What do Jason Kelce, Joel Embiid, and Charlie Manuel have in common? They’re wrestling fans.

Charlie Manuel was still a minor-league ballplayer when he ended spring training in the 1960s with an exhibition at Houston’s Astrodome.

Manuel — a towering Twins farmhand from rural Virginia who became a folk hero decades later in Philadelphia — was sitting on the bench as the Astros ran through a tryout. A second baseman ripped a double, returned to the dugout, and sat next to Manuel.

Manuel asked him his name. It was Dusty. He asked Dusty how old he was. Too old to be at this tryout, he told Manuel.

The second baseman was Virgil Runnels, known by his friends in Texas as Dusty. He played college baseball and tried his hand at minor-league baseball and professional football before giving up the dream. Runnels turned to professional wrestling, became Dusty Rhodes, and transformed into a superstar.

On that bench in the Astrodome, Rhodes was dreaming of a life in baseball. Just like Manuel.

“I said, ‘Good luck to you, man,’ ” Manuel said. “He asked me my name and I walked away.”

» READ MORE: This South Jersey ‘factory’ makes monsters. It has become a pipeline to WrestleMania.

This weekend’s WrestleMania will draw more than 70,000 fans on consecutive nights to Lincoln Financial Field, with more than 2 million watching at home. The WWE has a reach that rivals the NFL as it draws fans from nearly every demographic. Some are old. Some are young. There are fans who are businesspeople, blue-collar workers, and schoolteachers. There is even a world champion baseball manager who once sat on a bench with one of wrestling’s all-time greats.

“I’ve always kept up with it,” Manuel said. “I’ve always been a big fan and I still watch it.”

Manuel is a big enough fan that he once quoted Ric Flair at a news conference before managing the Phillies in the postseason. He’s not the only Philadelphia sports figure to fall for wrasslin’.

Joel Embiid was fined twice by the NBA for insulting an opponent with a taunt he saw wrestlers use when he was a kid. Jason Kelce watched wrestling growing up, wore a luchador mask in February when he celebrated his brother’s Super Bowl win, and seemed to be cutting a promo fit for WWE when he wore a Mummer’s costume at the Art Museum. Wrestling fans are everywhere.

“There are all types of wrestling fans,” said Drew Gulak, a current WWE wrestler from Fox Chase who remains a diehard Philly sports fan. “It’s an eclectic group. I’ve met everyone from criminals to professors and doctors. That’s in the business. So the fan base is just as eclectic. It’s a niche. It’s a niche art form.”

» READ MORE: What is WrestleMania? Why is it in Philly? And why should I care? Our chatbot has the answers.

The WWE warns fans to “not try this at home,” but that didn’t stop the Kelce brothers from trying to mimic what they saw on TV.

“I got power-bombed through my living room floor as a kid,” Travis Kelce said before the Super Bowl. “We broke the wooden floor, and then we just slid the couch over it so our parents wouldn’t know. My mom was vacuuming like two weeks later and figured it out. Sure enough, we got in trouble for it.

“Growing up in the ‘90s, as a boy, I feel like you had no choice but to emulate wrestlers on the playground, at recess, and in the living room.”

Travis Kelce said the brothers were fans of “Stone Cold” Steve Austin and the Rock, the two wrestlers who were in the main event at WrestleMania in 1999 when it was last in Philadelphia. The Rock is back again this weekend, and there are rumors that Austin, who appeared at WrestleMania two years ago, could be involved.

Perhaps the Kelces could find their way to the event, as the WWE has a history of incorporating professional athletes — from Muhammad Ali and Billy Martin appearing at the first WrestleMania to George Kittle mixing it up at last year’s event.

Mike Mizanin, better known as WWE star The Miz, told both Kelce brothers that he would love to train them. Jason Kelce, Mizanin told TMZ, has everything it takes to be a WWE star from the athleticism to the ability to talk on a microphone. Kelce, like Manuel, is already a fan. And now the big event is at the stadium he called home for 13 seasons.

“Hopefully, we can brew something into fruition here,” Travis Kelce told TMZ last spring after working with WWE.

» READ MORE: A Philly public-school teacher helped Drew Gulak become a pro wrestler and a WWE mainstay

The NBA called Embiid’s taunt “an obscene gesture on the playing court” when the league fined him $35,000 in January 2023. Wrestling fans recognized the move — Embiid gestured with his hands to his midsection — as something else.

The “crotch chop” was popularized in the 1990s by D-Generation X, a wrestling faction started by Triple H and Shawn Michaels that smack-talked foes on the microphone the same way Embiid trolls opponents on social media. Embiid, watching as a child in Cameroon, was hooked.

“We all go back to the DX days, so that’s where I got it from,” Embiid said in 2021 on the Lowe Post podcast.

Embiid tweeted his admiration in 2017 for Triple H, whose real name is Paul Levesque, and then entered the arena to the wrestler’s theme song before mimicking his hero and spitting water into the air. In 2021, Levesque and Embiid wore custom DX shirts as they rang the bell before a Sixers playoff game at the Wells Fargo Center.

Embiid plays in front of Philadelphia fans, a crowd with which Levesque became familiar during his career. The city has long been one of the WWE’s main markets, as it ran events every month during the 1980s and 1990s at the Spectrum before regularly hosting pay-per-view events at the Wells Fargo Center. A Philly sports fan can be tough to win over. The city’s wrestling fans are no different.

“Philadelphia is a hardworking town,” said Brian Heffron, who broke in at the ECW Arena in South Philly as The Blue Meanie before reaching the WWE. “Busted knuckle, blue-collar, lunch-pail guys going to work, and when they come home, they want to have something to take their mind elsewhere. All these hardworking people in Philly, they want something to let off that steam.”

The DX taunt, Kevin Durant tweeted, was a “trash celebration.” So Embiid, never one to back down from a spar, responded on Twitter with a highlight of him using it set to DX’s theme song. Embiid hit it again earlier this season and was fined $35,000 for “repeatedly making an obscene gesture on the playing court.”

Levesque, retired from the ring and now WWE’s chief content officer, invited Embiid to WrestleMania at the Linc. No fines there, Levesque said. Unlike Kelce, the Sixers’ resident wrestling fan doesn’t have a chance to get in the ring this year. The Sixers will be on a road trip, and Embiid is gearing up for a return from injury.

“It’s no secret that Triple H is my guy,” Embiid said in 2023. “And obviously DX, when I used to watch wrestling, those were my guys.”

» READ MORE: Becky Lynch on her new book, raising a family on the road, and women in WWE: ‘There’s nothing else like it’

Manuel laughed as a high school student when Baron von Raschke entered a screaming gymnasium and applied his “claw” to a young fan.

“This little kid’s dad got mad, jumped up, and started hitting him,” Manuel said. “It was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. Baron’s eyes rolled around and he acted like he was hurting the little kid. The fans got mad. I used to think how stupid they were for believing it.”

But then Manuel caught a few matches on TV and became captivated by the show. When his baseball career took him to Japan, Manuel lived near Antonio Inoki — the country’s wrestling superstar — and became friends with Dick Beyer, an American who wrestled for years in Japan as The Destroyer. The two Americans met weekly for dinner and Beyer would tell Manuel about his next match.

“I said, ‘If I know you’re going to lose, I’m not going to watch it,’ ” Manuel said. “I don’t know why he told me that.”

» READ MORE: Extreme Championship Wrestling once tried to take on WWE. Its story begins in a Philly pawn shop.

As a minor-league manager with the Twins, Manuel sat in the front row at a wrestling show in St. Paul, Minn. The clubhouse attendant Manuel brought with him held a sign that said, “Our manager can kick your [butt].” Maurice Vachon, the imposing wrestler known as Mad Dog, saw it and invited Manuel into the ring.

“I said, ‘Put that sign away,’ ” Manuel said. “It’s embarrassing to me, really. To this day, I guarantee you that my face gets red as hell. I didn’t get in that ring.”

Manuel’s run-ins with wrestlers continued as his winding baseball career rolled on. He once cleared his office in Cleveland so he could talk wrestling with Jerry Lawler. He became friends with commentators Jim Ross and Tony Schiavone. He sat next to Miss Elizabeth on a plane. He met Hulk Hogan, Jimmy Snuka, and Hillbilly Jim. He even met The Blue Meanie, who lives just a few blocks from Citizens Bank Park.

As Phillies manager, Manuel often sat near the ring whenever WWE rolled into town and he sometimes found himself backstage. Once, Rhodes — who was then working a behind-the-scenes role for WWE — learned that Manuel was in the building. Rhodes, who died in 2015, had since become a wrestling legend. But Rhodes, whose nickname was The American Dream, remembered Manuel for the encouragement he gave him decades earlier on the ball field. He went out of his way to say hi to an old friend, who happened to be a wrestling fan.

“He always remembered that,” Manuel said.