I Joined a Play-By-Mail Wrestling Game in the Year 2017 Because Why Not?

When I was a child, like many a young boy, I loved wrestling. I watched it with great frequency, and I would even, on occasion, read a wrestling-related publication. I distinctively remember having an issue of WWE (then WWF)’s magazine that was promoting the 1995 King of the Ring pay-per-view, which is the one Mabel one. There was another magazine I read occasionally. I don’t remember what it was called. Maybe it was Pro Wrestling Illustrated. All I know is that I saw an advertisement in the magazine for a little something called the Imaginary Wrestling Association.

The Imaginary Wrestling Association was a play-by-mail wrestling game. You would create a wrestler, or wrestlers, giving them a name and such. Then you would pick from a series of moves that would have a certain number of points ascribed to them semi-randomly. If you had more points than your opponent, you’d win. You’d get placed in a league, and then you could compete for titles within the league, or also titles across the IWA landscape. You could even win some cash or a fake championship belt, though I was never that successful. I guess you could sort of compare it to something like Dungeons and Dragons, but I’ve never played that game so I can’t say for certain. All my knowledge of it comes from watching Community.

Community - Dungeons & Dragons characters

I jumped at the chance to join the IWA. I was nine at the time, making this a couple decades ago. It cost money to play, and I had essentially no money since I was nine, but that didn’t stop me from putting a weird amount of money into it. Since I was a kid, basically I would think of a new name for a wrestler that I thought was cool, and so then I ended up with, like, 20 wrestlers, and I couldn’t afford to pay for all of them to have a match. It was dumb on my part, but, again, I was but a child.

I got my brother involved, even though he was even younger than me and literally had no money to his name, and then some of my friends joined in as well. Then, a little something called the internet came into my life. When I got on the ol’ AOL at the age of 12, I immediately delved into the IWA-related world of the internet. Oh, there was a lot of IWA-related things on the early internet. In addition to the IWA’s own website, which had a chatroom, a lot of “stables” (groups of different players who had put their wrestlers under one stable name because the IWA was super weird in retrospect) had their own websites, and one stable’s website was pretty much the go to place for IWA participants to congregate. Before this, I had assumed the IWA was filled with people like me, which is to say little kids who loved wrestling. Then I found out, at the age of 12, I was way younger than most of the people in the IWA. It was primarily boys (and it was literally like 99% dudes) between the ages of 16 and 18, and then some college guys. The most successful wrestler in IWA history (at the time) was owned by a 28-year-old dude in the Marines.

Needless to say, the message boards and the chats were almost entirely people talking trash and bragging about how good they were at the game, because there is no group of people more awful than teenagers. I lost my interest in the IWA at the age of 13, and left the Imaginary Wrestling Association behind me. I hadn’t thought about it in years. Then, I remembered it, and to me it felt like a fun memory of an antiquated idea. After all, we’re talking pre-2000 here. Since then, the internet has exploded. The concept of a play-by-mail wrestling game seemed almost quaint. I was sure the IWA had long since been folded. Then I looked it up online and, much to my surprise, it turns out the IWA is still alive and kicking.

Finding this out, I knew what I had to do next: I had to rejoin the IWA, if only for the sheer novelty of it. Look, in the name of transparency, I should say that my desire to sign back up for the IWA is entirely based on how amusing I find the idea of a play-by-mail wrestling game in 2017 is. It’s a goof, a curiosity. As a kid, I took the IWA very seriously, because that’s how kids are. Now, I can wink at the whole thing, but also I can have some fun with it. I decided the time had come, many years later, to get back in the play-by-mail wrestling game.

The first thing I had to do was come up with a name for my wrestler. My initial thought, obviously, was to go with Mildred Pierce, the titular character from a 1945 film starring Joan Crawford. I believe she won an Oscar for it. They made a miniseries starring Kate Winslet, but make no mistake, I was thinking solely of the Crawford version. However, I then decided against it. My next thought was to name my wrestler in honor of economist John Maynard Keynes, and then for some reason J. Alfred Prufrock crossed my mind. All fine options, but in the end, I decided to name my wrestler after Captain Scrummy. As you no doubt know, Captain Scrummy was a low-rent ice cream man played by Michael Stipe in an episode of The Adventures of Pete & Pete. He gave Big Pete the scoop on what happened to Mr. Tastee, the much more popular ice cream vendor in Wellsville. I’ve always like the name Captain Scrummy. Plus, wrestling has a stories history of captains, from Albano to Rotunda. This also allowed me to go with the “Bona Fide Sludgsicle Bomb” as a finisher. I don’t feel like explaining the reference. It’s a little closer to sincere than I had intended heading into this project.

Pete And Pete at the Beach

After that, I had to choose my moves. I briefly discussed the process of choosing moves, but now allow me to dive into a little deeper detail. You will be forgiven if you skip this part, or only half-read it. First, you have to choose 10 wear-down holds from a list of 60. The moves are given a value between 1 and 30, with each number being used twice. I said that the process was “semi-random,” and here’s what I mean. The move values change between every “cycle,” but they don’t usually move a ton. For example, a move isn’t going to go from 30 to 1, but it may go from 30 to 25. There’s no pattern, though, so it still comes down mostly to luck. After you choose your 10 wear-down holds, you choose five set-up holds from a list of 30. Those holds are valued from 31 to 45.

Fortunately, the hold values were all listed on the IWA website. Unfortunately, every division, and there are several divisions, have different hold values. Beyond that, some of them are valued in a drastically different fashion. Take, for example, the pole ram. In a few of the divisions, it’s one of the highest-valued holds. In one, though, it was literally worth one point in the last cycle. So, let’s say I chose the pole ram as one of my moves. I’d have to then cross my fingers that I didn’t end up in that one division. Basically, I was unable to game the system, though I certainly tried. Here are the moves I ended up choosing:

1. Airplane spin
2. Choke Slam
3. Flying drop kick
4. Giant swing
5. Overhead toss
6. Shoulder breaker
7. Atomic drop
8. Full Nelson
9. Grapevine
10. Pole ram

Yes, I bit the bullet and went with the pole ram. I don’t know what a pole ram is. I assume it involves ramming somebody into a pole.

1. Abdominal Stretch
2. Boston crab
3. Texas cloverleaf
4. Avalanche
5. Big splash

There are a lot of submission holds in the set-up moves. All my moves selected, I put my wrestler info and a check into an envelope, and awaited my matchup with these 10 bad boys:

 

Since I don’t have a league yet, the IWA put me into a matchup with these 10 wrestlers they made up. I am happy to say they are the same 10 wrestlers that they used way back when I was nine. Even the artwork is the same. Nook the Secret Weapon is still there, ready to square off with my wrestler. These dudes are designed to be beaten. As a kid, I won all my initial matches even though I did not know the hold values ahead of time. If I don’t end up 10-0 after my first cycle, I’ll be surprised. Now, all I had to do was play the waiting game…

A few weeks later, I opened up my mailbox to see the big white envelope with “IWA” written on it. As a child, I would get so excited waiting for my IWA envelope to show up. On at least one occasion, presuming my IWA report was going to arrive that day, I faked being sick so I could stay home and get my report, like, two hours early. I was decided less excited to receive this report, but I was amused, and my mood did certainly improve. I also noted that it only says “IWA.” It did not say the word “Imaginary Wrestling Association” anywhere. Maybe it’s like how companies that sell sex toys or porn or what have you advertise how they will ship them to you discreetly (or so I think, if I am remembering the ads I’ve seen correctly). Nobody has to know that you are participating in a play-by-mail wrestling league. Personally, I feel like I have nothing to hide. I’m a grown man. I don’t care if my mail carrier doesn’t think I’m cool.

I opened the envelope, and it was jam-packed with stuff. There was the IWA Handbook, of course. I had seen that before. There was also some stuff clearly meant for new players. For example, a “Manager Questionnaire” that prompted you to provide more information on yourself, and your wrestler. There was a “How to Trask Talk in the IWA” pamphlet, giving me insight on, um, how to trash talk. This, frankly, is a bridge too far for me. I can’t imagine writing fake trash talk for a fake wrestler, and I’m a professional writer. This may also be why I’ve never gotten into Dungeons and Dragons or whatever. It’s too much. There’s something called “IWA Ringside Magazine.” I’m not entirely sure what it is. There’s a guy on the cover called Nightmare Sam Hell, who appears to just basically be Adam Bomb, the ‘90s wrestler from Three Mile Island. I was also given a sheet informing me of the supporting staff of something called The Gold Rush. I admittedly maybe am not too interested in figuring out what all this stuff is. I’m not nine years old anymore. Two of these characters are photos of David Hasselhoff and Stuart Scott. I don’t think they got the OK to represent Hollywood Harrison and Shooter Stevens with The Hoff and the late Scott. It’s kind of weird.

There was also a piece of paper welcoming me to the National Wrestling League. This is the league I have been placed in. I’m kind of disappointed in that name. The first league I was placed in as a kid was the High Profile League, or HPL. Then, I ended up in the much more evocatively named Coffin Filler League. My brother was in the Snake Venom League. Eventually, I also joined the Evil Clown League. Now those are league names. National Wrestling League? Not so much. This is where I find out how the rise of the internet had changed things. Back in the ‘90s, when you joined the IWA, you were put in a new league with all new players. It was a fresh league. Now, when you are a rookie, you get dropped into the NWL. You are allowed to stay in the league for a few months before transferring. So I was plopped into a league with guys who have clearly been around for several cycles. I was disappointed by this, because it meant I had no chance of winning a belt. I wanted a belt! I wanted to be Dixie Champion!

You can see how ol’ Captain Scrummy did in his first cycle:

This is not surprising, especially since I didn’t end up in the division where the pole ram isn’t a good move. It was worth 23 points this cycle. I won all my matches so vociferously. Captain Scrummy never even used his finisher. Every match was won with a shoulder breaker or by disqualification. It feels a little hollow.

If you want a sense of what the “trash talk” is like in IWA, well, take a look at this:

I will present that without comment, because of the old “If you can’t say anything nice…” axiom.

So what now? I have done what I set out to do. I participated in a play-by-mail wrestling game in 2017. I created a wrestler named after an obscure character from a cultishly adored Nickelodeon show and he won all his matches. Was it amusing? Sure. Where does it go from here? I don’t know. Maybe nowhere. Maybe this is it. I’ve tickled that itch for novelty. The Imaginary Wrestling Association deserves…credit is maybe not the right word so let’s go with admiration, for sticking around this long. They aren’t even the equivalent of vinyl. They are a cassette, maybe even an eight-track. However, Captain Scrummy beat down Nook the Secret Weapon at my behest, much like nine-year-old me’s wrestler Jailbreaker did over two decades ago. The world is a strange place. The world is a beautiful place. Captain Scrummy lives.

Did you ever participate in the Imaginary Wrestling Association? Let us know in the comments, and check out the Wrestling Rumors Facebook page.