I don’t know a touchdown from a touchback. I heard the Pirates are getting a new goalie, and… I don’t know a touchdown from a touchback. I heard the Pirates are getting a new goalie, and Allen Iverson’s batting average is through the roof.

For all my studied ignorance of American sporting traditions, there is one sport I can speak on with startling authority.

I may not know what RBI means, but I can expound on senton bombs, Asai moonsaults and dragon suplexes with the best of them.

That’s right, my one area of athletic expertise is professional wrestling.

And don’t even try to say it’s not a sport.

World Wrestling Entertainment is not a sport, it’s a soap opera for boys. But ultraviolent indie-federation, thumbtacks-and-light-tubes-as-weaponry wrestling – now that, ladies and gentlemen, is a sport.

My accidental love affair with underground, hardcore wrestling began as a child. My older brother, a Hulkamaniac from before it was retro-hip to be so, had always loved wrestling, but the World Wrestling Federation – the name of the WWE before those environmental goonies at the World Wildlife Fund rained on their parade – proved too tame for him.

We’re originally from near Philadelphia, so Extreme Championship Wrestling was the obvious choice for him to feed his bloodlust. He somehow managed to find ECW tapes at video stores, and although I wasn’t allowed to watch R-rated movies, I spent plenty of time watching bloody cage matches and seeing brutal chair shots to the heads of such greats as Terry Funk and Mick Foley as the irrepressible Cactus Jack.

Sadly, ECW was absorbed, along with WWE’s feeder farm-team federation, World Championship Wrestling, into the WWE. While Vince McMahon attempts to congeal all of wrestling into one slickly marketed, kid-friendly amalgamation, crazy young masochists all over the nation are keeping the legacy of the founding fathers of violence and pain alive.

The federation I have most familiarity with is New Jersey-based Combat Zone Wrestling. Because of their extremely bloody matches, they had to hold matches in Dover, Del., to get around New Jersey and Pennsylvania’s draconian, state-regulated athletic commissions and their pansy bans on ultraviolence – that is, until the city of Dover recently passed a law banning the use of anything other than the human body and boxing gloves in wrestling matches, effectively banning CZW.

They’ll move back to Viking Hall in Philadelphia – formerly known as the ECW arena – and avoid light tubes and barbed wire so they don’t break any pesky laws. Viking Hall is a nasty, little place in an out-of-the-way part of South Philly – perfect for events such as Cage of Death III, which I had the pleasure of attending in December, 2001.

I saw Sandman drunkenly stagger on a catwalk above the Cage. I saw Sick Nick Mondo – that sexy bitch – fall from about 20 feet in the air, through three tables, two chairs and a ladder, onto concrete. I saw countless chairs and trashcans to the head, and I saw an unfortunate cactus get destroyed after a hulking Wifebeater was hurled into it.

I also heard and participated in countless chants of various expletives, “CZW! CZW! CZW!” and, toward the decided minority of women in attendance, “Show your,” um, mammary glands.

CZW, like most indie feds, has a frighteningly devoted following and presence on the Internet. My friends who introduced me to the simple delights of seeing Mondo take a weed-whacker to his tattooed, mouthwatering, lithe belly – but I digress – faithfully take road trips once a month nearly 300 miles east to see CZW events. These kids own tapes of almost every event they’ve ever been to, and they check and post on message boards almost daily.

Fanatic devotion, arcane vocabulary and physical punishment – no one can say I’m sports-illiterate. Hey, that guy on television just put the ball in the little hoop! Was that good?

Melissa Meinzer wants to have, like, ten thousand of Nick Mondo’s babies. E-mail her at [email protected].