Those who know me know I have a peculiar infatuation for newsmen. I subscribe to the school of thought that the news-entertainment industry has long ago been veering steadily toward requiring their headliners to be hot hunks. The jump from beefcake eye candy behind the news desk to homoerotic wrestling hunks in my imagination is a short one. My first homoerotic wrestling fiction charted the narrative of 8 network news studs in a beach wrestling reality television bonanza. In fact, THE first match I wrote starred my constant newsboy infatuation #1, Chris Cuomo, doing battle with his bromantic weatherman colleague, Sam Champion. This was before Sam was out of the public closet, but that didn’t stop me from writing with certainty Sam’s undisguised workplace crush on the big , muscled, beautiful Italian. In that match, Sam stuns Chris by going vicious and dirty first, but the bulging newsreader battled back, furiously crushing Sam’s chest in a breath stealing body scissors that left the Champ unable to submit until the Italian Stallion finally tired enough to let an ounce of air back into the weatherman’s lungs. With no love left between the colleagues, Sam tried to double cross Chris in the team wrestle free-for-all. The weatherman successfully sleepered Richard Engel out of the competition, and nearly did the same to big, too beautiful to stay in news Rob Marciano. But big, bad Rob had other plans in mind, knocking the Champ out cold with one bare fisted punch to the face.

Anyway, Sam Champion’s real life narrative started to turn almost as hot as I imagined him in my wrestling fiction. He came out, married his swelteringly hot Brazilian bon-bon, and honeymooned on the beach, in speedos, lingering long for the cameras to snap just hoe hot and beefy we always knew Sam to be. And with that slice of heaven in his corner, I have to wonder of the Champ might need a resurgence in the News Division in my homoerotic wrestling imagination!

And two years after his workplace crush, Chris Cuomo, flexed his guns in Sam’s face and then left GMA for good, Sam has announced that he’s also out the door to headline The Weather Channel. The eye candy left at GMA is getting pretty sparse. Unless the quickly promote Gio Benitez and Matt Gutman to shirtless anchors pronto, I predict a precipitous fall in GMAs ratings. Cause the only thing that let’s me digest 2 full hours of mot pruning newsishness is hot hunks serving it up.