Most of us started the same way: as kids, messing around in a backyard, doing the moves we saw on TV because it was the most fun we'd ever had. A trampoline became a ring. A camcorder turned it into something we could watch back. And what began as a way to kill an afternoon quietly became the most important thing in our lives.
None of it would have happened the way it did without one discovery — an online message board called The Backyard Wrestling Link. Until we found it, most of us thought we were the only ones doing this. Then suddenly there was proof: kids and crews all over the world, filming in their own backyards, chasing the same feeling we were. It's hard not to bond with people when you realize you've all been doing the same strange, dangerous, beautiful thing in isolation.
The Boards That Built Us
The community didn't live in any one backyard — it lived online, on the boards. The Link came first, run by the crew behind VCW out of Vancouver — regarded by a lot of us as one of the best backyard feds there ever was. The Link had an aura. It could also be brutal: if you posted something the community thought was weak, it would let you know. People chased that approval, sometimes to a fault — changing the way they wrestled just to earn respect from names on a screen.
Then there was GBYWN — a different board with a different feel. It didn't carry the same intimidating reputation as The Link, but it had something just as valuable: a dedicated group of people who weren't trying to impress anyone, who just wanted to make stuff together and have fun doing it. For a lot of us, that's where the real friendships took root.
And running underneath all of it was WrestleFigs — the place where this scattered group of backyard wrestlers actually became a community. We woke up every day and checked these boards. We posted media, traded footage, argued, hyped each other up, and slowly turned a list of usernames into some of the most important people in our lives.
"Seeing that there were so many other people doing what we thought we were the only people doing — it's just hard not to bond with everybody."
Building the Ring
You can only outgrow a trampoline so many times before you want the real thing. Somewhere on the boards was a post explaining how to build a wrestling ring from scratch — and another on how to build a "base." Half of us didn't even believe it was possible. Then we built one: tires, wood pallets, mattress springs, plywood, carpet padding, and a tarp. The first time we bounced off those ropes, it changed everything. We weren't kids playing anymore. We were good at this.
That ring became the thing that tied the local crews to the wider world. When members moved on — some to train as pros, some into music, art, and other creative paths the scene first unlocked for them — the ring kept getting handed forward, kept hosting the next group of people who needed it.
Super Shows: Taking It on the Road
The boards made friends out of strangers. The super shows made those friendships real. A super show is simple to describe and hard to actually pull off: a bunch of us would take our own money, drive to another state — Indiana, Chicago, Ohio, anywhere someone could host — and put on backyard wrestling shows together. People you'd only ever known as a username would show up in person, and within minutes it was like you'd known them your whole life.
There's a particular kind of trust that forms when you're putting your body on the line next to someone, purely for the fun of it, with no money and no crowd to speak of. You drive across the country on a chance. You crash on couches. You wrestle, you laugh, you go home — and you've gained people who'll have your back for years. More than a few of us learned that you could be stuck anywhere in the country, car broken down, and there'd be someone from this community within reach who'd say "yeah, I got you."
"To be able to see people from other states, other countries, have a common goal — and realize their problems could be your problems, and you can actually help each other's lives out. That's one of the biggest things I got out of this."
What We Stand For
Brotherhood
Backgrounds that never should have crossed, bonded for life over something nobody else understood. These became family.
Doing It Ourselves
Homemade rings, homemade entrances, real bumps. No sponsors, no shortcuts — just people who cared enough to build it themselves.
Preserving It
This was a real scene with real history. We document it as it happened — not to rewrite it, but so it's never lost.
A Decade Later
It started, for a lot of us, as a "best of backyard wrestling" video — one person's love letter to the community, footage gathered from everywhere, set to music, made to hit you right in the chest. People shared it. They wrote paragraphs about what this scene meant to them. And it made one thing obvious: this never actually ended. We'd just let a decade slip by.
So we got everyone back together. Dozens of people from all over the country — and beyond — in one place again, falling right back into inside jokes from fifteen years ago like no time had passed at all. People apologized for old grudges. People who'd "retired" felt the itch the second they laced up. And everyone walked away with the same realization: these people aren't just something we did when we were young. They're in our lives again — and we get to choose to keep them there.
"The community is such a lifelong thing. This resets the clock."
That's why Golden Triangle Media exists: to preserve this — the footage, the history, the people, and the bond that outlasted all of it. The matches were never really the point. They were just the reason we found each other.
Watch the Archive
Every match, every event, every era — preserved on the channel.
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