It was early in the year 2000: You could occasionally see a music video or two on MTV; The only airline passengers taking off their shoes were the gross ones; And “Big Time” Joey Bishop was on the rise to the top of the fourth largest promotion in the world.
I made that last part up. Or, more appropriately to say, I made that last part up back in 2000, when the MTV and plane things were happening.
It takes a special kind of nerd to play Dungeons & Dragons and decide that what it was missing was big meaty men slapping meat. I was that kind of nerd. Ahoy. I’m your old pal, Doug.
In the infant days of the internet, nerds would surf the information superhighway (when their moms didn’t need to use the phone) to meet other nerds and talk nerd stuff. It was as glorious as it sounded. One day, while nerding it up something fierce, lying on my waterbed with my laptop battery burning a hole in my chest, I discovered something called Fantasy Wrestling.
Now, I have since come to find out that, much like Santa Claus, the Devil, and the likable guy in The Office, Fantasy Wrestling has a different name depending on who you ask. The basic point is that it was fantasy role playing for wrestling.
Only, since it was the early days of the internet and Winamp was confusing, we would type out our promos and get experience points based on our “Promoter’s” (read: Dungeon Master) interest in our content. Then, our promoter would put our names in a random match generator they found on, I’m assuming, Limewire. That would generate a list of moves and a fake Meltzer-style rating, and we’d get more experience points based on that. Our experience points would dictate how high on the card we would appear, and it was ever so fun.
But, there was turmoil in our humble promotion. And that turmoil’s name was “Big Time” Joey Bishop.
Now, first of all, if you found this article because you’re a fan of the Rat Pack, apologies. This has nothing to do with the stand-up comedian from the 50s named Joey Bishop. I named the character after him, but that’s it. So, you can move on. We’re talking about kid’s stuff.
I am a large person, myself (not a medical giant, but still 6’8” and 325 lbs). So, when I created “Big Time” Joey Bishop I used Big Show’s stats from the N64 No Mercy game. But the character was all my personality, ramped up a notch. Goofy and lighthearted but with an edge.
Big Show was a lump of boring nothing at the time. I honestly don’t remember if I knew he was Captain Insano, but I did know him as the sleepy guy that hung out with The Undertaker.
As our promotion ramped up (read: we were actually participating and producing a lot of promos and interviews), my character got into a feud with a character that was a clear rip off of Shawn Michaels. His name was The Heartstealer, or some nonsense as bad as that.
Things were fine just fine for a while, until Big Show would have a guest appearance alongside Triple H and Mick Foley during The Rock’s first SNL hosting gig. Big Show stole the…um…show. In a big way.
Suddenly, Big Show’s character was a goofy nutball. He would dress up as other people’s characters. He was feuding with Kai En Tai. And, in return, Heart Steak Kid started accusing me, not “Big Time” Joey Bishop, of stealing a character from real television.
This led to the downfall of whatever three letter acronym we were going by. Kidney Snap Child and I were the headliners for a reason, and when he quit because I refused to “admit” I “stole” the “character,” there was now just one person doing regular promos.
No one stepped up, a la The Rock when Stone Cold broke his neck. It quickly became me emailing funny speeches to a 40 year-old “promoter,” who I can only imagine got exhausted reading them before long.
And so goes the tale of a 17 year-old Doug, and his fake wrestler who brought a pretend world to its knees in the year 2000.
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