Reflections on 2016

Before we get too far into the New Year, let's spend a moment to reflect on what 2016 blessed us with in the world of the Bodyslam Fan blog.  But first, I'm sure most of you are anxiously awaiting the announcement for Wrestler of the Year, but I regret to inform you that there will be no such award for 2016.  The turmoil from the presidential election spilled over to the WOTY Selection Committee, and things got pretty ugly pretty fast.

No one was willing to compromise or even consider seeing things from someone else's point of view.  Allegations of corruption, criminal acts, and even sexual harassment were rampant, and #notmyWOTY became common place.  We also experimented with electronic voting, but every time the votes were tallied, Vladimir Putin came out the winner even though everyone on the Selection Committee denied voting for him.

With all this chaos and animosity, I decided to just completely scrap the Wrestler of the Year award this time around and instead do something different.  Because I always enjoy finding new wrestlers and featuring them in my blog, it seems like a good idea to highlight four of my favorite new guys who first appeared on the Bodyslam Fan scene last year:

Destroyer Dharma debuted on my blog shortly after making his own debut at Singapore Pro Wrestling in a high flying match against Rowdy Ranga.  And by high flying, I mean Dharma had his opponent flying high around the ring.  You can watch the whole match here.  Dharma's second match was a handicap bout because SPW felt it wasn't fair to have just one guy face the reining Mr Singapore in the ring alone.  As you can see here, it wasn't much of a handicap.  Now I understand from Dharma himself that he will be in a battle royale later this month.  It looks like the big guy is making a name for himself at SPW, and let's hope we get to see more of Destoyer Dharma in 2017.

One of my favorite posts from 2016 featured Kevin Lin in a match from Underground Championship Wrestling.  Despite doing this blog for several years, I never really paid much attention to UCW, but I'm glad I finally decided to check them out.  Kevin appears in a few UCW matches, but I don't think he's been in anything new for the past several months.  But I'm hopeful he'll be back on the mats again sometime in 2017.

What can you say about Steel?  Thunders Arena has a knack for finding the big guys who know how to flex their muscles and then really show them off by gorilla pressing other dudes.  Steel has appeared in several matches at TA during the last year, and although he has been an infrequent guest on my blog so far, I expect that to change in 2017.

And finally there's Tanner Hill at Rock Hard Wrestling.  While Thunders Arena loves to feature the big bodybuilder guys like Steel, the wrestlers at RHW like Tanner are more often the high school jock and college fratboy types.  RHW is not as prolific in its production of matches as TA is, and I was even worried last year that its run might be over, but luckily their wrestling continues.  I look forward to see what they have in store for us in 2017.

With wrestlers like Destroyer Dharma, Kevin Lin, Steel, and Tanner Hill in action, 2017 should be another exciting year for the blog.  And one wonders what new wrestler will take the scene by storm. We'll just have to wait and see how things play out over the course of the year, but here's one guy I hope we get to see more of in action:

Happy New Year dudes!