On Tekniq and the Liminality of Kayfabe

I once had a secret little email friendship with a cute wrestler who went by the name Tekniq. His regular gimmick was kind of a mini-Matt Hardy: black t-shirt and stylishly-flared white pants, mildly alternative but relatively clean cut. He had icy blue laser beam eyes, and sometimes also wrestled in a yellow luchador mask as “Papi Chulo”. Oh yeah, Tekniq’s finishing move was a “619” (but it was Vegas so we called it a “702”).

I’ll be quite honest, I was a total mark for this kid. Don’t know why exactly, probably the same reason I’m a shameless mark for Randy Orton. Laser beam eyes render me powerless. Tekniq and I barely ever even made eye contact at the shows – he seemed to put some stock in the principles of kayfabe and I was really timid about kayfabe breakage – but at some point Leeann told him that she and I were like totally his fans, and he took the time to figure out who I was enough to send me an email, something to the effect of, “What’s up girl! Tekniq” and I wrote back basically, “Hey there, what’s going on?” and there were maybe one or two more little one liners. Somehow it tapered off, but then like a year later he wrote me again — “Where you been girl? Tekniq”. I said I’d been in Croatia for much of the summer, and that I moved to Henderson and couldn’t make it to the shows much anymore, and how was his life going? He told me things were good – he gained some weight and bulked up, finally! And that was the last I ever heard from him.

Here’s a match in which you can watch Tekniq wrestle a fellow named Jason Riggs, who would later job to Hacksaw Jim Duggan on Heat, among other noteworthy developmental achievements. The Tekniq-Riggs match is not beautiful — they can’t all be epic — but both of those guys had talent. Oh also, one time Tekniq threw everybody for a loop when he took a call from Triple H on his cell phone. For real, when there was a Raw taping at the Thomas & Mack. I had it on good authority that Triple H was totally hanging around with this kid and apparently thought he was fabulous.