How Did I Get Here?

Throughout my life I've had several hobbies and interests, but most didn't stick. Whether it was frustration with not feeling I was good enough to really carry on with a hobby and excel at it, or I just got bored. A few things stuck though, mainly professional wrestling.

I can't pinpoint the exact moment I became a fan, but I can tell you everything I remember right after I got hooked on wrestling. My first time tuning into a pay-per-view was the 1993 WWF Survivor Series. I can vaguely remember watching WWF on weekend mornings and seeing the build up to the show and wanting desperately to see it. My family wasn't rich, but my dad managed to provide a good life for myself, my mom and my siblings. Dropping money for a ppv would be a hard sell to my parents. I'm pretty sure it involved doing extra chores and not missing a single one of them, but I managed to get it done.

If you asked me before I started writing this what I remember about the show, all that popped in my mind was Lex Luger and Undertaker having a team face Yokozuna and his team, but for the life of me I couldn't remember much else. Going back now and looking at reports about the show, it all came flooding back.

Undertaker wasn't even originally in the match and I didn't remember that he replaced Tatanka, but reading the story about what happened, I connected two memories that I didn't think had anything to do with one another. I remember Tatanka having an incredible undefeated streak that was ended by Ludvig Borga, but didn't realize the attack on Tatanka that cost him the match led to Undertaker replacing him and thus beginning his rivalry with Yokozuna.

I remember some of what went on after looking over the match card again. Shawn Michaels teaming with Jerry Lawler's knights was weird, but since social media wasn't around back then and most wrestling news you learned about from magazines or those 1-900 hotlines, I had no idea why Lawler was pulled from that match but I'm glad I didn't know when I was kid.

Anyway, this was the show that really kicked off my love of wrestling. I became obsessed. So much so that I remember my family having a gathering at my grandma's house on the day of Wrestlemania X and I spent most of the evening trying to move the bunny ear antennas on her tv into the perfect position to unscramble the picture for the ppv. My family thought I was crazy but I didn't care. I was 12 years old and this is the first thing I showed real interest in besides video games and girls. If I wasn't going to be allowed to stay home and order Wrestlemania, then dammit I was going to rig my grandma's tv to watch it no matter how grainy or scrambled the picture was.

In January of 1995, I finally got to attend my first wrestling show live. It was WWF recording a bunch of tv episodes and a few of those Coliseum home videos. I have some old pictures of the show still somewhere in my parents house, but I can remember so much about what happened. Looking back on this card though, it was truly insane from seeing who competed after being a fan almost 30 years later. It's also kinda hilarious how many matches there were, way more than any AEW show in the last couple of years, but the average match length was two minutes or less. As a kid, I didn't care if the match was 2 minutes or 2 hours, I had a blast.

There were two matches that I remember the most. The first was was Diesel (Kevin Nash) vs Jeff Jarrett w/Shawn Michaels and The Roadie (before he became Road Dogg Jesse James). If memory serves me right, Jarrett was a replacement for Bob Backlund as this was shortly after Diesel beat him for the WWF Championship in 7 seconds. It's still wild to me that Jarrett is still able to go and look as good as he does three decades later.

The other match I remember was Bret Hart vs Owen Hart. The match was magical as you can imagine and I consider it one of my top 3 favorite wrestling moments I've witnessed live. I consider myself fortunate to get to see it in person as this was a match between two of the all time best to ever wrestle. Bret Hart was already my favorite wrestler at the time, but seeing this match locked me in as a fan for life. I even ordered some Bret Hart sunglasses that I would wear everywhere until people started bullying me over it. Looking back, I wish I had kept doing what I wanted and not worry about what those people thought as long as I was having fun. Thankfully, I've surrounded myself with people in my life that know and appreciate how big of a wrestling fan I am, including my amazing wife.

So here I am, just over 30 years later and a bigger wrestling fan than I ever was. It wasn't until the last 2-3 years though that I started traveling for wrestling shows. I've always wanted to do something in wrestling but could never figure out what I would be good at. Then it hit me. My journeys are something I would love to share with people who would want to take the time to read about them. Even if I never get a single reader, writing about it is theraputic. I not only get to talk about the shows themselves, but the stories around how I go to and from them. Maybe this will all lead to something bigger, maybe it won't, but I'm happy to start journaling my experiences and see where it takes me.