WITH WRESTLEMANIA 29 CREEPING UP on the internet and physical reality in a matter of hours, live from New Jersey, I thought I’d reflect back on my useful archival data in regard to the grandest stage of them all, and of course ask some cohorts what they thought about the big spectacular as well. My memories of...
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The victorious wrestler is an oiled rhinoceros in a green Speedo, stomping the ground with his delicate feet. His funeral barge arms are ceremonially poised above the golden sheaves of his mullet, shorn and curled like an offering in a rite of vegetative fertility. His muscles are burial mounds beneath the roiling prairie...
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Brock Lesner was raised on a farm in North Dakota. As a child, Lesner dodged a barrage of arrows with glee. Consequently, Lesner is now unable to eat s’mores without grimacing. On his 15th birthday, Lesner hid among the karaoke singers and dreamed of being the next big thing. Almost immediately, Lesner witnessed a...
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*Editor’s Note: On the eve of the anniversary of wrestling’s most controversial moment, the infamous “Montreal Screwjob”, Julie Hart, former wife of wrestling superstar Bret “The Hitman” Hart, reveals 25 Hart-breaking songs inspired by their relationship, a Barnstormer exclusive, from her forthcoming memoir Hart Strings (Tightrope Books, 2013). The book is, in Hart’s words,...
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AUGUST 19, 2012. STAPLES CENTER, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA. Singles Match for the United States Championship Pre-Show: Antonio Cesaro (with Aksana) vs. Santino Marella (c) Once again, two ‘lucky’ wrestlers received the dubious honour of competing during the SummerSlam pre-show. Last time, at Money in the Bank, the WWE shat on the tag-team division by...
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The following is an excerpt from Nathaniel G. Moore’s forthcoming novel Savage 1986-2011. The story tracks Nate’s idyllic teen years in the 1980s to his disorganized and funereal twenties to his hopeful thirties, chronicling the middle-class implosion of his family, bracketed by July 1986 – when Nate first saw Randy “Macho Man” Savage in person –...
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