I don’t claim to be anything more than just a conduit for Pooke. It demands fresh 4,000 word articles and I provide them. Well, I did provide them, in the before time. Then out of nowhere, the voice of Pooke went silent in my head. It left me and when something that great leaves you, it doesn’t usually come back.
It took 8 years, minor motivation by the always leggy Chikodemono and a frustrating website thrown together in one night to make that voice start whispering again. And now all of a sudden it’s yelling. It wants to be fed. NAY. It demands fresh word documents.
How do you start something like that all over again though? I wasn’t sure. Fear, uncertainty and doubt gripped me. Could I be of any help to the great Pooke in the sky? Could Chiko and I save millions from their miserable existence? In a word: Maybe.
So I brainstormed for upwards of 20 minutes. That voice, that Pooke, it spoke to me. It was firm, but kind. It asked me one thing: What makes Pooke what it is? There is no one answer. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of them. And they all deserve their moment to shine, to have respect paid to them…to be inducted into the brand new Pooke Hall of Fame.
We’re going to start that now with a man who gave me my only happiness as a child. A man who answered only to the “ones of the SKYYYYYYY”, a man who once described Bill Clinton as a “one of America’s greatest bag of shit idiots” and who defied all human limits. There is only one word for him: Warrior. And sometimes Ultimate, but that seemed more dramatic to just go with the one word thing.
The only man to ever hold both the IC title and WWF heavyweight title at the same time, the Warrior for a short span was the king of the wrestling mountain. Despite being mostly terrible at his chosen profession, the crowds of “little Warriors” embraced him unlike anyone not named Hulk Hogan during the early 90’s. The path seemed bright, a legacy in the making. Unfortunately, Warrior is bat shit insane and that kind of made the old bastard hard to work with. He was in and out of the WWF over the next half decade, each time returning with an even more atrocious haircut and noticeably less muscle mass. These returns went well initially, but he never stayed long enough to see if it would sustain. To say Warrior had grown more eccentric is an understatement. From changing his name legally from “Jim Hellwig” to “Warrior to the time he made a comic book in which he practices bondage role playing with Santa, the wheels had definitely come off.
He made a token run in WCW in the late 90’s to challenge Hollywood Hogan and his New World Order. I was going to try to recap this glorious event, but after around 20 seconds of watching a few highlights of him appearing in mirrors and one scenario that plays out like he’s raped Brutus The Barber Beefcake, I collapsed into a heap. My inner child could take no more. He didn’t want to see that. Heroes usually end up falling, but not at the hands of Horace Hogan, ya know?
Warrior is now a staunch right wing pundit who once noted that “Queering don’t make the world work” and that he was glad Heath Ledger was dead so that Ledger’s daughter would never meet such a piece of shit. Either this gin is starting to take effect or those words made me feel fuzzy all over. (Authors note: It was the gin)
He won us over, he left us, he came back, he left again. Not unlike our father’s, eh? Ya know, something to make this achingly poignant. Ah fuck it, Chiko said it best when I asked him for his thoughts on the Warrior. His quote, you ask? But of course.
“The Warrior still has an unrequited win over Triple H.”
And nothing can change that. Let the doors open to the illustrious Pooke Hall of Fame open for the first time and let it embrace it’s greatest son. DIG YOUR CLAWS INTO HIS ORGANS! The Power of the Warrior will always PREVAIIIIL.
LITTTTLLLLEEEE WOYAHHHHHHHS! FEED ME YOUR DREAAAAAAAAMS!!!!!
