channel to RAW, did you reply "But what about Raven?" Because if you didn't, you should have.

My best friend is about as big of a wrestling fan who exists... except he's pretty much only interested in WWE. He watches every show, no matter what bullshit they put on, and is perfectly content with it. I've been trying to expand his wrestling horizons since the late 90s, and he legitimately prefers WWE to pretty much everything else. I haven't been able to sit through an entire episode of RAW that I want in the crowd for since about 2005. It's the exact opposite of what I want from wrestling about 75% of the time. He is 95% of wrestling fans... we are the weirdos. My advice is to embrace your own quirks, because if you're waiting for the 95% to appreciate what you see, you'll be waiting forever.

I took that Thanos graffiti differently. They'd just shown during the play how the battle of New York had traumatized Clint. Then, he lost his best friend and his family (for a while) and his humanity because of Thanos' snap. To see that written there after he'd sacrificed so much to defeat Thanos must've been really painful.

I'm gonna reply to two topics here... First, my name. I've had the nickname "Log" since my sophomore year of high school. I walk into math class one day, and this dude yells out "Matt (my name) The Log!" I was like, what? He says he was looking at his calculator, saw the Log button and thought it'd be a funny nickname. He decided that the next person who walked in the room was getting it. I can't believe how long it stuck. Pretty much anyone that knows me knows I love pro wrestling. Honestly, I've never had anyone be a dick about it. I got into it around Hulkamania, so it was "in". I kind of fell out in the early-mid 90's and came back in during the Attitude era when it was "in" again. Since then, I've been old enough to not give a shit. A few years ago, I worked at a tv station where we had like 7-8 legitimately hardcore wrestling fans. A couple of them even worked as commentators on the side. In addition to them, we had quite a few who had been fans at some point and had a fondness for it. We even gained a couple fans when some on-air people did some "celebrity" matches for OVW and a huge group of us went to the shows. Other than college (late 90's) when WWF was huge, that's the most social my wrestling fandom has been.

Very briefly: 20+ odd years ago I chose to go with my first name/last initial probably because I was a young, slightly overwhelmed lurker for the most part and it felt like it gave me a little more credibility than having a gimmick name to hide behind. The big rule of wrestling around here is that it doesn't impact the rest of my life. The kids never take second place to it, for instance. I've kind of kept them out of it since it's brought as much heartache as joy. If they find their own way into it, I'll support them and provide them things, but it's a hobby I tend to have to myself.

LOL.

@BobbyWhioux.

We definitely used traffic cones as weapons in my backyard because they were easy to steal. They're shit weapons but the go-to spot was to pretend to sodomize someone with them. Best backyard weapon was a wet floor sign. Easy to walk out of McDonald's with one, flimsy and plastic so they don't hurt when you crack a dude in the head, but the two sides clack together and it sounds like a fucking kendo stick.

Don't even use the tweet, just smack them.

Re: bullies I got it through 7th grade pretty good. Then between 7th and 8th grade I grew 6 inches and gained 40 pounds and it all of a sudden stopped for some odd reason lol.

I started college in '98, so you'd THINK my wrestling fandom would have been a plus then. But I was the guy refusing to flip to Austin on Raw because Perry Saturn was wrestling on Nitro. It wasn't a plus.

The top of those holiday popcorn tins. Swing as hard as you want. Cracks LOUD, sounds good on your camcorder.

Oh man, such a collossally dickish move. Big 10 is awesome.

"It appears that Butch Reed Oklahoma State has put so much pressure on the Junkyard Dog Lincoln Riley that he decided to leave the Mid-South area Oklahoma job so he could face weaker competition" - Bill Watts

No matter how crappy your team’s weekend was, at least you’re not an Oklahoma fan.

I said elsewhere that every time some mouth breather says "Paying college kids a small stipend violates everything good about collegiate athletics!", I'm going to smack them with this tweet.

I can't speak for anyone else, and in the interest of not dumping all my personal stuff here, a couple quick, incomplete reasons: 1) Being on the spectrum, I'm not thrilled by the idea of confrontation in general. 2) Trying to make a difference in an academic non-profit, where some people's image of me can matter in how/if they want me representing them.

I am assuming Jerry Dipoto traded them

FTFY

I sympathize with this. I did finally get a promotion I've been trying to get for years at work so maybe I might be a little more lax about it, but I leave most of my hobbies at the door (virtual or otherwise) when I step in. If I ever made it to an Assistant Director of a Department level, I might take it on as an affectation and have a bunch of lucha masks displayed on shelves or something, like the one we had who had framed Tintin posters around his office, but I'm probably not reaching that level. Oh yeah, no watching wrestling with the kids but they're happy to try to climb all over me and get power bombed lightly onto the couch or what not. Protips: Torture Rack always works. Almost everything can be done pretty safely, but never ever try for an Exploder; kids bounce.

My kids have shown little interest in watching wrestling, but they love playing it. In our case that’s me jobbing in a handicap match where I get no offense and I do Ray Stevens bumps around our living room in a manner my wife wouldn’t approve of if she were home.

Also, you know, young kids can't always discriminate between fantasy violence and real violence. We know that wrestling exists in a special world where punching someone or tearing their shoulder out of socket DOES solve all problems, but the real world could do with a little less of that.

I'm so glad you wrote this. I have a brother who's many years younger than me, and I very purposely avoided introducing this to him for the same reason, and I wasn't sure if that was the right thing. Things like DSotR and AEW's general vibe of "good will" have changed my stance on it somewhat, as people actively seek to avoid repeating the same mistakes. If he came to me now as an older kid I'd probably show him the good stuff, but he was born pretty shortly after the Benoit tragedy, so at the time it made me think about getting the news about Pillman, Spicoli, Owen etc. as a kid.

One of my social circles is made up of academics and academic-adjacents. They're confused enough by my comic fandom, so not a single word about wrestling is breathed around them. EDIT: I did "confide" in one guy, who took it in stride, but was completely baffled when I took him to an EVOLVE show. ? Like, he was so confused, I might as well have shown him ancient South Pacific tribal rituals.

4/16/90: Fuchi/Kobashi vs Tito Santana/Jimmy Snuka: Kobashi got to be cool coming out to Fuchi's Danger Zone. Good for him. Snuka was barely in this one except for to have a weird leapfrog that actually served as a cut off on Fuchi. Santana more or less worked heel. Let me put it this way. It was the second most heelish performance I've seen in his career (both in Japan). Arn Anderson talks, erroneously, about how he'd be a bad babyface because he doesn't have babyface "skills." By skills, he mainly means dropkicks and flying headscissors and stuff off the top. Tito didn't have heel skills, being cutoffs and clubbering and raking a guy's eyes over the ropes and eyepokes and who knows what else, so even though he showed attitude and aggression, he was still hitting his dropkicks. Kobashi had a nice transition where he flew in with a springboard splash. Fuchi got pretty chippy at times. Overall though, this was more of a miscasting than anything else. 4/16/90: Kabuki vs Greg Valentine: Valentine was full Elvis here and it was just weird. I was dreading a Kabuki night off and hoping for Valentine/Garvin level stuff and it fell somewhere in the middle. Both guys were happy to lay it in but Valentine kept going back to the goofy pose/dance thing. You'd think he'd feel freed by the locale but maybe he was instructed that the crowd wanted to see the full WWF nonsense production, and I suppose it protected him on the finish since he hit the pose something like three times before getting rolled up. There was a good match in here with Valentine going hard onto the leg, but we didn't get it, just the ghost of its potential. EDIT: I just realized I have some matches from 3-31 to check out so I'm not quite on the final stretch yet.

I really like all four versions of the IWGP Heavyweight Championship. V4 is the best closely followed by the V3 then V2 and V1. Over time the latter two have grown on me.

I am proud of being a pro wrestling fan. I wear pro wrestling shirts, hoodies, hats and caps, warm-up jackets, even my gym shorts have the lion mark logo on them. I doubt there is anyone who knows me well that doesn't know that I love pro wrestling. Maybe it helps that I live in Japan... but I was the same way in Canada. Some people don't get it, but almost everyone has always respected that it's one of my passions. I can't imagine feeling ashamed of being a fan of pro wrestling, or trying to hide it. In fact, I have made a lot of real-life friends based at least in part on a mutual love of pro wrestling. I guess I was lucky to grow up where I did. And have continued to be lucky everywhere I've been to since then (i am definitely very lucky with people) ...or maybe people just sense that there's no point in trying to make fun of something that I'm obviously proud of?

Not sure why I chuckled so much at the silly little "I Love Lucy" gag on Legends this past week.

I was in High School 91-97 everyone knew me as the “wrestling dork”. When everything started kicking off again in 96-97 everyone wanted to talk to me about it. To this day most of my friends call me “the wrestling guy”. I’m 41 for freaks sake.

https://www.fightful.com/wrestling/bryan-danielson-says-mjf-calls-himself-sprawl-god-and-claims-nobody-can-double-leg-him?utm_source=TW-Fightful&utm_medium=Fightful Wrestling News&utm_campaign=dlvr.it

My name is Sam. At some point during high school school people started calling me Sammo because I'm Asian and tall and fat they'd go "Oh Sam like Sammo Hung" This was around the time Martial Law was airing on TV. Maybe as a knock? I dunno. Sammo Hung rules though so I kept the nickname.

PWG Giant Sized Annual #4 7/29/2007 and they were on opposite teams in the ROH vs. CZW Cage of Death, but I don't remember if they mixed it up before Dragon abandoned Team ROH

There's a Red Rooster cockfight joke to be made, but I can't find the right wording at the momemt.

Holy shit is that a like 12 year old Giancarlo Esposito right there?

Also, "Kung Fu Karate" basically says, "tell me this poster was written by a white person without telling me it was written by a white person."

New Way of the Blade pod with DUSTIN RHODES~! We talk the Double or Nothing match with his brother, emotion in wrestling, his first bloody match and much more https://redcircle.com/shows/be34c05b-8483-4797-af55-5ec4bd254611/episodes/b099927f-2adf-418f-a892-963213e276e0