3. Tony Kozina Punishes Ryan Kidd
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPMp86PRrzU At an Adrenaline Pro Wrestling event in July 2012, indie wrestling veteran Tornado Tony Kozina was booked to wrestle the then sixteen-year-old Ryan Kidd at a Magnum Pro show in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Part of the same triple-header tour as Kozina and his boys on Team Ambition, Kyle OReilly and Davey Richards, Kidd showed up for his match having posted a video to Youtube with a promo bigging up the hotshot rookie vs. ferocious veteran angle that he understood was the story of the match, as well as a few kayfabed tweets doing likewise from his wrestling Twitter account. By all accounts, Kozina (a man only really known at all due to a) having trained former Ring Of Honor world champion and current TNA wrestler Davey Richards and b) this incident) took exception to these in-character comments, and the fact that Kidds Twitter bio had cheekily read The fakest fake wrestler ever! What followed was the story of a mark for the business, attempting to stretch a minor for disrespect If the above video plays out like a dull, poorly worked ten-minute match with a pit bull sloppily savaging a teenager, well - thats exactly what it is. You can see that Kidd, a fledgling pro wrestler with no high school wrestling experience at all, has no idea how to work a man who keeps dropping down into an amateur wrestling starting position or a mixed martial arts guard position. For his part, Kozina seems to be having a bit of fun with the rookie, playing games and no-selling everything he tries to do to actually work the match, before switching to stretching him and slapping him around and finally applying a genuine triangle choke to knock Kidd out. Pro wrestlings unwritten rules mean that veterans police offences of etiquette and disrespect backstage or via stiff offense or stretching the guy in the ring. This kind of behaviour would, therefore, have been considered old-fashioned but acceptable without the legit choke ending, and had Kidd been an adult. It would also have been handy if Kozina had made his little life lesson entertaining to watch for the punters, but there you go. As it was, the industry was divided: between people who like to kid themselves that they have an old school mentality, and so backed Kozina up 100%; and people who couldnt see any disrespect in the first place, and felt a little bit sick watching a grown man beating up and knocking out a child. Richards, OReilly and Kozina would be involved in further controversy 24 hours later when they took money in advance to work the next show and then ran out of the back door with the cash without working the gig, so theres the professional part of the professional wrestler thing taken care of.
Jack Morrell
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Professional writer, punk werewolf and nesting place for starfish. Obsessed with squid, spirals and story. I publish short weird fiction online at desincarne.com, and tweet nonsense under the name Jack The Bodiless. You can follow me all you like, just don't touch my stuff.
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