The local broadcasting scene just witnessed an odd landmark. A real odd landmark.

Will Dunham hosted the 20th anniversary rendition of Inside the Squared Circle. This weekly roundtable on pro wrestling began as a radio show in 1989 on WMET-AM, a very low-watt station in Montgomery County, and moved to cable access television in 1993.

The wrestling industry over that period has enjoyed a boom and suffered through a bust and now sits somewhere in between.

But ITSC started small and stayed there: The program now can be viewed only via cable systems in Montgomery County and D.C.

That ITSC can still be viewed at all says a whole lot about Dunham’s dedication to the program, or maybe his inability to give anything up. He’s been there from the first episode on. He says he’s only missed “maybe” two ITSC tapings in the show’s 20 years.

“We started the show thinking we’d come up with a great way to get free tickets to wrestling shows,” says Fred Sternburg, who founded the program in 1989 with Dunham and local TV producer Rich Daniel. “It was just three of us wrestling fans in this little dump of a station in Gaithersburg, going to interview has-been wrestlers at VFW halls and armories. It was so much fun, and I wish we could have taken it to another level back then, but that never happened. But Will has kept this going. Now it’s 20 years? That’s amazing.”

Sternburg says he and his family gave their all to the show in the beginning. The WMET signal was so weak, Sternburg’s parents would leave their Bethesda home and get in the car on show nights to drive to a spot where they could hear their boy talk rasslin’.... Continued