To The Editor, Bleacher Report

Re: The try-out article you asked for

Dear Mr. Editor

Here is the final draft of the “try-out article” you requested during our enjoyable and encouraging recent conversation via Reddit comments. I found the topic enormously challenging — arguably impossible — and I am very cautiously optimistic that my witty writing style will keep an our audience captivated and clicking through an entire slideshow of 61 facts, one by one, about wrestling boots (I’m worried that the section between Wrestling Boot Fact 44 and Wrestling Boot Fact 17 gets kinda same-y, you know?).

Please let me know what you think.

BS

 

61 Things You Never Realized About Wrestling Boots

by Bradley Sheepskin (special correspondent)

61. The very first wrestling boots are believed to have been worn by heel Adam Synn during an “Apple on the Tree Ladder Match” against Eve Torres at the In Your Garden pay-per-view on January Zeroth, Year Nothing, Day 6ish.

60. Some wrestlers don’t wear wrestling boots. That’s right, some wear shoes, and some have bare feet. Can you think of some barefoot wrestlers? We couldn’t!

59. Wrestling boots go very high up the leg, sometimes almost to the knee. This is specifically designed for pro wrestlers, because they spend the majority of their lives sitting around dirty arena locker rooms, so they might as well keep their fingers busy with a nightly 90-minute ritual of boot-lacing.

58. Ricky Steamboat couldn’t lace Ric Flair’s boots. Literally, the arthritis in his fingers was just awful.

57. Wrestling boots have a special memory-foam sole, developed by NASA for ASTRONAUTS, which means every dropkick, brogue kick and superkick you see is completely, utterly painless for its “victim.”

56. Hulk Hogan gave Hillbilly Jim a special pair of wrestling boots. Somewhere, right now, Hillbilly Jim is midway through a four-hour retelling of the story to a roomful of decreasingly conscious seniors.

55. The word “boot” is defined as “a sturdy item of footwear covering the foot, the ankle, and sometimes the leg below the knee.” A wrestling boot, therefore, is a sturdy item of footwear covering the foot, the ankle, and sometimes the leg below the knee of a wrestler.

54. Wrestling boots are responsible for an estimated 70 percent of the smuggling of illegal foreign objects (the other 30 percent being, of course, the smuggling of illegal foreign objects via inner-trunk-nutsack-swamp.

53. John Cena used to wear sneakers with a ridiculous built-in air pump instead of wrestling boots. ‘Member?

52. Wrestling boots have a lot of tight laces to provide extra protection against twisted ankles and broken bones, although that didn’t work in that video of Sid Vicious jumping off a turnbuckle in WCW.

51. A pair of new wrestling boots costs roughly ___$$____[NOTE TO SELF. DO RESEARCH AND ADD THIS PART LATER. DO NOT SEND IT TO THE BLEACHER REPORT EDITOR UNTIL YOU DELETE THIS TEXT AND REPLACE IT WITH A FACT ABOUT WRESTLING BOOTS. DON’T FORGET!!!!!]

50. Wow, 61 doesn’t seem like a huge number until you try to write a clickbaity list of pointless facts about obscure aspects of pro wrestling….. Pointless facts such as: If your shoe size is American Men’s 12, your wrestling boot size is 5.25. If your shoe size is American Men’s 8, your wrestling boot size is 9. And so on.

49. I’m only in the 40s. The start of the 40s. How many wrestling boots are in a 20-man battle royal? 40. There. There’s a fact.

48. Wrestling boots are… good lord. Is this worth it? Is this really how I want to hone my writing talents, by building ad-laden slideshows that value the almighty click above all other tenets of journalistic integrity. Wrestling boots smell awful. All of them. All the time.

47. You know what? I can’t do this. This thing will need 43 million clicks for me to break even, given the money I had to spend on the Oxford Encyclopedia of Wrestling Boots.

46. I’LL DO THE REST TOMORROW. TIME TO BLAZE ONE LOL. NOTE TO SELF: REMEMBER TO WRITE THE REST OF THIS BEFORE COPY-PASTING IT IN THE EMAIL TO THE EDITOR GUY. DON’T FORGET TO SCROLL DOWN TOMORROW TO SEE THIS NOTE TO YOURSELF.