May 15, 2001

12:19 PM

Backyard WrestlingFile this under "funny but sad." You must have a look at few of the video clips of these boys in action. The whole squalid environment reminds me of Gummo. I understand it's just mindless fun but....is this the bottom of suburbia or the frightening norm?
posted by davebush (36 comments total)

This has been going on for quite some time now, so the answer to your question is "it's the frightening norm". There are lots of pages like this.
posted by swell at 12:25 PM on May 15, 2001

Frightening norm. There was a father here in Ohio who was recently convicted of child endangerment because he allowed, nay, encouraged his kid to do a backflip off their roof onto a burning table. They showed the video on the news - the kid landed, all his friends were laughing, and then the kid's clothes caught on fire and he ran around in a panic while his friends threw him to the ground and tried to kick and beat the fire out. He suffered 2nd and 3rd degree burns. The father said he didn't see any problems with the stunt, and would keep encouraging his son to pursue his dream of a career in pro-wrestling.

Do they have pro-wrestling in Canada? 'Cause if not, I'm moving there.
posted by starvingartist at 12:33 PM on May 15, 2001

Yeah, we have pro wrestling in Canada. Sorry. :-)

The Hart family is from Canada. So's Val something-or-other who was on a local radio station recently.

Plus Wrestlemania 1989 or someting was held in Toronto.
posted by cCranium at 12:37 PM on May 15, 2001

Do we?

Half of the WWF is Canadian.
posted by sauril at 12:38 PM on May 15, 2001

I would not have believed this if I hadn't seen it on television a few weeks ago. Either "Weekend Today" or "CBS Sunday Morning" had a piece on it and they showed these kids beating the living crap out of each other with lawn furniture, trash cans, car parts...and all kinds of parents standing around watching, cheering them on.

"Funny but sad"? Nope. "Frightening norm" closer, but PLEASE don't tell me this is really the norm?!?!?!
posted by briank at 12:38 PM on May 15, 2001

The Hart brothers are from my home province of Alberta . . . hence, the Calgary Hitmen of the WHL.
posted by iceberg273 at 12:39 PM on May 15, 2001

hey, these kids manage to permanently damage either other, just consider it a little more filtering of the gene pool.

god bless em. at least they aren't doing this crap in my front lawn.

wait. i have no front lawn.
posted by jcterminal at 12:45 PM on May 15, 2001

Hallelujah jcterminal. I'm all for giving out another darwin. It getting hurt or killed is what it takes to teach them what morons they are, then I say let 'em go ahead and keep wrestling.
posted by brokosz at 1:00 PM on May 15, 2001

Yeah, I'm thinking let them keep going for the good of the species. The genetic benefits, to the rest of us, by these guys not being able to breed would be enormous.
posted by srw12 at 1:13 PM on May 15, 2001

Thanks for making my day :)
posted by preguicoso at 1:17 PM on May 15, 2001

What I don't understand is... why do they even have refs in these matches? It seemed like every other clip was the so called "ref" getting assaulted with some hideous object.
posted by fluxcreative at 1:41 PM on May 15, 2001

Have you ever watched wrestling? The ref is fair game!
posted by owillis at 1:46 PM on May 15, 2001

Hey, I know. Let's use this as another opportunity smugly to stereotype 'suburbia.' Yeah, that's it. We're smart, young, hip, urban dwellers. This is bizarre, so it must be how everyone lives in the 'burbs.

Thought I was reading the New York Times for a minute there. Lose the condescension, folks, it's very unbecoming.
posted by tippiedog at 1:48 PM on May 15, 2001

I wondered how long it would take for someone to do the "condescending" post.
posted by frykitty at 1:53 PM on May 15, 2001

hey, forget condescension! my money is on the "chaos kid"! nature tends towards entropy.
posted by elsar at 2:00 PM on May 15, 2001

Just wondering - what's life like in Pflugerville?
posted by davebush at 2:04 PM on May 15, 2001

Hey I have an idea - ok, nobody steal this - How bout we get these kids to put out their own FOOTBALL LEAGUE!!!!!
posted by DiplomaticImmunity at 2:06 PM on May 15, 2001

tippiedog: having spent large sections of my life in both urban and suburban areas, i can say, without hesistation:

"these kids are morons, no matter where they live."

besides, aren't these kids mostly in rural areas?

btw: i have some more condescension, but you'll need to bring kneepads if you want it.

;)
posted by jcterminal at 2:10 PM on May 15, 2001

p.s. what the hell is 'hesistation'?
posted by jcterminal at 2:10 PM on May 15, 2001

Life in Pflugerville is, well, very suburban: love my immediate neighbors and neighborhood, hate the sprawl.

Having grown up in the country and spent my 20s in Europe and an urban college neighborhood, I used to stereotype the 'burbs like the best of you. But once I moved to the 'burbs, I realized that most of my preconceived notions were inaccurate. But then, that's the nature of generalizations, isn't it?
posted by tippiedog at 2:18 PM on May 15, 2001

And my mom ask me why I got out of teaching high school.
posted by crackheadmatt at 3:02 PM on May 15, 2001

These backyard kids seem to also be moving into tv (which is sort of reflective, because they're emulating tv...)
posted by owillis at 3:05 PM on May 15, 2001

The New Times of Broward-Palm Beach recently had a good two part article on backyard wrestling. I'm a wrestling fan but this stuff is really depressing.
posted by maurice at 3:15 PM on May 15, 2001

I live in a "rural" area, and believe me, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of this going on. However...I DO live in Texas...so most of our teens are busy tipping cows. Whe all the kids around here start wrestling the cows..... then we may have a problem...
posted by bradth27 at 3:41 PM on May 15, 2001

hhhmm....looks as if that is already happening.
posted by bradth27 at 3:45 PM on May 15, 2001

my god! spell check is a GOOD thing!

>:(
posted by jcterminal at 4:02 PM on May 15, 2001

But I thought it wasn't the kids, or the burbs or the parents but Jackass that caused these things.
posted by amanda at 5:01 PM on May 15, 2001

Sorry, tippie, this would be disturbing no matter where it might happen. I don't see anyone here targeting the burbs for abuse, just the dumbass kids doing these stunts. I suppose if the article was about city teens, you'd accuse us of being lame-ass rural hicks, anything to give us a little attitude. Spare me.
posted by briank at 5:10 PM on May 15, 2001

Although I think it's a bit disturbing, I don't think it's as bad as the rest of you seem to think it is. Sure the mainstream hates wrestling and thinks of it as evil and all that jazz. I disagree. It's just different. It's not for me but I'm trying to keep an open mind about it. Wrestling is not as evil as we all think it is.
posted by GrooveJedi at 6:24 PM on May 15, 2001

Well if wrestling is fake why do kids get hurt doing it?

Why isn't there a dateline on how Roger Clemens throws a 95 mph pitch at someone's head when someone hits a homer off him? America's pastime huh.

Real life is faker then professional wrestling.
posted by andryeevna at 11:22 PM on May 15, 2001

andryeevna - psychic?

Foley Is Good: And the Real World is Faker Than Wrestling
posted by owillis at 12:43 AM on May 16, 2001

One of those "when I was a boy" stories...My friends and I were into watching pro wrestling, and although the business was still kayfabe (pretending to be real), we were all coming to realize it wasn't physically possible to do some of the moves without co-operation and the storylines were too corny to be real. We however didn't use wrestling moves on each other when we horsed around - our outside rough-housing was never in anger, but a lot more genuine in force and intent. Like comparing actual wrestling to pro wrestling. If kids are using mattresses and co-operating in their rough-housing today, they're being more careful than I ever was.

As an aside, I spent some time a few years ago from my white collar job to train to become a pro wrestler. I had a few matches on the independent circuit and have the fractured bones to prove it. Don't ever think because it's predetermined that injuries don't happen - even those of us who are properly trained get hurt from time to time.

So will kids get injured from a "fake" sport? Yes. Are kids hurt from climbing trees, or riding bikes? Yes. It's an easy cop-out for the media to blame pro wrestling. In my dad's day, there were plenty of kids emulating Superman and getting hurt from it as well.
posted by irishcreme at 8:12 AM on May 16, 2001

"Well if wrestling is fake why do kids get hurt doing it?"

Maybe because kids aren't trained in how to look like they're hurting each other without actually hurting each other?

If Superman is fake, why do kids get hurt when they try to stop a bus with their bare hands?

Because the kids aren't faking it!
posted by CrayDrygu at 12:33 PM on May 16, 2001

tippiedog:
Let's use this as another opportunity smugly to stereotype 'suburbia.'

It's kind of hard to hold "backyard wrestling" events anywhere else.

-Mars
posted by Mars Saxman at 1:43 PM on May 16, 2001

Mars, that's a bit of a logical falicy, isn't it? There's a name for that, but I can't remember it. A does not imply B in this case.

While I agree that backyard wrestling can really only be held in suburbia (not too many backyards in most major urban centers) it doesn't mean that everyone in suburbia is partaking.

It's kind of hard to be homeless and stay alive anywhere other than urbania, but not everyone in urban centers are homeless.
posted by cCranium at 5:45 AM on May 17, 2001

Of course, there aren't any backyards in small towns either, right?
posted by harmful at 6:16 AM on May 17, 2001