If you were lucky enough to attend an OMEGA (Organization of Modern Extreme Grappling Arts — the 1990s were the peak of goofy wrestling acronyms) wrestling show in a North Carolina armory in the late ’90s, you would’ve seen a roster full of wrestlers who went on to big-league success.

The promotion was run by The Hardy Boyz, future WWE Hall of Famers Jeff and Matt, but also likely performing would be Kid Dynamo (Shannon Moore, who’d wrestle in WCW, WWE and TNA), Ice (Caprice Coleman, who’d have a long run in ROH and is currently their color commentator), Kid Vicious (Shane Helms, who’d wrestle in WCW and as The Hurricane in WWE), and Joey Matthews (who’d hold one half of the WWE tag-team title as a member of MNM). You could’ve also seen wrestlers who had shorter runs in major federations like Venom (Jason Arndt, who’d wrestle as Joey Abs in the WWE), or Mike Maverick and Otto Schwanz (who’d work as The Dupps in ECW and in WWE developmental).

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However, despite all that future star power, another lesser-known name would often steal the show.

“If you don’t know me, my name is Cham Pain — that is, first name Cham, last name Pain. I’m a former male exotic dancer from Las Vegas, Nevada, who’s traded his g-string for the wrestling ring. I’ve been around the world twice, I’ve seen everything but the wind, and I’ve been everywhere but the electric chair. I’ve been to two state fairs and I have driven through hell in a gasoline truck in reverse with my hair on fire, wearing thermal underwear and a fur coat, with a big, red sign hanging out the window that says, ‘Cham Pain is the freakin’ man.’”

“Cham Pain” Marty Garner was the one who was left behind.

Despite being arguably the most charismatic of the original OMEGA crew, and as talented in-ring as any of them, many only know of Garner from his retroactively viral Pedigree sell against Triple H in 1996 (which was just uploaded to the WWE Vault in perfect video quality). But in many ways, he is the Zelig of professional wrestling, touching its history in multiple, fascinating ways. Unlike many of his celebrated peers, Garner’s career was more about near-misses and brushes with fame, viral clips, movie stars and burned bridges. Now, at a time when the majority of his old running mates are either retired or winding down their careers, “Cham Pain” has returned to wrestling to take one last swing at the plate.

Matt Hardy first met Garner in a fitness center in Vass, North Carolina, in the early ’90s. Matt and his brother had built a makeshift wrestling ring in their backyard and had begun running shows. “They had black plastic, wrapped around trees and they made an arena out of the plastic,” Garner, 58, tells Uncrowned, “and in the middle they had a trampoline with garden hoses wrapped around it for the ropes. They would film the matches, and they would make a tape and sell it to the local video store — and they would rent the video out.” The crew eventually leveled up from the backyard to the local fair. “We did our first show at the fair on a regular ring with about five people,” Garner recalls, “and we would put on hoods for some matches and some matches we would be ourselves.”

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Eventually, this group of North Carolina teenagers began achieving bigger success in the wrestling business, being used as enhancement talent for the WWF. “May of 1994 we went to the WWF, The Italian Stallion [Gary Sabaugh] called me and said he needed four guys to come fill in,” Matt Hardy says. “The four of us — Jeff, myself, Jason Arndt and Marty — would drive wherever they were wrestling and we did jobs there.

“Stallion’s students got upset that the Omega crew were getting picked to work the matches even though they were paying Stallion and we weren’t. So we just talked to [WWE Hall of Famer] Chief Jay Strongbow and told him what they were doing. ‘If you want us, you can just call me and I can book us.’ And that is how we broke away and built a relationship with the people in the WWE.”

Garner achieved his first big viral moment in June 1996, when he wrestled Paul Levesque, aka Triple H. The future WWE chief executive hit his trademark Pedigree, but instead of bumping on his face, Garner kicked his legs straight in the air like he was taking a piledriver and ended up getting dropped vertically, straight onto his neck. It’s a clip that still pops up on Twitter nearly two decades later, and one that demonstrates the wild recklessness that became a calling card for Garner and the rest of the OMEGA crew.

In another retroactively viral clip, Garner attempted a running plancha on Jeff Jarrett and totally whiffed, crashing onto his head when Jarrett side-stepped him.

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With some visibility from television, the crew began getting booked by other independent promotions and running its own shows, creating OMEGA and putting on displays that became legendary on the nascent wrestling internet and tape-trading scene. One by one, the OMEGA guys got signed to bigger promotions. First The Hardy Boyz joined the WWF, then Moore and Helms became two-thirds of 3 Count in WCW. Arndt joined Heartland Championship Wrestling (then WWE’s development) as Venom and eventually the WWE as Joey Abs of the Mean Street Posse. Garner briefly joined the dying days of ECW as Puck Dupp, managing and teaming with fellow OMEGA alumni Mike Maverick and Otto Schwanz as Jack and Bo Dupp. The ECW stint was short-lived though, as Garner really wanted to be in the WWE. But while the WWE took Jack and Bo Dupp into developmental, Puck was left on the outside looking in.

The cocky charisma that made Cham Pain such a compelling wrestler to watch may have caused him some difficulty in the notoriously prickly and political WWE locker room. “I was just hard-headed,” Garner admits. “I wouldn’t listen to people. I wasn’t trying to be arrogant, I tried to ride my own road and it didn’t work out.”

“Marty saw his friends on TV, and we all loved him so much, and he didn’t get that opportunity and he got discouraged,” adds Matt Hardy.

That classic Cham Pain charisma, though, did make an impression on one big star.

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Marty was in Los Angeles in late 2002 doing motion capture stunts for a video game company and ended up connecting with The Rock, who was in town shooting “The Rundown.”

“We went out to the movie set, and as soon as The Rock saw me, he says, ‘First name Cham, last name Pain — a former male exotic dancer who ended up trading his g-string for the wrestling ring,’” Garner says. “He knew my whole spiel. We go out to dinner and he said, ‘Look, I want to tell you guys something. I didn’t take my lines from Cham Pain, but I like the way he presented to the crowd, I kind of took some of his style, I loved the way he did his spiel.’ I just about teared up. This was The Rock saying he took something from me.” The two ended up going out on the town the next night. “I met Turbo from the movie ‘Breaking,’ I met Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake,” Garner recalls.

“I am thinking to myself, ‘I am from Vass, North Carolina, with a population of 758 people. I am drinking Cristal with The Rock and Britney Spears.’”

After catching up with The Rock again at WrestleMania 19 in 2003, Garner returned to Vass and got a call.

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“Look, man, you ain’t never asked me for nothing, you have always been my friend, so I am going to ask you for something — do you want to come work for me for a while on a movie set?”

Garner spent the next two years off and on traveling the world as The Rock’s assistant. “When I got the job,” he remembers, “Rock said this isn’t going to last forever, I just want you to have some fun.” Eventually, the ride had to come to an end. “The Rock told me, ‘My wife is on me about us going out to clubs and stuff and wanted to know what your job actually is,” Garner says, “‘and I don’t think she dug it.” So Garner again went back to Vass. “I just got off an airplane where I was eating caviar and a ribeye steak,” he says, “and here I am, walking into a single-wide trailer, and all I could smell was chicken crap.”

After his Hollywood rock-star stage came to an end, Garner made another run at professional wrestling. He began working North Carolina independents again and got back on the WWE radar, working some dark matches from 2006-08 and even getting a pay-per-view match against a then-debuting Montel Vontavious Porter.

“I went up to Johnny Laurinaitis and asked him what I need to do to get a job,” Garner explains. “He said, ‘I don’t think we can make you any money in the WWE, you need to make a name for yourself.’

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“I decided to make a blog. This was back in the MySpace days and I would call it ‘The Forgotten Beatle,’ and it got picked up by a bunch of the wrestling sites, a magazine in the UK did a big article on me. After that article, people started a ‘Hire Cham Pain’ campaign together. I got to a show in Charlotte and got to the parking deck and there was ‘Hire Cham Pain’ all over the car. They were in England and there was a sign that was six feet long. Johnny Laurinaitis calls me and says, ‘My personal email is getting blown up, 300 or 400 emails a day wanting me to hire you. I don’t ever want to see you again. If you come into a WWE locker room again, I will have you arrested.’

“You told me to make a name for myself, so I did — and I got punished for it. So after that, I got out of the business.”

Garner returned to Vass once more and put wrestling behind him, leaving the ring for over a decade. However, the same wild man who made The Rock’s wife nervous is no longer who Marty Garner is.

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He is married, with two daughters. “I wanted my little girls to see me wrestle live,” Garner says. “I went to an independent show and got the fever again.” He had a cameo appearance in a Matt Hardy vs. Jeff Jarrett match at WrestleCade, taking a guitar shot from Jeff. That appearance — and him dropping his famous Cham Pain catchphrases during an OMEGA reunion at the same event — led to a 2023 booking at GCW, where he showed he could still hang with youngsters. He lost a competitive match with Cole Raderick, but a lot of the athleticism and timing that made him a success in his OMEGA days was still present. “I don’t tell my mind I can’t do it,” he says. “I just assume I can do everything I used to do. I just go ahead and try it.”

Reinvigorated, Garner continued grinding, working shows across North Carolina, doing what he loves, until an injury put him back on the shelf for a bit. “I had a knock-down, drag-out match with this dude — man, it was awesome,” he says. “And we did a bunch of high spots. I dove out into the crowd on him, did a front flip over the top rope. We were doing a bull-rope match — I wanted him to jerk me off the top rope, and when he did, I wanted to fall a different kind of way and I kind of messed myself up. I broke my collarbone and my rib on that last move he gave me. I’ve got to heal, man, and just get right.”

Always a hustler, Garner is judging boxing and MMA fights in the meantime while working on getting an OMEGA documentary made. He still thinks he has something to give the business. “I can talk, man,” he says. “Even today, I would take a managerial job for somebody. I would be their mouthpiece, because man, I’ve got stuff I know that would get over. I could give them five T-shirt [slogans] that would sell.”

“Marty is someone who just loves to entertain people, and he is destined to entertain people,” Matt Hardy says. “I would love to see him get some of that pro-wrestling success he didn’t get earlier in his career.”