Dragon Heart proudly displays his half-eaten piece of pizza, as if to say, "That's right, food can't mess with me."

    In most cases, I don't agree with the saying that "a picture's worth a thousand words." Bad writers use it as an excuse not only to write poorly, but also to fill articles with pointless unrelated charts and graphs. In this case, I'll make an exception and litter your monitor with pictures of these cutting edge athletes, as a pleasant backdrop to my narration.

    In the defense of backyard wrestlers, at least they do what they brag about doing, however ridiculous it may seem to anyone with a full set of chromosomes. Sabotage, Dragon Heart, and Hemp Man, for all their website bragged about them being total thugs, did little more than eat food and stand on things. It was apparent to me that most of the pictures on the site were taken over the course of a day or two, and that they'd continued to take pictures of themselves sticking their tongues out and flashing signs even when their parents had instructed them to do more constructive things, like the laundry.   

    The Triad, as we came to know them by, embodied that which we loved to write about in regards to freestyle walking, and we pasted them all over the site. I believe it was Dan who, in a stroke of pure genius, e-mailed them the link to the site and asked for their personal opinion on our job. And I believe it was Sabotage who replied with a lengthy essay that wounded my feelings deeply. In it, he complained that we only showed the pictures of them sitting around and eating, and that nowhere in our article did we portray them as the superstars they were. I'm determined not to screw them over in the same way again, so Sabotage, two years later, I now make up for it with the following action shots, and detailed descriptions of the moves being done in the pictures:

Hemp Man leaps from a precariously high dumpster behind his house. On par with your specifications, I have neglected to show the two pictures taken immediately after this one, in which Hemp Man hits the ground knees-first, curses loudly, and attempts to hold back the tears. I've also left of the pictures in which the rest of you make fun of him, and he starts throwing punches before returning home in tears.

Another Hemp Man classic shot, this one of Hemp Man heroically lifting himself from the ground and hanging in midair for multiple seconds, a feat I doubt he can do more than once in the same day. To the readers, I've never been able to find out if any part of that trick included standing on the swing to his left and riding it like some sort of flame-encompassed comet, but I'm reasonably sure it did.

I don't know who this freestyle walker is, but if he's still standing on top of that gutter, you should probably warn him that it's getting ready to collapse. What his original plans for this trick were is a mystery to me, especially since the windshield of a parked car is located directly below him. Though never on their website did I notice you mentioning one of your crew crashing through glass, I'd like to think that's what happened - I would serve as a major redeeming factor for most of the content on there.

Sabotage, I hope there are no hard feelings. You're probably 14 or 15 now, and maybe don't even remember the three-day war you waged on myself and Dan, but I still feel like this all needed to be documented for future generations.

    The reason I profiled The Triad wasn't to anger them. At the time, I wasn't as unscrupulous, and had honestly hoped they'd find it to be funny. What made me stop caring about their favor early into our relationship was their overly homogenized hardcore-wannabe attitude.

For instance, they enjoy kicking signs. My personal favorite sign kicking photos are the ones in which Hemp Man struggles in vain to make his leg reach the handicapped parking sign, only to give up shortly after and go for the more easily accessible fast food drive-through window sign.

The Triad didn't stop with an angry letter, however. I received word a day later from someone who'd visited the site, pointing out that it had been defaced. Their elite hax0r skills had pulled through and they'd managed to paste the words "This site sucks!!!11!" all over the main page. Dan and I chose to leave it that way, feeling it was a vast improvement over the original layout, but that wasn't good enough for them. The Triad wanted attention, and they would have it. So the next day, when I returned to the site, they'd fixed it back, and made it better. The site now had a cool shockwave menu system and a better general look to it. With 48 hours, they'd changed it back to the original way it was, as if to say, "Did you guys see that? That's what could have been." We weren't too upset, but we did take down their pictures for an extended period of time. Until now.

How this scenario didn't end in the destruction of Loveland, Ohio (their hometown) is a question that will haunt me until the day I die.