10 Times Children Got Involved In Professional Wrestling

4. NWF: The Children's Wrestling Federation

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClHZcVYf9BvGCWVxphjIcQQ When you were a child, did you ever think "Gosh that grappling sure looks like a lark. I wish me and my fulsome chums could form our own league. But darn, we're just kids"? Meet the children who put your childhood self to shame. To absolute shame. They are the children from the NWF, the National Wrestling Federation. They were a wrestling promotion created by, and run by, children in the mid-80s in Anoka, Minnesota. The NWF was on a national cable channel. They put on public shows that drew hundreds of people. Not one of the wrestlers or the show runners was over 16. If you're now depressed at how little you've accomplished in your brief sneeze of an existence, that's totally fair. The Little Federation That Could began its life as simply kids filming other kids having scraps on four mattresses pushed together. It was pretty terrible. Dean Malenko would have been very cross. Eventually they rigged up a rectangle of hardwood boxes and tied ropes around posts to make a squashed ring. The ropes were not ring ropes. They were actual ropes. The boys had a deal with the local public access station and their show, mostly consisting of promos and matches filmed on handheld cameras, went out to TV all over their city. They upgraded to a boxing ring in a local high school, before putting on a risky big show in a local armoury (as one of the then-kids, now-adults points out: "the first Wrestlemania was a risk for Vince McMahon as well") and over 300 people came. They bought an actual wrestling ring and started making shows for national cable. WHAT? HOW CAN CHILDREN...? WHAT? The Federation only fell apart after (no jokes) adults stole their ring. They release old footage regularly on their youtube channel here. Check it out. It's astonishing. They even have their own Hall of Fame! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEoJ990PhEY What?!