From a St. Louis sports perspective, few things deliver the entertainment power of a fake punch quite like pro wrestling night at the South Broadway Athletic Club in Soulard, featuring the stars of the MMWA-SICW.

And since you’re now probably wondering, the answer is “No.” Nobody knows what MMWA-SICW stands for. And whenever anyone asks, another letter is added.  So please, just let it go.

For the pro wrestling purist however, it’s a real treat. It’s like the Class A ball – or maybe more accurately the Appalachian Rookie League – of the WWE.  There’s no million-dollar egos, no backroom corruption, no steroids. On the contrary, many of the wrestlers here could stand to lift a dumbbell or two.

Instead, these guys compete for the love of the sport, or more accurately the sports-based entertainment.  There are names like Big Texan, Ace Hawkins, Captain Courageous, the Lumberjacks (and they’re okay). These guys are all extremely affable with the fans, and it was pretty easy to get a picture taken with them.

For the most part, the crowd was what you might expect, making the upper bowl of a Blues game look like an auditorium full of PhDs attending an astrophysics lecture. Chants of “U-S-A!” broke out throughout the night several times. Chants of “Jer-ry!” did not. But it wasn’t for lack of trying.

Even still, it’s a remarkably diverse crowd: young, old, male, female. There were even a few celebrities in the house, like Terry B. Crouppen of the legal dynamic duo Brown & Crouppen - the proverbial Robin to Ron Brown’s Batman. When you think about it, where else would St. Louis’ foremost ambulance-chasing personal injury lawyer be on a Saturday night? It makes perfect sense. If someone splits a skull on the business end of a folding chair, he’s right there.

And turns out it’s a great place to host your small child’s birthday party, complete with an appropriately-themed cake.



The best part though has to be the prices, which have been rolled back to the days of Wrestling at the Chase. Beer is two dollars. For the more sophisticated palate there’s a wine list, featuring your choice of…red or white.  Actually, the house Chablis – although pronounced [sha-bliss] by the wait staff – is to die for.

And just when the night couldn’t get any more surreal, an all-too-familiar face to the loyal readers of JSF entered the squared circle:



Why, it’s none other than the 2012 Riverfront Times “Funniest Twitter Feed” winner and Joe Sports Fan’s own Matt Sebek.  At least we think it might be.  Who would have guessed that Sebek moonlighted on the weekends as a semi-pro wrestler?

Ballet dancer? Sure. Boy band member? Absolutely. But a wrestler? No way.

And despite the prosthetic body suit, which adds the illusion of nearly 100 pounds of muscle to Sebek’s frame, I have to admit the guy has some serious moves.



The hot pink tights? Just perfect. Nothing sums up “metrosexual badass” quite like they do. Also, the one pink boot is a nice touch. It’s got kind of a Michael Jackson feel to it.

Turns out, Sebek wrestles under the alias Brandon Espinosa, an homage to his Cherokee heritage.

The festivities ended with a Battle Royal, humbly submitted for your approval, where the last man left in the ring wins.

Say you work in production for a local news station in St. Louis and get assigned a generic time-filling story about ticket scalpers at the Super Bowl next Sunday.  Since the same story has appeared on nearly every news outlet before every Super Bowl, it pretty much writes itself, but you will need some B-roll footage of scalpers hard at work on the streets to fill in the gaps, so where do you go? 

Maybe hit up some fellow network affiliates to see if they have anything in the tape archives?  Maybe you head out to the streets during a local event to see if you can scare anything up?

Or maybe you just dig into the original video collection of a local blog and hope that you randomly find a spoof on ticket scalping they filmed almost three years ago. 

Last night, St. Louis' own Fox 2 went with the latter route. 

As we saw from our couch last night, without any advanced notice, a video JSF filmed for Yardbarker's 2009 Final Four coverage in Indianapolis - the same city hosting next week's Super Bowl - was apparently selected as the supplier of said b-roll. We analyzed the side-by-sides and the conclusion was clear:



The moment we figured out why those blurred out clips looked so familiar, numerous questions popped into our heads:

What did Fox's producer type into Google to uncover this particular video? 

Should we wait by our mailbox for a residual check? (Probably not)

Does this mean we're finally mainstream media members? (Hopefully not)

Why did they choose to avoid this section of our video...?



Alas, those questions remain unanswered.  We're just hoping that they come back to the JSF video page if they ever need some b-roll clips for a groundbreaking story on men's softball.  We've got just what they're looking for.

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Most sports fans are familiar with the infamous “Madden Curse“; an immediate damnation that is bestowed upon an NFL player that graces the cover of John Madden’s popular video game series.  There’s also the “Sports Illustrated Jinx” – which all but guarantees failure for teams that appear on the cover of the magazine prior to their respective season.

The past two years, we've been keeping out eye on the local hex of "Alive Magazine".

Here are the last two Cardinals to appear on the cover.



Now, allow us to recap.

In June 2010, David Freese appeared on the cover of Alive Magazine as the figurehead of their annual "Hot List".  Four days after the magazine hit local newsstands, Freese was put on the 15-day DL after bruising a bone in his right ankle.  Then, during a rehab workout, Freese dropped a weight on his left-foot – at which point, he thought, "Eh, might as well have season-ending ankle surgery."

Coincidence?  Nope.  Last year, Alive Magazine thought Matt Holliday was totally "Hot List" worthy and slapped him on the cover of their May 25th issue.  Less than a week later, Holliday was sent to the DL after tweaking his quad.  He missed over two weeks in a season bridled with odd injuries.

Apparently, Alive Magazine learned nothing from their bad magazine mojo because they popped David Freese on ANOTHER cover.



Damn you, Alive Magazine.

The World Series MVP has appeared everywhere from the Ellen Degeneres Show to the Country Music Awards this off-season, but this is too much.  Not Alive Magazine.  Anything but Alive Magazine.  There are unpreventable consequences at stake here.

Don't say we didn't warn you.

The first official baseball card of Albert Pujols wearing his Los Angeles Angels uniform has been leaked to the Internets.  Well, we should clarify that.  He's not wearing *his* uniform, unless of course the Angels staged a game (against Kansas City) and had Pujols catch a few balls at first base.



Given that the aforementioned is false, we're guessing that the card shown above is Photoshopped.  Shocking and a little disappointing, we know.  It's a little like finding out that Steve Savard isn't a cyborg.

Yet, in this obsessive culture of being FIRST! at everything, fictional baseball cards are just a part of the industry.  But we say, if you're going to be completely ridiculous in creating events that never happened, you might as well go completely off the reservation.



Rally Mongey.

If the Angels start selling Pujols Rally Mongeys, we may have to start rooting for #5 in a Los Angeles jersey.  Or, at the very least, for him not to rupture an achilles during Spring Training.

Let's start there.

These days it's not easy to get public approval for "superfan" status in St. Louis.  The barriers to entry are steep based on the characters who have established the criteria.  We're talking about joining an exclusive club that includes Sign Man, Towel Guy, Die Hard Cards Fan, the Cardinals Cowboy, a guy who randomly dress like 80's wrestling legends and those now infamous Rams Rules participants. 

That's a mean lineup.

But with the recent success of the Blues, we expected some new faces to enter the ring.  It didn't take long before we had an intriguing application for inclusion into this bizarro fan fraternity. And serving as the meat of every application is TV appearances, or in this case, the potential of seeing this guy flash on the screen every time a penalty is called:



At first this had the makings of a one-time, possibly alcohol-induced appearance - the hieroglyphics on the face, the sunglasses inside, needless use of a Blues helmet and most notably a random NHL referee jersey - but over multiple games, the cameras locked in on him, the texts and tweets rolled in to our inbox nominating him as a candidate and even a brief description from a trusted JSF Fan Hunter confirmed suspicion that this was more than a brief fling with super fandom.  According to our fan hunter's account after sitting in close proximity, "he shows up in a huge black trench coat and stands up and makes every call during the game."

We've been officially put on alert. We've got ourselves a potential future star inside Scottrade and, just as we like it, he's one who will never set foot on the ice. 

Now all we need is a name:

We're voting for Kerry Fraser's Evil Twin.

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