With one date remaining of the Cubs’ allotment of 2013 non-baseball special events, professional wresting returns this summer to Wrigley Field after an absence of nearly 80 years.
In what’s being billed as the “Rumble at Wrigley,” the featured match on the card pits Cubs Chairman Tom Ricketts against Wrigleyville Alderman Thomas Tunney with the combatants dueling in a 15’ x 15’ barbed wire cage.
Grapplers last appeared in the squared circle at the Friendly Confines in 1934 when more than 35,000 people packed the ballpark to see world champion Jim Londos best “Strangler” Ed Lewis.
“I’ve had it with melee-mouth politicians and greedy rooftop owners telling me and my family how to run our business,” Ricketts told the team’s magazine, Vine Line. “Tunney is as soft as baby poop and I’ll crush him like a kalamata olive.”
Ricketts last wrestled at the 76-lb. weight class in junior high.
“I might weigh 140 (lbs.) soaking wet in a tank top and shorts,” responded Tunney. “But that lout doesn’t know what he’s in for. I hope he wears some novelty Harry Caray glasses so I can smash them right on his face.”
While he has no ring experience, Tunney said he’s been practicing wrestling moves in between listening to his “whiny constituents bitch about how tough it is to get to Starbucks and Whole Foods on game days.”
Ricketts will be managed by Cub fan-savant Ronnie Woo-Woo with rooftop owners George Loukas and Beth Murphy seconding Tunney.
Other matches include the “Battle of the Former Skippers,” with Ozzie Guillen vs. Lou Piniella; the Bulls’ Nate Robinson squares off against Adam Dunn, billed as “The Dope against the Mope”; and in a tag team bout, Ryne “Silent but Deadly” Sandberg and Dave “King Kong” Kingman versing ex-Bears Doug Buffone and Ed O’Bradovich.
