Day 044: Time Travelling Wrestling Sign of the Week

Having fans bring signs into events is a wrestling tradition as old as no-selling finishers and wrestler’s daughters being wooed by the enemy. Sometimes, they are obviously correct, like “Foley Is God” and “I’m With Stupid —->”. Sometimes, they are painfully wrong, like “Stevie Richards Is The People’s Champ” and “Val Has A Small Venis”. While the last entry couldn’t have been more wrong, this week’s sign is so on the button that it’s borderline creepy:

I caught this sign while watching “Stunning” Steve job out to Dustin Rhodes at WCW Halloween Havoc ’93. This was 3 years before “Stunning” became “Stone Cold”. While that doesn’t seem like a long time, in ’90s wrestling, that’s an eternity. There was absolutely nothing about “Stunning” Steve that was retained in “Stone Cold” Steve Austin. He was a pompous pretty boy heel from Hollywood. He had a hipster blonde haircut. He wasn’t a brawler. He didn’t have a bum knee. He couldn’t work a microphone. He was so far removed from the beer-swilling, cursing badass that you’d wonder if it’s even the same person.

What compelled this person to write this sign in [presumably] blood and gold tin foil? Did they really think that this cookie-cutter journeyman was the best wrestler of the decade? They were probably trying to be an asshole, marking out to a wrestler that nobody likes. Or maybe they knew they would get TV airtime, as nobody else would be stupid enough to make a “Stunning” Steve sign. And mission accomplished. They got prominent TV time and 27 years later, it’s still being marveled and wrote about by dummies like me.

Or maybe, just maybe, this sign was made by a time traveler. They already knew what was going to happen at King of the Ring ’96. They knew that there would be a ratings war and the WWF was going to win. They knew that an innocuous heel would change the landscape of wrestling forever. Seconds after the sign made airtime, the person was arrested by the Time Police and taken in for questioning. As it turns out, they are just some trailer trash that wanted to see how wrestling storylines turned out but then decided to go back when they accidentally saw Dale Earnhardt die. Definitely not a threat to the future. They confiscated the time travelling Nokia Pager, made them sign an NDA and sent them on their merry way.

Either way, the person must be very proud of themselves. If that were me, I would still brag endlessly about being right about something so unforeseeable. They probably spent years and years making other wild predictions, maybe even gambling money on it, but never getting it right again. The sign was their savior and their demise. The fan lives and dies by the sign.

– TeeCoZee