What is Skalbamania?

The first ever Skalbamania champion: Mr. Perfect

Skalbamania is more of a concoction than an idea, but let me give a history of it's origin.  My sophomore year of high school, I was in a class where I met Josh Harvoth.  Both of us had the common bond of being life long wrestling fans and for a short period we were lab partners.  Instead of paying attention to the lectures, we drew up a bracket of 64 spots and filled them out with mostly wrestlers.  The winners were decided by a flip of a coin.  This literally went on every day in that class and started to incorporate other people from classmates to faculty to other TV characters.  It became a fun tradition within that class.
The other part came from a website I frequent often, GameFAQs.  They started a Character Battle, a tournament made of strictly popular video game characters.  This was more organized, the characters were seeded and the winner was determined by voting from the site visitors.

George Costanza: The second champion

During my first year in college, while still attending Purdue Cal, I was bored and wanted to create a tournament.  I wanted to randomness from the ones we made in high school.  The characters and placements would be unpredictable.  But I wanted to decide who won by the voters instead of random chance, like GameFAQs.  Given that time period, I had to come up with a way to make it happen.  I found a website that allowed for bracket creation and was able to fit in some code that allowed for people to vote for their favorites on my AIM profile.  There was some limitations, first being that people had to know my AIM screen name in order to participate.  The next was that I could put up one match up at a time, which cause for a long process to get to the finish.  The final was I had to constantly be signed on with a dial up modem, I needed to be completely dedicated to this.
It was worth it though, much to my surprise people got into it.  There was discussion on over who was better: Mickey Mouse or Santa.  The AIM thing wasn't an issue, since it was before the social network boom, people still chatted via that. Through word of mouth vote numbers were rising by the day.  There was campaigns by people over who they wanted to go all the way.  When it was all said over, Mr. Perfect ran the table and beat Michael Jordan in the first finals of Skalbamania I.

Chris Farley is the third and last champion so far.

I did this two more times over the course of the next 4 years or so.  The problem was that it started to lose some steam after the 3rd one, I would suggest because AIM was beginning to fade with the rise of Facebook and Myspace.  I decided to put it on the back burner until I found a more efficient way to develop it.  Today, social networking is bigger than it's ever been, so networking it shouldn't be an issue.  The internet is also more interactive than it was before, so I can work up something for the voting.  I don't even know my AIM password these days, and would be damned if anyone is even on it. After some years of a hiatus, Skalbamania IV is a reality.