Backyard wrestling

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Backyard wrestling (BYW), and also referred to as yarding or backyarding is a controversial underground recreation based on the usually untrained practice of professional-style wrestling in a typically low budget environment between predominantly 12 to 30 year old males. Some practitioners have attended wrestling school or learned wrestling abilities from those who do. For years, it has been followed by critical opposition and its popularity boosted by the boom period of professional wrestling notorious as the Monday Night Wars.

In the late 1980s to early 1990s, before it was opposed, backyard wrestling was often a good-natured genre which appealed to media for coverage. Gradually, it began showcasing the reckless basis of ultraviolent antics that incited controversy among worried parental guardians and professional personnel.

Backyard wrestling is a loose term that can occur anywhere from a park, field to an actual backyard and has become completely reliant on sharing home-filmed events, matches and videos via public-access television and the internet which were both an upgrade from distributing videos person-to-person retrospectively.

Television

• MTV's True Life: I'm A Backyard Wrestler
• The Ricki Lake Show: "Backyard Bloodbath!"

www.youtube.com/BXW610

Video games

• Backyard Wrestling: Don't Try This at Home
• Backyard Wrestling 2: There Goes the Neighborhood