I’ve been dreading to write this one.

Not because I am embarrassed by it or anything. It’s more because I write about pro wrestling every day. I think about it, probably too much. It weirdly has become my primary hobby. This stupid wrestling hobby.

Fumbling Towards Forty: Prologue
Fumbling Towards Forty: The Internet
Fumbling Towards Forty: Camping
Fumbling Towards Forty: Drugs
Fumbling Towards Forty: Videogames
Fumbling Towards Forty: Music Part I
Fumbling Towards Forty: Music Part II
Fumbling Towards Forty: Music Part III
Fumbling Towards Forty: Music Part IV
Fumbling Towards Forty: Movies

When I decided to go to college in 2008 for journalism, I thought about what going me into wanting to be a journalist. Videogame magazines like GamePlayers and GamePro in the 90s was likely an influence. The film Almost Famous was definitely an influence. I also loved The Ongoing History of New Music by Alan Cross, which I used to record on cassette tape from the radio. So why am I not in the videogame industry or music industry and instead I write every day about pro wrestling?

The 90s

I know I watched pro wrestling here and there when I was really young, but my most vivid memory of seeing pro wrestling was my dad staying on the channel showing the World Wrestling Federation in 1993 when Yokozuna was doing the Bodyslam challenge. He was convinced Hulk Hogan was going to come out and do it. Instead it was Lex Luger, who my dad didn’t know (I think he called him an Arnold wannabe) so my dad switched it off.

Maybe a few weeks or months after that, who knows in kids memory (I apologize if dates are off on remembering 30 year old events), I remember seeing The Undertaker on WWF Action Zone. Or Superstars, one of those. But he mesmerized me. I was really into fantasy, roleplaying games, the supernatural, all that stuff, and The Undertaker was unlike anything I had seen before. He was like a living version of a lich, a magic using undead zombie lord. Nobody that tall should move that fast, should jump that high, and should be able to walk the ropes like he does.

That got me and my childhood friend Matthew to start watching pro wrestling. I remember renting the WWF pay per views at the Video Movie Shop, especially SummerSlam 94 and Survivor Series 94. One time they didn’t have a wrestling pay per view or match compilation with Undertaker on it available to rent. So I got WrestleMania X. That was the first time I watched Bret Hart versus Owen Hart, and the first time I actually paid attention to the work inside the ring. That’s when I first started to like pro wrestling, and not just The Undertaker.

I became a big wrestling fan. I wish I knew where it was at my mom’s still, but I had an old journal that listed my favourite wrestlers: The Undertaker, Kwang, Bret Hart, Razor Ramon, Adam Bomb. Yes, Kwang was number two. I once told Savio Vega (who played Kwang) that I wanted him to be World Champ and he replied on Twitter, “Politics man.” I’ll never forget that.

I also lost interest after a year. Yeah, the Diesel WWF World Title run was pretty bad. Bad enough for me to stop watching wrestling on the weekend, stop buying WWF Magazines, and stop renting VHS tapes. Even when Bret got the title back I barely cared. Wrestling was out for me as a 10 year old.

The WWF was doing really poorly at the time which meant my hometown of 45,000 people in Ontario, Canada was important enough to be a house show stop. It was in 1996, and I went with Matthew as one of the last times we hung out for years. Matt was a bit older than I was, which was fine when he was under the age of 16, but now he was 17 and I was 11, so we just had different interests in our lives at that point. I remember him and I saying vulgarities towards Shawn Michaels and Shawn threatening to punch us. I remember a guy telling Sycho Sid to flex for a photo and he did. I also remember Sunny having an argument with Skip even though she was managing the Smokin Gunns now and we literally got to watch a public squabble behind the arena, because you see the Chatham Memorial Arena was too small for the wrestlers to all be in a locker room so they had a small area behind the arena blocked out to be their locker room.

That show was main evented by Stone Cold Steve Austin versus Shawn Michaels for the WWF World Championship. I am also convinced I saw Vader and Sycho Sid have a “moonsault off” but I am also convinced that’s my dreams and memories getting mixed up.

It was a little after this I remember seeing World Championship Wrestling up here in Canada. It was around 1996 because I remember seeing Chris Benoit for the first time and it was around when Jeff Jarrett was messing with the Four Horsemen. Finally seeing wrestling outside of WWF on TV was a fresh experience and I think that opened me up to trying to like wrestling again.

I remember I once got to meet some independent wrestlers in an old building near the train station, which is also the first time I got to find out about Japanese pro wrestling. I remember the guys there were obsessed with Sabu and the poster had Doink the Clown on it. There is a Chatham indie show from 1996 which has Doink the Clown defeating The Lumberjack but no Sabu and a show from 1993 with Sabu but no Doink The Clown. It’s entirely possible I’m mixing the two up!

But it was around the time Bret Hart started doing the Anti-USA gimmick and D-Generation X was telling everyone to suck it that I got really into pro wrestling again, and this time I wasn’t so much about Undertaker but all about Bret Hart and the Hart Foundation. I also started using the internet a lot more in 1997 and that’s when I started checking out wrestling websites and discussing wrestling on forums. I also got into e-wrestling, which you can read all about that here.

You then had the Survivor Series Screwjob happening, and around that same time was when TSN started showing WCW Nitro regularly on Tuesday. I liked WCW more than the WWF (my mom once bought me a D-Generation X shirt so I used to wear that sometimes and do crotch chops), but it was harder to get into in Canada. Thankfully, videogames helped with the release of WCW vs nWo World Tour on the Nintendo 64. I remember playing that and Revenge so much.

My friends and I in school used to have WCW vs nWo: Revenge tournaments where we’d all go over to someones house and do a tournament playing each other. We always had to rock paper scissors because everyone wanted to play as La Parka and only one person was allowed. We’d write out our brackets and everything. Later on when WWF No Mercy came out we used to bring our memory cards and controllers over so we had our Create a Wrestlers to fight and basically made stories out of it. Now everyone just plays games online so they don’t really get that experience anymore.

The 2000s

But now it was getting to the turn of the millennium and I was deep into pro wrestling. So much that I even did some backyard wrestling. Well, it was more trampoline and basement wrestling with high school friends. My friends Erik and Dennis used to record videos for their own wrestling promotion and we’d have characters and music and storylines. Even a website.

(I’m using this short moment to mention that back in my teens I used to build websites, and once I built a website for a backyard wrestling promotion called HCW and instead of paying me in cash they gave me their build a ring instructions. That promotion had a backyard wrestler in it who ended up actually becoming an accomplished indie wrestler, probably one of the most underrated in the 2000s. I’m talking Ruckus.)

In my teens I spent hours upon hours talking pro wrestling, being in e-feds, and playing wrestling videogames. I guess that answers my question as to why this became such a dominant hobby. I was finishing high school in 2004 and didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my life. I didn’t really do as well as I should have (thanks undiagnosed ADHD) and had no real path or purpose. So I decided I wanted to travel and I wanted to do something I was passionate about. I considered becoming a pro wrestler.

I tried saving up the money for wrestling training and even went a few times to the Can-Am Wrestling School in Windsor, Ontario. Then when it was time to leave Chatham (I didn’t have many goals in life at 19 but the one thing I wanted to do more than anything was live anywhere other than Chatham) I saw that most of my friends from high school moved to London. I went the other way and moved to Windsor.

Me looking like a child in red doing security for BCW in the summer. Photo by Holly Lengyel

The goal in Windsor was to get a job, make some money, and eventually start going to wrestling school. I even started volunteering for Border City Wrestling in 2005 with my first show being the BCW International Incident when Jeff Jarrett beat Raven for the NWA Heavyweight Championship. I got to the show late, missed most of it, because I worked for 12 hours in framing/construction and then biked out to Ciociaro Club. That was my first day of helping take down the ring and collapse the chairs. After that day I became a part of the Ring Crew.

It was an odd time for Windsor pro wrestling, since Scott D’Amore was starting to do more and more with NWA:TNA. I ended up on the ground floor of a new promotion being set up by some of the Ring Crew guys to basically be a sister promotion of BCW called Sin City Wrestling. You see, Windsor at the time had a lot of rub and tugs, gambling at the casino, and tons of bars downtown. Americans by the truck loads were coming every weekend to party since you could drink at 19 and 20 here. It started being called the Sin City of Canada, so this was Sin City Wrestling.

It was here I got to be more than just ring crew. I built the website (my payment was an SCW shirt that Holler didn’t get to me until the BCW War Without Honour show in 2009), I took photos, and I even got to take part in the creative process. Here I was, just moving to Windsor, haven’t even started my wrestling training, and I’m already helping book independent wrestling shows. Not good shows, but hey I was helping.

Sin City Wrestling only lasted a few shows, with the final show on Mother’s Day (Mother’s Day Massacre) being such a disaster they only had 13 paid in attendance and not all the wrestlers got paid. Phil Atlas and Tyson Dux decided to have a no bump wrestling match in the main event.

It was actually a show a few months prior to that where I had a conversation with Phil Atlas about the creative freedom of an independent wrestler. I realized you didn’t have much, if at all, and it was that moment I decided I no longer wanted to become a pro wrestler. It also didn’t help that I had tight hamstrings that were genetic so doing too many hindu squats just ruins me. I didn’t want to become a pro wrestler anymore but I still loved pro wrestling and I loved more than just the wrestling. I was interested in the creative side of it. The booking, the promoting, the business.

I used to write long journals of wrestling diaries using Extreme Warfare Revenge by Adam Ryland, a PC wrestling sim. I was already doing more “wrestling promoting” in e-wrestling than I was running my e-wrestler. It was the business I was interested in.

By that point I had already developed a healthy (unhealthy?) hatred of the World Wrestling Entertainment company, but the only way I could still talk to my friends about wrestling? It was by following WWE. Which probably made me hate it even more. I saw WrestleMania 23 live in Detroit and I have never watched it back. It’s still the last time I’ve ever paid to watch a WWE event live.

I watched everything I could get my hands on. Every match I could download or get sent by DVD I would watch. My friends Adam, Danny and I all lived together at one point and would just watch pro wrestling every day. There was always a match on. Sometimes it was just Fire Pro Returns on Playstation 2 running CPU vs CPU matches. That’s fine. All wrestling all the time. I once got a Scott Hall shoot from RFVideo and watched that sucker so many times that whenever I talk wrestling psychology I am often talking stories Scott Hall told.

The 2010s

I eventually moved out of Windsor after graduating from college and decided I needed to move around to try and find a job. I moved to Kingston, where Adam and Danny now lived, in the hopes of finding a job in radio, print, or TV. I instead found no work except volunteering for another wrestling promotion called Ontario Championship Wrestling. This time I got to see true small time small town wrestling unlike BCW. BCW was one of the biggest independent wrestling companies and I didn’t know it because they weren’t the popular tape trading promotion. But the crowds they got were usually over 500 and sometimes over 1000 and nobody in the 2000s was really doing that except them and a choice few others. Now I was helping a promotion that patted themselves on the back when they got 80 people in their little arena.

Danny Frantic, myself, and Adam Keaton in OCW. Photo by Robert Rusaw

Doing OCW for a few months made me glad to never have become a pro wrestler just in the ways I saw the promoter essentially scam people out of $100 per month in the hopes they could springboard their way out to become a pro wrestler. Some of them still work in the industry that I saw during those days, but places like OCW are a trap. I got to work a little bit as a wrestling interviewer (I wasn’t good at it) so I enjoyed my time there, but I also got to see that the stuff you hear about happening in the major promotions watched all over the world? It also happens on the small time, with local regional network TV. Same egos. Oh I also once had to fill in for referee work at another small house one time (I also wasn’t good at it.)

I eventually moved back to Windsor and hooked up with the old Ring Crew friends as BCW sparsely ran shows. Instead the sister promotion was Can–Am Rising, headed by Tyson Dux, and it was handled far better than SCW was. Tyson made sure everyone who helped put the show together got paid, and made sure the shows were well organized. He had great help from Holly and Matt as well in that regard. I did some ring announcing on the first show (I again wasn’t good at it.)

Since the Can-Am Rising shows I haven’t done too much independent wrestling crew work, aside from helping handle tickets at the door and the occasional camera work. It’s one of those things where I’m always open to be asked to do things but I don’t put myself into the process.

The problem is that after returning to Windsor, I started to lose my love of pro wrestling. I had been watching and obsessing over it for so many years and now it felt like it was just a husk of itself. The excitement of the 1990s was gone. The excitement of the new indie promotions was pretty much gone too. The 2001 Invasion sucked and the brand split following it was just an annual disappointment compared to what I thought it could be if done right. There was nothing new and everything was just kinda chugging along. I remember BCW doing an East versus West show featuring BCW wrestlers against New Japan Pro Wrestling wrestlers, and here I’m seeing guys like Hiroshi Tanahashi and Kazuchika Okada and Shinsuke Nakamura in their prime and I’m just not that hyped up about it. I was more hyped my buddy Chuck, who finally shaved his head, got a photo with Karl Anderson, who I kept telling him he’d look like if he shaved his head. That was the best part of the night for me.

Karl Anderson and my buddy Chuck. Won’t say which is which.

Jeff, Adam, myself, and Chuck with our Cineplex WrestleMania tickets.

My friends Adam, Chuck, Danny, and Jeff, we’d all try to watch WrestleMania together as a friend thing, usually at a theatre. We saw WrestleMania 30 in 2014, and that’s where Undertaker lost to Brock Lesnar. His first ever loss at a WrestleMania. Here was the guy that truly got me into watching this, likely close to retirement (ha wrestlers never retire) and I got to see his big WrestleMania loss at the cinema. I remember the whole theatre going quiet with people wondering if it was supposed to happen. And in the moment I said to myself, “Well that’s pro wrestling for me. Good place to stop.”

I should add that at the time I was occasionally on a podcast about wrestling and was also the guy who launched the Last Word on Sports wrestling department. I was either writing, editing, or talking wrestling all the time still. And yet, my heart wasn’t in it. In 2014 it really felt like I was going to be done with pro wrestling eventually. I stopped doing podcasts. I stopped being a wrestling editor eventually. I wasn’t watching it as much as I used to.

And then Lucha Underground came along in the fall. Lucha Underground, handled like a TV action series but the wrestling matches are shown like pro wrestling (but with editing), was the spark I had been looking for years for. That’s the thing I had wanted more than anything. Something that felt fresh, original, and unlike anything the WWE had been doing. Lucha Underground was it. The first three seasons of the show I still hold near and dear to my heart.

Soon after on January 4, 2015 was Wrestle Kingdom 9 in New Japan Pro Wrestling. This show was on internet PPV thanks to Jeff Jarrett’s Global Force Wrestling with commentary by Jim Ross. Less than a year ago I saw these NJPW stars right up close (I was at the after party and saw Jyushin Liger without his mask) and that didn’t spark me. You know what did?

Working camera for Destiny Wrestling in 2016.

Watching Kazuchika Okada, this supposed wrestler of destiny, The Rainmaker, with everyone expecting him to beat Hiroshi Tanahshi for the IWGP Heavyweight Championship that night. And Okada lost. And then he cried in losing.

Those tears in losing? That brought my love of pro wrestling back in full force. I watched a man cry due to losing a major match and it wasn’t treated like a joke or pathetic. It was treated like the right reaction to losing that match. It meant he would have to wait another year to try again, which he did at Wrestle Kingdom 10.

Since then I’ve been back in loving pro wrestling, and spent those years following NJPW, ROH, even Impact Wrestling. I resisted the urges of people to watch NXT seeing it as just WWE’s pop version of Ring of Honor. I re-connected to all the things that made me love pro wrestling in the past and got back into conversations about wrestling. And that got me writing about wrestling again.

When All Elite Wrestling announced in 2019, I was starting to lose my love of hockey due to the management of the Montreal Canadiens. There was a real void in my soul, and it felt like pro wrestling was going to fill it. More importantly, I had a ground floor opportunity to watch something and follow it from the start like I did Lucha Underground. Good or bad, I was going to make AEW a mission for me.

The 2020s to today

Out of writing about AEW monthly came GrapPro, my new website where I try to write every day about All Elite Wrestling. It mixes that love of videogame magazines I had along with the passion of documenting the “ongoing history” of All Elite Wrestling. The Almost Famous link?

“They are trying to buy respectability for an artform that is gloriously and righteously dumb!”

“You have to make your reputation on being honest and unmerciful.”

It’s been 10 years since Kazuchika Okada brought my love of pro wrestling back, 20 years since I volunteered for an independent wrestling company, and 30 years since I rented Survivor Series 1994 and watched Undertaker snap the pole of a Japanese flag over his knee and wonder why he would hate the country that brought me the Super Nintendo.

Why do I still love this stupid wrestling hobby? This stupid wrestling hobby that has yet to make me any money, this stupid wrestling hobby I never ended up becoming a pro wrestler in? This stupid wrestling hobby I waste way too much of my time, energy, and writing on? This stupid wrestling hobby that somehow despite all of the scandals and terrible decisions the WWE is now the strongest it has been since the late 90s and hasn’t died like I pray every night it does to your gods? Why do I still love this stupid hobby?

Terrible photo from AEW Revolution 2020.

Because in 2020, before the pandemic, my buddy Joel and I went to Chicago for AEW Revolution. That night, we saw Kenny Omega and Hangman Adam Page defend the AEW World Tag Team Championship against the Young Bucks. We didn’t like the Young Bucks. We were cool with Kenny Omega. But we loved the Hangman. We loved the beer drinking anxious millennial cowboy. We both even have the t-shirt. We loved this young guy, under the thumb and shadow of his supposed friends, constantly told he’s doing things wrong when he’s a world champion, and essentially being told to just treat their upcoming match like a regular wrestling match. We loved this guy mad at everyone saying the best tag team in the world wasn’t the tag champions but their opponents, who never even held the titles yet.

We watched as Page and Omega won. We watched as Page did exactly what we hoped he would do. He wouldn’t just win the match, he’d win it by Buckshotting both Bucks. He got the team the victory. Not “The Best Bout Machine” in Kenny Omega. Not “The Best Tag Team in the World” the Young Bucks. Hangman Adam Page got it. I lost my voice during that match. I lost my voice but I gained my soul.

That’s why I love this stupid wrestling hobby. For the times I can share it with friends, and the way it can make me feel to believe in something and see it happen. There isn’t a lot of times I got to feel that in my near 40 years in this world. At least I get it in pro wrestling sometimes.

Next month I turn 40.

Header photo by Holly Lengyel from Border City Wrestling: War Without Honour. That’s me in the back running hardcam. Another one of my many jobs in pro wrestling. That one I was good at.