EDITOR’S NOTE: If you want to support Kevin and his family a GoFundMe has been set up to help with their expenses. Thank you.
How do you sum up a friendship that’s lasted over half of your life in one post? It’s an impossible task. Recognizing there’s no right way to do this, the only thing that I CAN do is tell you about our history together in chronological order. That makes some kind of sense to me right now. Hopefully by the time I’m done it will make a little more.
I first got to know Kevin Fields on an internet message board called ISCABBS. When I say “internet” it’s not what you think of it as now. There was a time when it was all text based. No graphics. No music. No video. No social media. Just email, bulletin boards, and newsgroups. Kevin and I hit it off right away though because of our two mutual interests — pro wrestling and rap music. When I saw that his handle on the BBS was “KAM” we struck up a conversation right away. I wouldn’t say that meant he was the world’s biggest fan of the fiery West coast rapper, but we all tried to stand out and using KAM definitely did.
Most of the time we hung out in a forum of the BBS called TAES 189. If you watched enough live wrestling in the 1990’s you might have seen a sign pop up in the crowd with those letters and numbers and wondered what it meant. “Theatrical and Extreme Sports.” The number was just chronological (like this post ironically) in the order the forum was created. We grew to self-identify with it because of our passion for the sport and the sometimes raucous debates we could have. ISCABBS had something social media doesn’t though — moderators. If it got too crazy you could be put on time out or kicked out of the forum altogether. We didn’t always agree but we learned to keep it civil and still have fun.
I grew up as the internet grew up and started making websites. The first was OHHLA and from there I kept trying more and more things. I had grandiose notions of becoming a webmaster for the rappers I loved, so I started searching for names that hadn’t already been registered, and Tame One (RIP) was one of them. Now I’m going to be honest with you, I was complete in over my head on this one, I had no idea what the hell I was doing. Darlene Harris (Ma Dukes) saw the website though and reached out. Those first few years running Tame-One.com for her and her son were a lot of fun, and they forgave my inexperience because of how passionate I was about his music and his career.
How does Kevin Fields tie into this you ask? Simple. Kevin and I had taken our love of pro wrestling to the next level. I asked for his help designing a website called “The Angry Marks” where the three principal contributors were going to be me and my friends Chad and Dave. They eventually moved on, but Kevin stayed and grew into a more visible face of the website. The first wrestling podcast I ever recorded was with Kevin and two of our TAES 189 friends — Frank (Nikes the Sneaker Pimp) and Dani (Joisey Girl). Without Kev taking the “executive producer” role that never would have happened. He was an incredible behind-the-scenes nuts and bolts guy to make shit work right. For that same reason by mutual agreement between Kev and Ma Dukes, I turned over Tame-One.com to him to run. Tame’s career was growing incredibly fast and he needed someone to keep the site going full time.
Now as good of friends as we were between knowing each other since the bulletin board days in the 90’s and our mutual love of rap and wrestling, that’s not to say Kev and I always got along in every way every day. We’re all human and we all make mistakes, but one of mine was trusting him with the hosting of ALL of my websites. Again he was a nuts and bolts guy and I just wanted to make content for AngryMarks (we dropped “The” from the name after a while), OHHLA and RapReviews — the sites I still had after he took over Tame’s for me. He was running sites on the server as well including one for Alexis Laree; well, you know her better as Mickie James. Once she signed with WWE they asked him not-so-politely to discontinue it, but he and her still remained friends. Because we both had sites I just did my thing, he did his, and if the server went down it was his job to get it back up and running again. I trusted him implicitly.
Kev unintentionally screwed the pooch though. I’m only telling you this to give you the full history of our friendship, not to speak ill of the dead. He wasn’t regularly installing the security updates that were necessary back then, many of which would be automated by today’s internet standards, but back then you had to do it manually. A backdoor exploit enabled someone to hijack the server and start using our bandwidth to distribute pirated software or some shit. I never got the full extent of what they did, I just got the bill for the overrun, because back then the hosting had a GB cap and for every GB you went over there was a surcharge. This was not a small thing folks. I got a bill for THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS. Kevin hadn’t done his due diligence and I got left holding the bag. He couldn’t afford to pay it, I really couldn’t either, but if somebody didn’t pay it we’d lose everything. I went outside and violently attacked the hedge on my front lawn with a pair of clippers until I burned off the rage I was feeling, then went back inside to handle the situation.
Now you might think that alone would be the end of a friendship, but Kev and I had known each other for too many years and been through too much together for that to shut us down completely. I was testy for a while. I yelled some profanities at him. You know what though? We still kept working together. He still kept producing and recording wrestling podcasts, which is how many of you reading this became friends with him. He actually lined up a lot of the big pro wrestling interviews through his personal connections to the local wrestling scene in Kentucky. You already know Louisville and OVW if you know Kentucky. It’s because of Kevin that I spoke to the likes of Jim Cornette, Mad Man Pondo and the late Sabu among so many others. Hard to stay mad at a guy when he can make shit like that happen for you. Thank you Kev.
As time wore on though Kev reached a point where doing the back end maintenance on the websites while also producing podcasts and lining up interviews on the front side was leading him to burnout. It’s something I understood completely, because once Genius scraped the web for all of OHHLA’s content and monetized it (an entirely separate story too long to go into here) I was feeling pretty burnt out myself. Kevin decided to step away and leave the back end to me, but thankfully by that point we had developed a good relationship with our hosting company and I was able to somewhat easily take over. There were some bumps in the road, but a lot of what had to be done by hand now happens on the hosting end, often overnight when I’m not even looking. Kev also stopped producing the podcasts, but by this point I had learned how to capture live audio conversations and clean them up myself using Audacity (noise reduction is a Godsend) so I was comfortable doing that too.
Life took Kevin Fields in a different direction than being involved in my day to day affairs and vice versa, but we still remained friends on social media, and the door was always open for him to come back and chat on a podcast — which he most certainly did. I’m grateful for that and that I have decades worth of conversations with him I can listen to again now that he’s no longer with us. The news last night that he was taken to the ER unresponsive and reportedly passed due to complications of diabetes rocked me. I knew he had some health problems and we all do as we get older but I definitely didn’t see this coming or him going so quickly. As you can see from this lengthy blog post our friendship was a roller coaster, it had some ups and downs, but I’m very grateful for the ride we went on together. If you’d like to support his family and give him the farewell he deserves a GoFundMe is available and your contributions would be welcomed. Whether you called him KAM, Kevin Fields or Killa Kev, if you knew him you’re going to miss him terribly. Rest in peace my friend.
