ARWPRO was Live in the ‘Ville – Hessville, that is – on Sunday June 11, 2017 at 2pm under a 93-95 degree blue sky.  And on a black-top road surface.  So yeah, it was hot.  This event was part of a 3-day community festival in Hessville on Kennedy Ave.  If you haven’t sat in the middle of Kennedy Ave on a 95 degree day to watch wrestling, you haven’t lived.  It looks like this town party grew from an “every Saturday night for a month” thing to “screw it, let’s just shut down Kennedy Ave between 165th and 169th for three days straight!”

Well, this event was more of a wrestling exhibition than a full on 2+ hour show, which is good, because sitting in that heat any longer would have been unbearable.  I did start the show off right, though, by getting a yummy cupcake from the Weekend Baker‘s truck right next to the wrestling area.  There was a pierogi truck a ways farther up too.

The first match was the artist formerly known as Rancid Joey Rak vs. Dakota Prodigy.  Joey was introduced by Uncle Charlie as “the twig on a branch of the family tree” which drew a few “Twig!” chants through the match.  After   some punches and flips, Dakota injured one of his arms and left the ring to seek attention.  The ref had no choice but to count him out!  So The Twig got a relatively easy victory.  Hopefully when Dakota has recovered, he’ll get another chance at a Family Feud.  This picture to the right shows him when he had two working arms.

Match 2 had the newest Family member X-Caliber take on Santana Starks.  Since it had been proven at a previous show that the Masked Cubbie was not Starks, no matter how badly Dante DVS wanted it to be, the ARWPRO owner King Bishop has re-instated Starks to make up for him being unjustly accused of shenanigans. In his first match back, though, Starks went down to X-Caliber, and the Family is 2-0 on the card so far!

In Match 3, the Arabian Sheik tried to win the ARWPRO Heavyweight Title from Max Holiday.  Silly man.  The Arabian Sheik came out with headwear, bright green Saudi Arabian type flag, and – most importantly – pointy toed boots.  It didn’t take Max long to finish him off.

Match 4 was a tag team match, The Picture Show vs. newcomers R.O.W.  I did not catch what R.O.W. stands for.  They were a lot of fun, had good interaction with the crowd, and I want to see them again … maybe in a battle of the entrance music with Mr. 3% Jon Hudson. This was probably my favorite match of the night.

Match 5 was a Battle Royal, in which just about everyone who had wrestled already came out (except Dakota; get better soon, dude!) with a couple of people who had not been on the show.  There were about 8-10 people altogether, I think.  The winner after about 10 minutes was OSM, Old School Manson – making the Family 3-0 … not bad for a day’s work, I think Charlie deserves a raise!

The next ARWPRO show is on Saturday July 9, at their usual Lake Station American Legion home base.

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If you’re so inclined, check out the Northwest Indiana Wrestling Action Program (NWIWrap) broadcast Sundays at 9:30pm, right after Mostly Metal, which runs Sundays from 8-9:30pm, on WVLP 103.1FM in Valparaiso, IN.  If you’re not in Valpo, catch it streaming on http://www.wvlp.org and the Tune In Radio app.  Rebroadcasts happen Wednesdays 10pm – midnight, and NWIWrap is archived on YouTube, just search for NWIWrap.  You can find @NWIWrap on Twitter.  And you can subscribe to the nwiwrap@gmail.com Google calendar, where I try to keep up to date calendar postings of shows in and around the NWI region.  Because WRESTLING!