Suplex Vintage: The Aladdin’s Cave of Wrestling Merch and Nostalgia

It is roughly 10.45am on a foreboding looking morning on the south side of Philadelphia. The clouds outside Suplex Vintage Wrestling are giving ‘Cody Rhodes torn pec’ purple as they bulge ominously overhead, once again about to cascade across the Pennsylvanian pavement that I will, in 15 minutes from now, have to negotiate without a hood on my jacket or an umbrella to hold aloft my head. Well, maybe 20 minutes, I think to myself as my eye catches the Mint On Card Jakks Pacific Titantron Live Series One Kane and Superstars Series Eight Shane McMahon and Commissioner Michaels, that formed a small part of my bedroom conquering action figure collection as a rabid 10-year-old wrestling fan, 25 years ago. OK, maybe I’ve got half an hour actually, I’ve just spotted the WCW Galoob section.

I am, as a 35-year-old married man with two children, gasping at action figures I owned a quarter of a century ago, staring back at me from a mesh-fenced display wall, carrying collectors’ item price tags and just crying out to be ripped open so I can formulate a year’s worth of storylines for them on the floor of my childhood bedroom in Pike Hill, Burnley. Only I’m now across the Atlantic Ocean, thousands of miles and 25 years later, wondering how long is too long to spend in a vintage wrestling memorabilia store.

Honestly, you could never stay too long in Suplex Vintage Wrestling.

I gawp at the sheer breadth of merchandise on display as me and my gaping jaw meander mindlessly up the stairs, wondering how I’ll ever pull myself away from this Aladdin’s cave of wrestling curiosities and collectibles. The mezzanine level, overlooking the entrance way, is cloaked in a homemade Hell In A Cell roof and adorned in everything from vintage wrestling tees to WWE turnbuckle pads. Better still, the projector screen to my right is playing some 1995 ECW only a few feet above a wall heaving under the weight of the most miraculous replica belt collection not owned by Conrad Thompson.

Various VHS tapes from the ’90s, neon signs and near-impossible-to-find trinkets are decked across every shelf and wall. A Sega Genesis is fired up with the Royal Rumble cartridge while the pinball machine of the same name occupies some prime real estate in the corner of the room, laid out with an NWO Wolfpac foam wolf face. The temptation to wear it while pulling up one of the almost innumerable souvenir steel chairs from so many PPVs down the years and firing up the VCR to watch everything from Survivor Series ’91 to World War Three ’96 is almost too much to bear.

My visit to Suplex, however, is a pre-opening hours stop to interview Woody Kumetat, one of the senior heads down at one of Philadelphia’s most beloved vintage stores. I am here, after all, during WrestleMania 40 week and am eager to soak up some of the local graps culture that Philly has become so notorious for over the past 30 years, from the advent of ECW to the present day, with the City of Brotherly Love hosting the biggest WrestleMania of all time this past April, attracting somewhere in the region of 100,000 fans to the city.

Armed with a box of a dozen Federal Donuts from across the street, acutely aware that Woody and co. will soon have a queue snaking out of the door and halfway down South Street for the next six days so perhaps a few bundles of sugar and refined carbohydrates will be necessary, I meet Woody outside the shuttered storefront and venture inside with all the eager anticipation of a rookie making their maiden journey through Gorilla Position into a sold out Madison Square Garden.

For those of you already aware of Suplex, you will have likely seen the team rewatching classic tapes and animatedly debating modern day graps on their Instagram feed or you may have caught a couple of them chowing down some Angelo’s pizza with Action Bronson on the Philadelphia episode of ‘F**k, That’s Delicious’, with their immense cult following extending to several of the biggest names in rap such as Bam Bam Baklava himself, Lil Uzi Vert and Westside Gunn. Oh, and they happen to count the likes of Dominik Mysterio and Grayson Waller among their returning customers.

So, what’s causing all this? How did Suplex come to be, how come people will pay OVER A THOUSAND DOLLARS for a t-shirt, which names sell the best and, seriously, would you lads miss these old WCW figures?

WrestleSphere: So, first things first, how did you get started with Suplex?

Woody: So I’d say about 11 years ago, we had a sneaker store and when they were trying to come with the name, came up with Suplex. Just because it’s fun and catchy, but also because we’re all wrestling fans. Like that’s just an undercurrent of everything we do. So about a year and a half ago we actually won the award for best vintage clothing store in Philadelphia, as just a vintage t-shirt store. So we had everything sports, but we were selling a lot of wrestling stuff and that kind of became a thing, like as we’re going to the flea markets to grab more vintage stuff, we’d be like, oh, look at all this cool wrestling stuff they have. And we’d grab that, too. But we had nothing to do with it. We’d just put it in the basement. Like, this is just cool stuff, we’ll find something to do with it eventually.

And we started looking around and thought, ‘man, we have so much wrestling stuff in the basement. What if we just did a full wrestling store?’ And they were like, ‘yeah, we could do that’, and we can get together and watch pay-per-views together and hang out there and maybe people would come and watch with us and kind of get like a little fun clubhouse feel. So we’re like, screw it, you know, why not? We shut down the vintage store, painted all the walls black, put up chain link fence and barbed wire. We opened back up as a wrestling store and everyone was so confused, like ‘it wasn’t barbed wire last time I came in this place.’ I was like ‘oh no we moved all the other vintage to our sneaker store’, so we have a little row of vintage there now. And we started to find that it’s not as niche as we thought it was. We thought that we probably wouldn’t get many customers. And then people started coming in. And we’re like, oh, people are really into this stuff.

WS: So, customer wise, is it more hardcore or casual fans that come in here?

Woody: The way we set this place up we try to make it so visually appealing with the huge windows, when we open those curtains, you walk by and you see those titles and you’re like ‘what’s going on in there?’ and the amount of people that just pop their head in and then after 10 minutes of them looking around we start talking to them and they’re like ‘oh yeah you know I used to watch wrestling when I was a kid, my uncle showed it to me and we used to watch Stone Cold together,’  and I’m like ‘oh, yeah, I’ve got a bunch of Stone Cold shirts. Then they see them and it’s ‘Oh my God, I had this shirt!’ Then it’s  ‘yeah, I got Stone Cold figures, too’ and they’re like ‘yeah, this is the one!’. So, suddenly, this casual guy that just walked in is in the thick of it again. He’s right back to being 12, and he’s reliving this nostalgia all over again. And sometimes they buy and sometimes they don’t, but we got to have that moment for a second and that moment is what we’re chasing right now rather than the sale.

WS: Have you found that there being a surge in 90’s pop culture over the last few years has really helped you here, as well?

Woody: Oh across the board that’s really helped. The vintage community has come up so much and the nostalgia of the ’90s I think has definitely helped, because you think wrestling in the ’90s you think Attitude Era and man, that was amazing, that was just  a special moment in time for us all. But you saw during the pandemic the rise of vintage was insane. Literally everything we had here doubled in price. That actually helped us kind of build the cash flow to get us to the point where we could do this too. So the two things that blew up were vintage and trading cards. We have a card store, so that kind of gave us that little boost, because we knew, man, you open a wrestling store, you’re not going to be successful right off the bat. It’s not like ‘oh yeah this is gangbusters, watch out!’ We had a five-year plan. Two months after we had that plan they announced WrestleMania is going to be in Philadelphia. We took that plan and threw it right out the window. We just had to focus on April. April, we have to be 100% ready to go by April. What we want to do in five years, we have to do in a year and a half now. And I think we’ve gotten to a point where it’s something we got really close to doing. I still got my original list of everything I wanted to have done, and I’m like 90% knocked off, which is awesome but it’s been a hustle. But it hasn’t been work, y’know? It’s working on your favorite hobby and you’re getting to do it with all your friends.

WS: How long have you all known each other before getting into Suplex?

Woody:  I was brought on when they switched it to a wrestling store. When the idea of a wrestling store came up, I started having meetings with them. I used to manage a sneaker store down the street. I also do back-end SEO. I build websites. So I’ve known Chris and Mike, the owners here, for, jeez, probably 14 years. They literally said, and Chris has shown me this in his book, they had an idea for a wrestling store and the very first name they put down was mine. Because they know I’m a huge wrestling nerd and I’m also a huge computer nerd. Like, I can help make things happen to get something built up. I mean, me and my wife were married at Wrestlemania 33. My wedding photo I’m holding the NWO belt. So they called me in and tried to pitch me this idea and I said, ‘what are you guys trying to sell? Are you kidding me? Oh and you’re gonna pay me? This is fantastic!’ yeah so it’s just been a dream and it’s with people that I know and trust, cos like I said they ran a successful sneaker store for over a decade. The amount of shoes they’ve sold of mine, it’s been insane. They helped me pay for vacation. It’s just good people and a good idea and it wasn’t even about whether this was a really smart money idea. It was about doing something really fun and shooting for it. I’m not quite 40, I got time to shoot for something crazy and see what happens.

WS: Which wrestlers or promotions tend to sell best with your customers?

Woody: Austin and Undertaker sell like crazy. ECW merch, people kind of know they come here for that. And also anytime we get cool New Japan and All Japan shirts, they’re gone.

WS: Is there any merch you get in that you really don’t want to sell and just keep for yourself?

Woody: I hate selling belts because once they’re gone they’re really hard for me to get again. Like the crumrine belt right now, the big gold, it’s my favourite thing in the world and every time I sell it I’m just like ‘I should have just taken that one home.’ I get really sad when something’s not my size. I’m on the lookout constantly for a WrestleMania 20 shirt. It’s one of my favorite ones, and we got one and I measure it and it’s like 23 chest pit to pit. And I’m a 25. I’m like, ‘I can’t squeeze into that thing, I’m not getting smaller in my old age,’ so, yeah, there’s a few pieces that I could tell you, if I ever come across them, like, you won’t even know I did, because they’ll never hit in the floor.

WS: Is there any ‘Holy Grail’ memorabilia that you or the guys here are desperate to get your hands on?

Woody: There was a few Austin shirts we were dying to get and we just got them in. We just got a super rare Stone Cold one in and this thing goes for usually somewhere between a thousand and fifteen hundred dollars, so we kind of just figured we’d never see it, but we got someone who gave us a stack of shirts and he asked for  $500 for the whole stack and there it was. We’re like ‘oh s**t!’  I think I overpaid on some of the other shirts but that was fine.

WS: What’s the most expensive single item you’ve ever sold?

Woody: I have a WrestleMania 14 crew shirt and you see that thing go for over $2,000. We got a Dudley boys ECW arena shirt that was worn by Spike Dudley. All the shirts when they came in, came in three sizes it was a large, 2x and 3x. Because Spike wore large and everyone else wore 2x. So we have that one and that one usually goes around $1,800. I’m dying to get this white RVD shirt (pointing to shirt on one of the downstairs racks), but I know I’ll ruin it in a moment, so I don’t want to pay for it. I can’t believe this thing’s in such pristine condition. It has to be 2001, maybe even like 99 and it looks like it’s never been touched.

WS: Finally, you’ve got a reputation among not just wrestlers, but also rappers who are huge wrestling fans themselves. Which big names do you get walking through your doors, here?

Woody: Grayson Waller was just in the store shopping. And I’m like, ‘is that, is that Grayson Waller? And he turned around, he was super nice. He was buying bootleg Shawn Michaels stuff. He was looking for him and Carmelo Hayes because they wanted to both wear it to the meeting they had with Shawn Michaels later that day. He thought that would be funny. And he bought some cut-off Stone Cold shirts and said he was gonna work out in them. Dominik Mysterio is a customer of ours. He loves vintage stuff. We posted a picture of a great ‘Latino Heat’ shirt and he instantly comments ‘I need that!’ Lil Uzi Vert, he’s a friend of the store. He comes in here and he’s buying all the autographed belts we had because he thought it would just look cool on his wall. And then while he’s in here, West Side Gunn walks in. That moment was surreal. Westside Gunn is doing a pop-up on the second floor. He takes vintage shirts and he prints over the top of them, so it’s his stuff mixed with the vintage wrestling. This is the kind of s**t that happens here.

I leave Woody to finish opening up the store as I take myself for a peaceful wander round before the mayhem unfolds (a WWE 2K tournament is scheduled for that lunchtime and then there’s the small matter of, y’know, a full wrestling block party to organise three days from our interview). I bundle out of the store into the unrelenting Philly downpour, that seemingly doesn’t cease for the next three days and seek solace (and two slices of pizza) in the Olympia II diner a few doors down. I luxuriate for the best part of an hour over slurps of soda and The Price Is Right re-runs on a television set that looks older than I am. When I finally make my way back pavement-side, the queues are already forming outside Suplex and are there whenever I pass for the remainder of the week. Nostalgia and community blended together in perfect harmony. A wondrous place for wrestling fans of all ages and promotional persuasions.

Follow Suplex on Instagram at @suplex.svw and visit their official website HERE