Gunnar 'The Grizzly' Gaines is 357 pounds of wood grain alcohol-swilling raw Alaskan power. 'Offensive' Alex Adams is a stylish, womanising, five-time World champion. Current World Heavyweight champion Caleb Temple is a heavily tattooed, battlescarred religious psychotic who will enlighten his opponents with scripture before pummelling them senseless with any objects he can lay his hands on. Yet you will never see any of these men on television's World Wrestling Federation. Why? Because this is e-wrestling, one of the fastest-growing internet based hobbies around.

   The concept is fairly straight-forward: out-think your opponent, and you'll win. Players, or 'handlers' as they are known, write interviews in-character, and submit them via e-mail to their league's President (or 'Fed Head'). The President signs matches between characters, who argue back and forth, trading insults, threats and general banter (in this respect, there's a parallel with professional wrestling), with the Fed Head deciding who wins. The resulting matches which are then written by staff writers often make for some of the most entertaining reading around.

   There are currently hundreds of e-wrestling leagues on the internet, but most have a relatively short lifespan. Over the past two years, one of the mainstays has been the Extreme Wrestling Association, or EWA. The league, widely acknowledged as one of the most prestigious around, has served as the breeding ground for e-wrestling 'superstars' like the three mentioned above, along with other great names like 'Dark Destroyer' Shane Dalton, Super Scott, Drac 'The Raven' Dravin, and 'Dreamlover' Trey Porter.

   "E-wrestling is a great get-a-way from the bustling world," says Kent Kronenberg, currently Co-President of the EWA. "No matter how old, or how young, you can always join a federation and have a sense of being in the ring, exchanging blow for blow with your opponent. E-wrestling has to be one of the most interesting, intriguing, surprisingly popular, and entertaining things on the internet. E-wrestling is a fantasy excursion for those of us out there who aren't blessed with perfect bodies."

   With the backgrounds of some of the e-wrestling handlers, it's little surprise that their work is of such high quality. The e-wrestlers are intelligent, articulate, and often, incredibly funny. Cartoonish WWF-style "Unngghh! I'm gonna beat you up!" posturing, this is NOT. Two prime examples are 'Offensive' Alex Adams, and Gunnar 'Grizzly' Gaines. Adams' handler is a 29-year-old school teacher from El Paso, Texas, and the man behind Gaines is 29-year-old Oregon journalist Curt Kipp.

   Almost unanimously acknowledged as the best handler in e-wrestling history, Curt Kipp is the man behind characters like Gunnar and his environmentally sound brother George 'The Green Grappler' Gaines, Psychrobat, and tag-team legends The Good Knights. Curt's latest character, and current EWA North American champion, is investigative journalist Owen 'The Truth' Curtis, whose daily 'column' marks a fresh new approach to e-wrestling. "He lets me do all the things I _can't_ do in real journalism," Curt says of Owen. "Run people down for the fun of it, brag like crazy, boast about my sex life, and basically be a self-righteous muckraker who dishes fabricated gossip left and right while touting the pristine ideals of my profession."

   But there's much more to e-wrestling than just wrestling matches and titles, though. Done well, e-wrestling allows storylines to develop far beyond not only televised wrestling, but even some soap operas! Unfettered by the limitations of television and what can be shown, e-wrestling has had some great stories over the years, some of which might be more suited to a Quentin Tarantino movie. One of the most famous incidents involved Curt Kipp's Gunnar Gaines character, who mentally shredded his drug-ravaged rival Silencer so badly that he was driven to commit suicide during a live show. Add to that a disrupted funeral, kidnapped children, two recent shootings (one fatal), and a gay sex attack, and the only thing missing is John Travolta in a sharp suit as Dick Dale's 'Misirlou' plays.

   With fans of 'real' wrestling involved in creating such entertainment themselves, it's significant that the major promotions like WCW and the WWF are now moving away from the cartoonish gimmickry of the past towards a more adult-oriented product. Who knows, maybe this time next year, wood grain alcohol will be the official drink of the World Wrestling Federation?

   For more details on the EWA, contact Kent at: phillipk@erols.com. To learn more about e-wrestling, check out rec.sport.pro-wrestling.fantasy on Usenet.

Scott B