Welcome to another edition of
OFF-TRACK with A-TRAIN
where I report on terrible wrestlers'
delusions of grandeur
in this episode:
WHATEVER TAMINA'S BEEN SMOKING,
IT'S SOME GOOD SHIT
Among professional athletes, there exists a common self-perception problem.
Many of these elite high level athletes, while excellent in comparison to regular non-professionals, might not be All-Star level material. Nevertheless, they believe themselves to be Hall of Fame level talents.
Ask pretty much any NBA player and he'll tell you he could beat Lebron James one on one. Even the guys at the end of the bench who never sniff playing time when the game is in doubt. Hell, there are probably guys out there in their mid-thirties who scored 20 points a game in junior college who still think they should be in the league right now.
The most famous example of this phenomenon is probably Nick Young, who currently plays for the Golden State Warriors. This is a guy who gave himself his own nickname. He has christened himself "Swaggy P."
For some reason.
Now, Swaggy is a talented player, to be sure, but he's not nearly as good as he thinks he is.
Exhibit A:
Your honor, I rest my case.
In cases such as Swaggy's and others of his ilk, this all amounts to nothing more than delusions of grandeur.
But there's actually a clinical term for this phenomenon--The Dunning-Kruger Effect.
"In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias wherein people of low ability suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability as greater than it is."
In more colloquial parlance, they think they all that, and they ain't.
Which brings us to Tamina.
Poor, sweet, delusional, terrible-at-wrestling Tamina.
During the 5-on-5 Traditonal Survivor Series Women's Match at Survivor Series--the one night a year that RAW and SmackDown Live meet in head to head competition, mind you--there was an unexpectedly well-received face off moment between the enforcers for both teams. Nia Jax and Tamina, who are like fourth-cousins or something, stared each other down and the crowd went sort of wild.
It was for sure the biggest crowd reaction that Tamina has gotten since her return from injury, and might have been the biggest pop that she has received, well, EVER.
I think all that adulation may have gone to Tamina's head because this is what she tweeted to Nia yesterday.
Let's look at the pictures she attached.
First, this one of her and Nia:
Now let's see the other iconic moments in wrestling history that she and Nia stand alongside.
Nope.
Ha ha nope.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOPE.
So in case you missed that, it was Hulk Hogan and Andre The Giant at Wrestlemania III, Rock and Stone Cold at Mania X7, and Undertaker and Shawn Michaels at Wrestlemania 26.
Tamina thinks that she and Nia are on par with those gentlemen.
That, my friends, is the equivalent of Swaggy P driving up to the arena, launching a three point shot at the building from the parking lot, getting back in his car and driving home.
This is so egregious that I think they should rename "The Dunning-Kruger Effect," "The Tamina Tamina Effect."
