Five Things You Don't Know About Gregg Gethard

1. Childhood obsession with Canada.

Most kids are obsessed with comic books or whatever, my brother was inexplicably obsessed with the nation of Canada. He had every fact about Canada memorized. It was a burning obsession through most of his childhood, which I hypothesize didn't fully go away until we went to the Summerslam at the Meadowlands featuring the Bret Hart led Canadian bad guy team getting beat. To this date, to my knowledge, Gregg has never been to Canada.

2. Threw his own ticker tape parade when he was 3 years old.

I was too young to remember this, but my mother loves to talk about it. When the Iranian hostages were freed in the early 80s, my brother ran to our bathroom, grabbed a roll of toilet paper and without any prompting or anyone having any knowledge that a toddler was aware of the customs of a ticker tape parade, threw his own ticker tape parade. Gregg also read the newspaper every morning when he was three, cover to cover (genius). Seriously, no one knows how as a small child he knew about reading and ticker tape parades and Canada, he just did.

3. Is a terrible fighter, but has thrown a couple straight rights that were gifts from God.

Gregg is a bad fighter, a really bad fighter, and the only times he won in fights as a child were when he fought dirty, which was advisable in our neighborhood of constant fights. BUT, a few times in his life, he has summoned a straight right which has immense KO power that makes no sense if you know his skinny sickly frame and generally non-confrontational demeanor. He once knocked me completely unconcsious with one punch in our kitchen in West Orange. It came out of nowhere, right on the button, it was like textbook boxing, his feet were framed right and he turned his whole body into it, I was fucking pissed. I remember another time he knocked a dude out of a speeding bicycle by sending a straight right, right into his face at Otter Lake, a campground in the poconos we used to frequent. The kid was the grandson of the owners and was douchey and messing with us, and Gregg summoned his superhuman punch. There have been a few other occasions where it has happened - it really is like Arthur pulling the sword from the stone in its unexpectedness and mysteriousness.

4. Is a kingpin of the little known world of fantasy wrestling.

When Gregg and I first got the Prodigy online service in about 1992, we quickly discovered a world of other geeks obsessed with wrestling. We thought we were the only ones, besides a few other dorks in our town. We used to watch every second of wrestling on TV and read magazines about it whenever we could. Prodigy gave us all kinds of information to read. It also introduced us to the world of fantasy wrestling, where you make up your own character and basically play D&D but with wrestlers in a wrestling world instead of elves in a fantasy world. The first character we came up with was an African king named the Mighty Impala. Then we became feuding brother characters named Famine and Pestilence. I did this from about seventh grade to ninth grade *. Gregg did this all through high school and college, and became one of the most sought after character players and match writers in the entire world of e-wrestling. It's a really small subculture and all those dorks know each other real well, and Gregg was like one of the Beatles in their world. He doesn't do it anymore but is still legend among them - when you google his name, you occasionally find dorks writing blog posts about some feud some weirdo character he had six years ago was in, and how it was like the Citizen Kane of online wrestling.

* Full disclosure - I briefly returned to this game when I was super depressed in college, but quit after about two months when I realized it really wasn't helping my horribly low self esteem to play fake wrestling online.

5. Used to think it was cool to rock a bright orange corduroy jumpsuit.

It wasn't. He got it from our neighbor's garage, our neighbor was a pack rat who gave Gregg all these garbage bags full of clothes. Gregg thought it was hilarious to wear an orange corduroy jumpsuit he found to high school, many times. It was kind of hilarious, but in a really specific lack of dignity way, which Gregg is sort of the king of. I myself stole a Guinness sweater from the pile and it's still in my warddrobe, it's classy and gets tons of compliments.