Lede Buried Like A Pile Driver

The real crazy thing about the New York City school teacher who called in sick so he could perform as a professional wrestler isn’t that he’s a wrestler or whatever but rather that he could have used personal days instead! I swear:

Kaye resigned from his teaching job in April after investigators approached him. He said he had not been aware that he could have used personal days to get time off to wrestle.

So rather than using personal days (to wrestle!), the teacher called in sick and got busted the hard way:

City school investigators laid the smackdown yesterday on a Queens high school teacher who allegedly called in sick while he was donning tights for World Wrestling Entertainment.

At Benjamin Cardozo High School in Queens, Matthew Kaye had a reputation as an agreeable social studies teacher.

But he led a secret life as pro wrestler Matt Striker – a greased-up macho man known for ring moves he called “the overdrive” and the “lung-blower,” investigators said. Several of Kaye’s students suspected as much.

“I swear I saw him on WWE Smackdown last week wrestling Kurt Angle,” a student wrote on the Web site www.ratemyteacher.com last March. “I know it was him.”

Special Schools Investigator Richard Condon said he wants the 6-foot-tall, 241-pound instructor to pay back all the money he got while he was supposedly out sick.

Condon’s investigators learned about Kaye’s alter ego from the teacher’s own Web site, www.thisisstriker.com, authorities said.

According to the site, Kaye made his professional wrestling debut in 2000 in the USA Pro Wrestling league. He used the name Hydro and fought as part of a tag team called Los Lunatics. The Web site lists and describes many of his performances – making it easy for investigators to match the days he should have been in school.

Personal days! To wrestle!