Barking with the ScrapYard Dog…

I stopped by the Waffle House(one of our local sponsors) after the baseball game last night and you’ll never guess who I ran into.

This gentleman approached me and said, “You don’t remember do you?” Tom Landry, I replied? “Come on man it’s me”, he said. This was an African-American fellow, so my next guess was Manute Bol. Wrong… Muggsy Bouges, wrong… Willie Mays, wrong… Deion Sanders, wrong… Bobby Lashley, Ron Simmons, Booker T; wrong, wrong, wrong, but you’re getting warmer… Sylvester Ritter(The Junkyard, doing it JYD style in the WWF)…Very, very close but JYD is dead(for that matter so is Tom)… But guess what?????

The ScrapYard Dog lives…He’s ALIVE…..Now I remember this Champion of Champions who used to have a beard and wore a chain around his neck and he looked quite a bit like a minature Junkyard Dog, but he is the ScrapYard Dog. The SYD has been wrestling for 8 long, hard years now and he says he still loves to lace up those boots and crawl back up into the squared circle. The SYD has spent much of his career working for Tim Blaze and ACW but he also travels to Burlington where they now have two groups going for the same piece of pie in the CWF and the CWE. The SYD said he’ll work for anybody. In fact he has another big match coming up very soon here locally and we’ll mention that later.

Last night that Waffle House on Randleman Road became a Dog Pound as the entire customer base plus the cook ended out in the parking lot as the wrestling talk carried on into the evening. The discussion and howling mainly centered around the old days of wrestling where you had Jim Crockett and the NWA Mid-Atlantic Championship wrestling and later the WCW. Gene and Ole Anderson, Johnny Valentine, Blackjack Mulligan, Wahoo McDaniel, Paul Jones, Ric Flair, Ricky Steamboat, Arn Anderson, Tully Blanchard, The Four Horseman, Greg “The Hammer” Valentine, Manny Fernandez, then The Fantastics, The Rock n Roll Express, The Midnight Express, The Fabulous Ones, Carlos Colon, Gino Hernandez, Chris Adams…..

Like any intelligent discussion the lists and those names kept going in all directions. Bob Caudle and David Crockett were voted the favorite announcing team and Gordon Solie won the award for best overall announcer. Tommy Young got the nod for top referee. Bruce Mitchell was named best writer for his over 75 years of covering wrestling on the local and national levels.

The ScrapYard Dog told the audience during the question and answer session, (as many sat on the curbing surrounding the Waffle House parking spaces in the lot on Randleman Road), that SYD’s training came from none other than “The Raging Bull” Manny Fernandez. SYD said Fernandez is still probably his all-time favorite wrestler and he respects him for all that Manny has done for the business over the years.

Fernandez is my least-favorite wrestler of all-time because of the nights when he used to walk through the crowd wearing nothing but a towel after his matches at the Thomasville Armory. My thoughts were get your Bull-butt back into the locker room or the men’s bathroom(depending on which place was the dressing room), “we the fans or onlookers don’t need to see you out here wearing nothing but a towel”. In other words, “get some clothes on Jackass”.

Speaking of the Thomasville Armory, that brings me back to the ScrapYard Dog and the local tie-in to this story. The SYD will be wrestling “The BeastMaster”, Rick Link, at the High Point Armory(off of old Highway 85 South) on Friday night May 30th. It will be an ACW/Tim Blaze promotion. This may not be wrestling, it might just turn into a bloodbath when the Dog and Link get together.

The ScrapDog Yard still lives, but we may need to go back and write a new chapter to this current story-line after Friday night May 30th. George Brothers Funeral Service, please be on stand-by for that weekend.

That’s the word from the WrestleReunion in the Barking Lot at the Waffle House on Randleman Road.