NAME: JONATHAN PAUL FULLER
AGE: 25 YRS
BIRTHDAY: AUGUST 7TH 1984
LOCATION: CHELTENHAM, UK
First things first.... I am NOT retarded. I was DELIBERATELY pulling that face in the above picture, and even though there have been (slightly) better pictures taken of me since then, I only keep that one up for comedy value.
Well, now that we've got that sorted, about me. As the above info says, I'm Jonathan Paul Fuller (friends can call me Jonny/Jon, enemies The Evil One), 24 years old, born August 7th (in case you want to send me a birthday present =D), and I now live in Cheltenham in the United Kingdom. Aside from that, there isn't a whole lot to tell, so bare with me as I do my best.
I first started watching wrestling around 1990ish, when my parents picked up Sky TV after we'd just moved to Gloucester. I think the first show we ever watched on satellite was actually Survivor Series '90 when the Undertaker debuted, but then again, that could very well be one of those memories which we make up to hide whatever hideous truth we don't want people to find out about. From that point on though, I know for a fact that I was hooked. My next big memory of wrestling was the Ultimate Warrior/Hulk Hogan showdown over the World and IC Titles at Wrestlemania V, before I remember a general mesh of superstars like the Macho Man, Mr. Perfect, and my personal favourite, the Million Dollar Man, Ted DiBiase. Like a lot of kids at that time, I was completely overawed by this weird and wonderful world of men in tights beating the crap out of each other, and it was enough to keep me hooked for the next five or six years.
During that time, wrestlers came and went. The Million Dollar Man retired from active duty, the horrible Giant Gonzalez came and fought the Undertaker before disappearing, and superstars like Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels pulled themselves from respective tag teams to become top entertainers in the business. One particularly fond memory I have was when Shawn Michaels delivered a little Sweet Chin Music to his then-partner Marty Jannetty for the first time, before then sending him crashing through the window of the Barbershop set used by Brutus Beefcake. That was when I thought, wow! I want to be just like HIM!!
From then on, Shawn Michaels became my favourite wrestler, even when he had Sensational Sherri as his manager, who scared the living bejeebus outta me. I watched Michaels rise to the top and cheered him on, much to the disgust of my Mum who hated his arrogant ways. But then, what did she know? When HBK won the World Title for the first time in the Iron Man Match between himself and Bret Hart, as he posed with the Title with fireworks erupting behind him, the feeling was great! I always preferred Shawn over Bret, although I did hold a certain amount of respect for the Hitman, but to me, the Heart Break Kid was always THE man and this finally proved it!
However, it was around this time in about 96-97 that wrestling lost it's edge. Many a fan stopped watching, and I'm ashamed to say that I was one of them. I can't remember when exactly, and I'm still stunned when finding out things about the period I thought I'd stopped watching but still remembered the events anyway. Anywho, I went a few years without the wrestling bug until catching the Rumble in '98, followed by various Raw's over the early part of the year, before finally watching Summerslam in August. After that one event (which, in retrospect, was somewhat unspectacular), I had been bitten by that same wrestling bug, and I began watching everything I could once again.
Come the early part of the next year, after browsing the web, I found the now infamous Kenny's Krib amongst others, and decided I'd have a crack at doing a bit of that. My Dad bought me FrontPage 98 and I busied away over one weekend, scanning in pictures, touching them up using Paint Shop Pro 8 and then uploading them onto the web. Here's a couple of examples:
As you can see, the quality wasn't exactly brilliant, but then, I did draw them by hand, scan them in and then try cleaning them up. Besides, the site got plenty of hits and plenty of fans who I suspect may not have even seen the likes of Kennys Krib before, but hey? For me, I was just glad that people were noticing my work.
However, I realised that my pictures alone wouldn't cut the mustard. Definitely not compared with the work of other South Park Wrestler artists on the web. That was why I decided to start doing something a little different. A little different, I hear you ask? Indeed.... I started creating Animations using a GIF animator I got free with FrontPage, piecing together numerous pictures to show wrestlers doing moves or taunts! Some were awesome, where as others just out-right wrong, but it was something that no one else was doing and it was mine, mine, ALL MINE!!!
These types of animations were my niche, and honestly, I loved doing them. However, as I got back to grips with my love of wrestling once again, I also came into contact with the internet and all of the other wrestling facets it gave me. Browsing the web opened my eyes to other worlds, most notably of which, e-fedding. For those who have never heard of an e-fed, it is basically wrestling on the web. You can create or take control of a real wrestler and then roleplay their interviews/segments to win matches and eventually become World Champ. Being the kinda guy that I am, I LOVED the idea and soon joined the first crappy fed I could find. As with most e-feds, it collapsed and I moved on.... Then on.... Then on, all the while improving and learning how to RP like a beast. I guess it was inevitable that in the end, I'd try and run one, and that I did. I honestly didn't expect it to last all that long. Maybe a month or two, probably less. But in the end, the W2KF lasted 2 and a half years.
My Wrestlemania 2000 Federation was, at the beginning, based entirely on the game of the same name on the N64. All results were based on the results of the game, and you could be any real life character I had created. Inevitably, we grew out of that primitive way of results and based them on roleplays, also allowing people to basically be whichever real wrestler they wanted to. For two and a half years, I ran the place single-handedly. Writing results, updating the site, keeping histories up to date and all the small little bits and bobs that needed doing, and this was only on weekends!!!!
As a result, the SPWF inevitably suffered. In the early days when the workload was much less, I still managed to draw new pics and come up with new animations, but as the W2KF took more and more precedence over my life, the SPWF was pushed to the backburner. By late 2000, I hadn't posted an update for quite some time. Then, in early 2001, I made a hard decision and chose between the two sites. The W2KF won, the SPWF closed. I gave up on the drawing, and concentrated on the e-fed, and did so over the course of the next year and a half.
However, running an e-fed single-handedly, and being able to do so on just weekends was obviously tough. It affected my schoolwork, and it affected my social and personal life to the point that I was getting not nearly enough sleep, and not going out at all with my friends. At the same time, the standards of a number of people within the fed were starting to slip. Where as I was tossing out week after week of lengthy, top quality match writing, only a handful of them were roleplaying. I become somewhat depressed and tried numerous times to pick things up. However, everything I did, everything I tried, failed. And so, after all that time, enough was enough and I decided to finish with it. That was in March of 2002, where I might add, we ended on a cracking PPV where I damn well gave myself the World Title for doing so much work!!!! lol
In the weeks after, I came across my old SPWF file on FrontPage again. Looking through it, I remembered the cool stuff I'd done and how cool it would be to start it up again. However, I didn't want to simply open as if nothing had happened. I wanted to make proper pictures which people could compare to the quality of those of Kennys Krib and (my personal favourite) Impala's. And to do so, I needed to start from scratch. So, I managed to get myself a copy of CorelDraw 10 and set about working out how to use the damn thing. It took a while, and I still haven't exactly mastered it, but what I have done is come up with something so much more professional than what I was doing before.
Over the course of the Summer and Autumn, I worked my ass off, drawing whenever I could. Having just started my first job, as well as my first year at Uni, it was somewhat difficult to do, hence the reason why the site took so long to get back up and running again. I didn't want to use the same design as I had last time either, since this was going to be bigger, better and badder than before, so I enlisted the help of my brother and Dad to create it for me. Unfortunately, the lazy gene runs rampant through our family, and neither of them did anything for months on end. After some rather hard pushing from me, my Dad finally set to work and with my help, we came up with this!
And so there you have it! The story of my love of wrestling, which led to the original SPWF and it's demise, the W2KF, and then the rebirth of the SPWF! Pretty neat, eh?
In the six years since the site has been re-open, nothing much has changed. Whilst almost all my friends have gone off wrestling and grown out of the ridiculous storylines and such, I'm just as hooked as ever, if not more so than before. I'm still e-wrestling, and I've now finished my University tenure and got a pretty nifty 2-1 out of it (the equivalent of a B, which believe me, is AMAZING considering how little work I put in). I'm currently still sticking at that same first job, attending car parks and just generally kicking ass until I decide to put my English degree to good use. But the really important thing as far as you guys are concerned is that I'm still updating and the SPWF is still alive. And after just over nine years, I've got no intention of letting this place die off anytime soon!
On the contacts page you'll find my e-mail address. Send in some questions for a FAQ I'll stick up when ready. Also, send suggestions, etc, since it'll be your input that really helps keep the site up and running.