Mar 15, 2021 4:54:06 GMT @admin said:

Mar 15, 2021 4:23:14 GMT Big Pete said:

So after WCW finished up I needed some new Pro Wrestling websites and naturally ProWrestling.com was one of the first ports of call. I used to visit the main site regularly and read all the editorials but it was the RFI Fantasy Show that was the big draw for me. I'm not sure how familiar you guys are with it but it was WCW vs. WWF vs. ECW if it was booked in 2002 and they were constantly hot-shotting everything to out-do each other. I remember ECW had an Eric Bischoff called Hydra made up largely of WWF and WCW heels terrorising the likes of Christopher Daniels and all the big name indie talent. Also the WWF writer had a massive hard on for The Patriot and was pushed to the moon for reasons. Regardless it was a fun read that kept me coming back.

I think I read this! Can't recall many details but The Patriot rings a vague bell because I thought he was a completely made up character at the time. Who knows why this has stuck in my brain, but the only other thing I can remember is that Big Show was in the main event scene and had War Pigs by Black Sabbath as his entrance music?

That sounds about right, I just remember they pushed Edge to the moon and had him going over Steve Austin, Goldberg and Kurt Angle which made me a devout RFI ECW fan from that point forward. :lol:

That was also my introduction to a lot of the emerging OVW talent like Leviathan and The Prototype, except I also thought they were completely made up characters.

Mar 15, 2021 4:56:58 GMT Big Pete said:

I also remember the Rosa raid of WoW and it was about as successful as Retribution. :lol: hr and LS went all Bruiser Brody and completely no sold that nonsense. I always liked WoW, I avoided it for awhile thinking it'd be this creepy board filled with pervs but the match analysis was actually shockingly good considering what they had to work with. Essentially went in expecting dirty lesbian porn wrestling write-ups, came away with a new found appreciation for Pro Wrestling.

That was always the point of the board - there were posters like Jazzy and Stapler who campaigned for somewhere to talk about women's wrestling seriously when WWE rebooted the division in 01/02 as there was basically nowhere on the internet at that time you could do so amongst all the T&A talk. I don't remember much about them personally but there was a lot of really great stuff posted in WoW over the years which doesn't get as much nostalgic love as the History forum, for instance, because there's next to no one from that time left now. Amongst some of the cattiness we ran some amazing debate tournaments, we were really doing what Diva-Dirt ended up getting credit for doing in front of a bigger audience well before they were.

Mar 15, 2021 4:56:58 GMT Big Pete said:

What was the deal with merle? I vaguely remember him but I can't remember why he rubbed people up the wrong way...was he a crotchety old guy like or something else?

I always liked Merle, I knew him when he was Bo, he used to have a Dukes of Hazzard avatar.  He was hilarious in OT, by then I wasn't posting at all the wrestling forums so I don't know much about his wrestling posts.  I do know that he loved to be controversial, he had some real different opinions and he wasn't afraid to put them out there, which usually led to him being banned.  I don't know how many times he was banned.

iron maiden and I actually met him, I think it was Wrestlemania 25 in Houston?  I am pretty sure it was there.  He was such good company, just the best guy to hang out with and we had a good time with him.  He had THE best Macho Man impersonation, and he was hilarious.  It's sad that he's disappeared off the boards but I think he had a pretty full life away from the boards too.

Mar 15, 2021 10:11:13 GMT Rogue said:

Mar 15, 2021 4:56:58 GMT Big Pete said:

What was the deal with merle? I vaguely remember him but I can't remember why he rubbed people up the wrong way...was he a crotchety old guy like or something else?

I always liked Merle, I knew him when he was Bo, he used to have a Dukes of Hazzard avatar.  He was hilarious in OT, by then I wasn't posting at all the wrestling forums so I don't know much about his wrestling posts.  I do know that he loved to be controversial, he had some real different opinions and he wasn't afraid to put them out there, which usually led to him being banned.  I don't know how many times he was banned.

iron maiden and I actually met him, I think it was Wrestlemania 25 in Houston?  I am pretty sure it was there.  He was such good company, just the best guy to hang out with and we had a good time with him.  He had THE best Macho Man impersonation, and he was hilarious.  It's sad that he's disappeared off the boards but I think he had a pretty full life away from the boards too.

Man did we have fun with him.  'I've got the box boys'.  He made us laugh until we were crying.  :lol:  Great guy.  But yeah rubbed people the wrong way on the boards.  

Mar 15, 2021 17:09:45 GMT iron maiden said:

Mar 15, 2021 10:11:13 GMT Rogue said:

I always liked Merle, I knew him when he was Bo, he used to have a Dukes of Hazzard avatar.  He was hilarious in OT, by then I wasn't posting at all the wrestling forums so I don't know much about his wrestling posts.  I do know that he loved to be controversial, he had some real different opinions and he wasn't afraid to put them out there, which usually led to him being banned.  I don't know how many times he was banned.

iron maiden and I actually met him, I think it was Wrestlemania 25 in Houston?  I am pretty sure it was there.  He was such good company, just the best guy to hang out with and we had a good time with him.  He had THE best Macho Man impersonation, and he was hilarious.  It's sad that he's disappeared off the boards but I think he had a pretty full life away from the boards too.

Man did we have fun with him.  'I've got the box boys'.  He made us laugh until we were crying.   Great guy.  But yeah rubbed people the wrong way on the boards.  

Being a racist hillbilly tends to have that effect on people. 

I don't know exactly when I found PW but it would have been in the early 2000's. I was in high school and a friend of mine showed me the website when I was at his house one day. Me and him were the only people that talked wrestling in our friend group and he was always up to date on news and rumours so I asked him how he knew all this stuff.

I found the boards myself when clicking around at home one day. I think I posted something in the wrestling forum about storyline ideas and whoever was mod at the time kicked it to Fan Fic. From then on I was hooked.

Signed up as Rolling Thunder and had an RVD avatar, which was the style at the time.

What's funny is I didn't get that vibe from him in person at all. I live in Berta. I know all about racist hillbillies.

Well it's a lot easier being a racist prick being the cloak of a Username and Tommy Dreamer avatar.

Shit I know people whom are racist all over Facebook but wouldn't have the balls to say half the shit they do in front of actual people.

I came to PW in 2004 as I followed Sandra from a Randy Orton forum. I was in the midst of my marriage falling apart and pretty much the lowest point of my life. I was trying to 'find myself' again and talk to like minded individuals because at the time I had no one who watched wrestling around me, read comic books, etc.

I left for a bit with some of the other posters due to getting tired of some of the trolls and some of the more bullying members of the Mod Squad, but I lurked and posted here and there. When that site ended most of us returned to PW and I became a regular in WWE, WoW, Off Topic and mostly Nerdery. My PW accolades are vast considering I (along with Rogue ) was one of the only women who went the distance in putting up with you all.  

There have been a lot of really great times and a few really terrible times, but I wouldn't trade my time on PW or any of you for anything. I have made life long friends and as I have attested to many, many times, it saved my life. I can't put a value on that. I am grateful that @admin saw the light and created this new home for us. Hopefully, some of the old faces (that we like) will find their way back. If not, that's ok. I'm ok being stuck with you bunch.

Freaking newbs

Jesus Blindy has the greatest memory ever. Insane.

I was in college back in late 2000 or early 2001. My friend mentioned PW.com as a good site for wrestling news. I checked it out and started hanging out on the forums. I didn't post often at first (social anxiety!), but over time posted more and more (still not as much as some). Mostly I spent my time being goofy with Johnny Blitz, Brokenlamp, and that crew.

PW got me back into comic books once I graduated since I finally could afford them. The Nerdery was a great time (Goku still beats Superman).

Eventually I modded Arts & Graphics when they went batshit due to previous moderation (I don't remember the details).

Someone mentioned the forums got quiet when Benoit killed his family. I remember that time as some of the funniest things produced on PW. Super dark humor, but hilarious.

I miss the live PW radio shows that Bryan and others used to put on.

I stopped visiting around 2010 when, a) the forum uptime was awful, and, b) I got jobs with open-office plans instead of private offices and I didn't think it would be great to be sitting on PW all day (when it was up). I didn't want to be on PW all night after work, either, so I lost the habit of checking PW.

Occasionally, I would try to visit the forum but it was either down or dead.

Last fall PW sprung to mind for some reason so I tried to find it. It took a couple days of googling but I found a random post on some other site where I think @admin mentioned this site. I took a look and I was very happy to see so many people still posting.

Ah, it's that time of year again where i get tagged in a thread like this as though its s vanity search i didnt need and yet still comment.

Ive been posting here longer than you. Before this place was a message board. Sometime in 2000 or ought 01 when people still watched wrestling, and i was working at wendys as a reataurant manager and making witty altera as chris p lettuce i was made the only mod of this place. The worl was chaos and so were the pw forums. Get home from work ao see dkahuna had spam posted in every forum and there were 25 new bots and alters to ban. Throws a toothpick in your face.

20 years and ptsd later

I joined in 2002 (coming up on 20 years) and I remember staying in the WWE section for awhile at first but eventually I ventured down into off topic and made some friends in there. I remember the PW/PWF wars that soon followed in the fall of 02 with the sites feuding, but with PWF gone now I guess PW won that war lol. I liked both places as I had friends at both boards.

I remember interacting with folks like SC (Stone Cold/Clod), Tri, SodaGirl, mikec, Mr. Marbles, amanda, ian, etc. I still keep up with a few of them like SC and Tri.

I don’t post here nearly as often as I used to back in the day but PW will always hold a special place with me as it was my first wrestling forum.

Hi.

I had watched WWE during the attitude era, and always went to PW.com to get the wrestling news. I saw that there were forums where people can talk about wrestling. I joined up, read some of the posts on wrestling, then made my way to the Off Topic forum. The very first thread I saw there was someone challenging another poster for a knock down, all out, epic fight and topped off his comment by using all 8 emoji's the forum had at the time.

Off Topic was always entertaining and sometimes a little over the top. Off the top of my head, I remember several threads that always had me laugh:

1) The Governator Raw Party threads.
2) The "Hi, I am new" thread.
3) Saggy creating the CASM. To be honest, I thought it was a brilliant name.
4) The PW (insert event here).

There were many people who joked, argued, and/or comforted each other. As the forums expanded over the months, many new people joined us. Some were funny, some were kind, and some...some were just downright cruel. The last thread I saw was what prompted me to leave. There was someone making fun of a female poster, telling her that she was the perfect fan for Matt Hardy, since was obese and ugly. A lot of people got away with this said cruelty, and I was done after that.

I still see some old names here. I hope everyone is well.

Holy moly.

Hi Joey 😉

(for the three people who get it)

Two trips to PW.com decades apart is my origin story. First day on the internet, way back in 1996, I was just guessing websites because I didn't know about search engines yet. After staring at the screen like WHAT NOW? I finally decided to see if prowrestling dot com existed, figuring it had to, and it did. Read some hot gossip, then signed off because my mom was furious I was tying up the phone line. I frequented the main page many times 'til about 2001, but never the boards, which I didn't really have interest in yet.

The second trip happened December 2012. I had recently lost a (bad) job and had a lot of time on my hands. I had stumbled upon a YouTube channel that uploaded all the old WWF Coliseum Home Video Compilation Tapes, which reignited a wrestling spark I hadn't felt since the aforementioned 2001 (minus an ECW One Night Stand watch I downloaded off Limewire, which was a one night stand for me as a wrestling fan in the aughts).

I had all these dormant memories of great matches I wanted to revisit, and great matches that I had always wanted to see, but 10 years earlier would have cost money to see through tape trading. Now it was all at my fingertips. But what were those matches? I started Googling best wrestling matches, underrated wrestling matches, things of that sort, and started finding threads in the history forum on PW.com. This gave a lot of "OH YEAH" reactions, as in, "Oh yeah, I remember that" or "Oh yeah, I remember wanting to see that." This sent me on a downloading spree of epic proportions. External hard drives were needed to be purchased, which was not the most fiscally responsible thing to do as a newly unemployed man, but this did give me some joy during a dark time, a bit of a life raft, so it wholly necessary.

I had no intention of posting. I was strictly lurking, just mining for memory gold, some new ideas of what to seek out to download, but at some point I saw an active thread called "AMERICAN HARDCORE THEATRE: ECW'S REAL HISTORY" by ShinobiMusashi*. For better, or for worse, ECW is my true love of wrestling, my soulmate, it just never got better than ECW at its best for me. This seemed like a thread made directly for me. As I started making my way to its newest posts, it was just beginning to emerge, not just as one man's journey through re-watching it, as it began, but as a sort of book club, people contributing their own tidbits, their own reactions, their own memories, their own stories. Baker joined the month before, and seemed similarly compelled to contribute to this thread as I was feeling. It was like a gravitational pull for dudes like us who had experiences of ECW in its time. So I started posting in that thread.

Shinobi and Baker were very welcoming, then I started getting a handle on the others that were hanging around the History forum (Big Pete , Emperor , 🤯 , and others). Started reading the Match Review thread, that seemed like a fun thing to do, and just like that I ended up a poster on a wrestling message board, something I would not have seen coming pushing 30 years old at that time, and someone who had zero interest in any of the current products, but there I was.

It's funny, I've been posting on the two variations of PW since then, nearly a fucking decade, and I've watched very little wrestling. I mean, I have stretches where I'm watching older matches, especially in the earliest days of me at P Dub, but it turns out I like talking about wrestling more than watching it, and talking about it with them dudes in the history forum. There's really no reason for me to still be doing it, but once again, here I am, still.

*Was always incredibly impressed by Shin's commitment to Hardcore Theatre. Those early posts he was mostly just talking to himself. Then you look at other wrestling boards, and it was the same deal. He was just a man on a mission doing this thing he felt he had to do and it eventually caught on, albeit to a fairly limited audience in that old History forum, but it caught on. Personally, I would have quit way before that even happened, just thinking no one cared, but Shin kept going. 

Mar 14, 2021 19:33:22 GMT Rogue said:

...but I still have my favourite Rogue banner and av that Lazer made for me.  He was another ridiculously talented A&G guy.

Holy smokes, I got a shoutout! After all these years? Shucks. I have a big ol' folder of my old banners and graphics from that time, so yours is probably still in there too. Which one was it?

I don't remember many of the specifics of my origin story, but it was probably early to mid 2000s. I'm sure I originally showed up for the wrestling boards, but I quickly found the Arts & Graphics board and made a (minor) name for myself when I became (I think?) the first ever A&G Hardcore champion with this little ditty.

I eventually made my way to OT and the Nerdery among others, moved over to another forum with a bunch of PW posters for a while, and probably came back for a bit. Lost interest in wrestling around 2006-2007 or so, and probably fell out of posting shortly after that, as I went back to school and got pulled in a hundred directions. Got married, had kids, checked in on the forum occasionally over the years but didn't really post at all, then it seemed to have disappeared, and then one day (today) I decided to search for it again and found this thread, started typing this reply, and I think we're all caught up.

I had a lot of good times around here/there and lots of good memories from that time. So thanks everyone for making an awkward teenager/young adult's life a little more fun and interesting!

Lazer!!!! Nice to see you! Hope you'll stick around or at least pop by here and there.

Lazer. Nice find! Larry ftw! Glad to see you back!

Jeff, you absolutely weren't wrong with what you said to Bryan Miller. From everything I knew he was a selfish, despicable human being who only desired to be liked to feed his ego. Poor guy was the definition of a lost soul.

Yoive totally piqued my interest in what you did that made you think you were going to be arrested! Hopefully someday you'll share.

May 24, 2021 19:01:59 GMT jTjohncenaGOAT said:

Joey, I used to talk to a Joey from PW on AIM.. you the same one?

Definitely not. Joey is a woman from Toronto (GTA) who's probably in her mid 40s about now.

I think I still owe my origin story, but really appreciate jTjohncenaGOAT's and the memories it brought up. Even if some are more petty painful.

I too miss kemis/@ocire. He had such an intelligent mind from what I can recall and a really unique (to me, at the time, at least) interest in pro wrestling. It was through him I first and perhaps one of his fan fictions that I first learned about wrestlers like Ricky Marvin, Drake Younger, Prince Nana, and Alex Shelley. He also pioneered gifs before gifs were a thing, linking to brief video clips for indy scene wrestling moves somehow. A trick I'd later steal when writing SEX circa 2008?

jTjohncenaGOAT, if I knew you and KJ had had a falling out, I'd totally forgotten. This feels like shocking news to me. At a certain point I had you two pegged as being much closer than me and KJ were to each other, and me and KJ were TIGHT.

Speaking of my PW Brutha from Anutha Mutha, KJ and I have met I think maybe 3 times in person thanks to one of his old jobs bringing him through Pittsburgh every so often. I think we knew each other's shoot first names, but it was so hard and weird to go by those. At least for me. I feel like it has to be similar to pilots who refuse to refer to each other by anything other than their call signs. So I feel like we tended to just lean on Pizzle and Kayjay and said fuck it to any eavesdroppers who might've been like "hey, wait, those don't sound like real names..."

I remember being a little bummed when you chickened out of our potential meet-up but also a little relieved. That work trip ended up being a packed disaster, and trying to squeeze in a personal obligation and make a good first time impression would've been all sorts of added stress. I still love the message you sent though and totally get and don't fault your rationale. To paraphrase, something about there being no guarantees I wouldn't turn out to be some Buffalo Bill cereal killer or whatever.

Between you and Lazer mentioning A&G, I feel like I need to chime in to remind folks about that one stretch of time I was modded while I had a drinking AND maturity problem. A&G took a nose dive under my watch because my OCD led to me deleting threads, and then I think I started deleting and merging old similar threads in the WWE back pages... And whoops, before you knew it I was un-modded and A&G was damaged beyond repair; i.e., dead.

Hope the incident you're referencing that caused you legit jail panic wasn't the WE WILL NOT CLOT gimmick we ran for a day or so. I honestly don't remember what that even was, and it probably wasn't nearly as hilarious as we thought it was in real time, but ahhh you be young and dumb and bored and drunk online with friends.

May 24, 2021 19:46:42 GMT jTjohncenaGOAT said:

WE WILL NOT CLOT ... I remember the saying but can’t remember what it was from? Help me out. 🤯

That's the thing, me neither! I just remember the phrase and that it was always in all caps.

I vaguely feel like it was around the same time when the walls of the hallway in my childhood home were weeping. No idea if my house was haunted, suffering HVAC issues, or I was drunk/tired enough to be somehow hallucinating.

But collectively, those sum up to pretty much the extent of my "old PW" memories now.

May 24, 2021 19:24:00 GMT Foos said:

Lazer . Nice find! Larry ftw! Glad to see you back!

Jeff, you absolutely weren't wrong with what you said to Bryan Miller. From everything I knew he was a selfish, despicable human being who only desired to be liked to feed his ego. Poor guy was the definition of a lost soul.

Yoive totally piqued my interest in what you did that made you think you were going to be arrested! Hopefully someday you'll share.

May 24, 2021 19:01:59 GMT jTjohncenaGOAT said:

Joey , I used to talk to a Joey from PW on AIM.. you the same one?

Definitely not. Joey is a woman from Toronto (GTA) who's probably in her mid 40s about now.

Lies! I am a woman from Toronto and I am actually 25 years old.

May 24, 2021 19:01:59 GMT jTjohncenaGOAT said:

Joey , I used to talk to a Joey from PW on AIM.. you the same one?

No my dear, I am not. But, nice to meet you. 

May 24, 2021 20:01:29 GMT jTjohncenaGOAT said:

🤯 .. did Fan Fic challenge WoW to a PWWM event? I remember you and I posting in their forum a lot for a while and could have swore WE WILL NOT CLOT was a jab at them. It may have also been a jab at X-Ray and also may have been us spamming a teen girl forum. All three of those come to mind.

Not sure what this teen girl forum thing is, but I do know I've never ventured to another forum besides PW. Even DOMS or whatever the crash shelter was called was always lost on me.

Ribbing on X-Ray or perhaps an intraboard subforum-to-subforum troll job though sounds like it might be close to right.

I miss X-Ray, he was like Greg but better. Instead of spamming my inbox with fan fic he would send me unsolicited booty pics on AIM.

May 24, 2021 18:52:11 GMT jTjohncenaGOAT said:

I found PW through a yahoo search. I was in Iraq in 2005 and bored out of my mind. I found the section where they were writing Fan Fiction on the main page and realized that I had been doing this for years (except on paper and never online). That was cool. But then I found the actual forum and immediately was drawn to Fan Fiction. My original username was TW@ and I was banned within a week. I came back as jTj (Jeffrey the Jew). I kept that username for the entirety of the time I was on PW. When we migrated here, I just went by Jeff. There was a period of time when KJ and PI (my best online friends) were changing their name every week to a wrestler they liked but retaining their username (Jeff KJarrett or Brian PIllman for instance but probably not those two) so I started changing mine as well. jTjohnCena, jTjBL, jTjamieNoble were the biggies.

I got a little bored and started posting on both PW and Down on Main Street. JJ was the Mod on DOMS for Fan Fic for a while and when that site fell apart, they asked me to Mod. That's when I got in pretty close with Roo and ThreedyPee. I ticked off KJ during that time for some comments that I made about PW on DOMS and we didn't talk for a year. Eventually, like everyone else, I left DOMS (they still have a Twitter page, I think, BTW). KJ and I buried the hatchet and not soon after that he asked me to be Mod with him in Fan Fiction. It wasn't too long later that he stopped and I think I got WMS as the second Mod. Though, around this time things got a little hairy because I started working a TON.

I was almost exclusively a Fan Fic guy. I navigated to A&G for a while to learn how to do graphics. But that forum collapsed shortly after. I'd venture out to WWE, History, and OT. I can remember participating in some spam attacks on some random teen forums with the guys. As a Mod, I got in a little hot water for telling Brian Miller to be a better person. And to be honest I was young and was just posting stuff out of boredom. Brian wasn't a bad guy and I didn't even dislike him. I was just young, stupid, and was trying to start stuff. I kind of lost all interest when one of the mods dared us to do something to a member and I was the one who did it. For legal reasons.. I'm not going to disclose what it was. But I did something really stupid and thought I was going to go to jail for it. If not jail, I was going to get kicked out of the Army. I spent the entire night scrubbing all of my posts and editing out any mention of being in the Army. By that time I had acquired like 10K posts. I also lied to Roo and convinced him that someone was stalking me and that I needed all of my posts on DOMS deleted. He did so. It wasn't anything harmful, just a stupid prank that blew up in my face.

From there on, I just visited but didn't post much. I can't remember who sent me a link here to the new forum, but it was probably the Kid. Kid and I used to absolutely hate each other. Right before I left PW, we became pretty good friends. I also prank called him one night in the middle of the night but his dad answered the phone. I'm pretty sure Holzhammer gave me his phone number. There is also a chance that KING KID doesn't know that, so...

WP and X-Ray were also pretty good friends of mine early on. But then X-Ray became a hippie who got way into weed and we really never heard from him again. Will and I stayed pretty close for a while. In fact, I'm pretty sure he and I are still friends on Facebook despite the fact that we've never talked to each other on there. Same with Parth. I see Parth on Facebook all the time, but he never even migrated here. I was also friends with HeavyMike and Gregzilla on Facebook but they actually wanted to talk to me on there and I found that a little weird so I unfriended them. JJ and I are still friends on Facebook but again, we have never even talked on it. He is really into Converse sneakers and Legos. Two things I don't care for at all.

I've never met any of you in real life. I came close once. PI was coming to the town next to me for work. We had agreed to meet but the week before I chickened out. What's funny is that.. I was going to meet him.. and I didn't even know what his name was. KJ and I were really good online friends for a while and it wasn't until we stopped talking that I found out what his first name was. PI, KJ, and I used to call ourselves the TRIAD. PI and I got pretty close to Kemis for a while there and started calling ourselves the QUAD. I miss Kemis. So much.

That's the bulk of my PW story.

You stole the show as the leader of Team Creativity vs the Sports Empire in what had to be one of the best PW Wrestlemania main events ever. Clench PWNS won it in the end for us with his rambling though! :lol: 

BRO!

LMAO jTjohncenaGOAT PRANKING MY HOUSE AND GETTING MY FATHER.

Yo. That reminded me. It was 100% Holzhammer who had my number because he called me once for like a 10 second convo. That bastard. How dumb was I to give my number out to him? He dared me and my pride never turned down a dare back then.

To be young and fearless again. Fucking consequences.

May 24, 2021 19:24:00 GMT Foos said:

Lazer . Nice find! Larry ftw! Glad to see you back!

Jeff, you absolutely weren't wrong with what you said to Bryan Miller. From everything I knew he was a selfish, despicable human being who only desired to be liked to feed his ego. Poor guy was the definition of a lost soul.

I cannot echo these sentiments any stronger.



BM was up there with TGO as someone who stood for nothing other than being popular.
I don't mind if you are an asshole, but be one for your own reasons.