5 Things That Will Never Go Out of Style in Pro Wrestling: #4 by The Russ

#4: Weddings Gone Awry

Vickie Guerrero & Edge

Stephanie & Triple H II

Stephanie & Triple H I

Miss Hancock & David Flair

Miss Elizabeth & Macho Man

Paul “The Butcher” Vachon & Ophelia

unless you’re pretending to be gay:

Billy & Chuck

FINALLY . . . THE RUSS HAS COME BACK TO SHOTGUNREVIEWS.COM!

Top 5 Favorite Shotgun moments

 by Russell Ray

I'm Russ. I used to write pro wrestling articles and was the managing editor for Shotgun for a while. If you want to know more, go bug Troy. He will probably write a blurb about each of us because I am too LAZY to write my own bio.

Anyway, I think I was the third or fourth person who came on board after the site initially launched in '99, and that period to 2002 was probably my favorite time on the site and what I would consider to be my heyday. At the time, I went through 3 jobs that I hated and wrote as much as I could while on the clock just to get through the day. Here are my top 5 favorite memories of that time:

5) Free schwag. Before the internet economy tanked and then the rest of the economy afterwards, people would throw free stuff at us with just the mention of the word "press". It's only recently with the advent of social media and the resurgence of blogs that this has picked back up again, but if Troy was good at two things, they were the best things to be good at: hiding dead bodies and scoring free (fill in the blank).

In the wrestling boom, we got the trifecta: ECW, WCW Monday Nitro, and a WWE house show. The house show was my favorite wrestling experience ever. I would rather watch a house show than Raw/Smackdown.

ECW was... well, it was ECW, and I guess it's one of those things that at least I could say I did it. The Indianapolis house show was cool from a historical standpoint because it was Mike Awesome's last appearance before running off to WCW (the crowd was about to lynch the guy) and Taz came back from WWE for one night to win the ECW Championship.

WCW was where Troy got to hand a business card to the possible next future Mrs. George Clooney, Stacy Keibler. This was when they were doing Nitro Girl auditions all over the country. Who knew that he would pick the one that would become the most famous?  (Troy's Note: Yeah, I was really going out on a limb there . . .)

Also, I got a complete set of the Royal Rumble Anthology 5 years ago... I guess I still owe WWE that review.