If you guys don’t mind, a new thing I want to try every week is to tell a story of something that happened in the past, a story that might mean a lot to me, or maybe something I just find funny. Since the outlets I used to blog on like Livejournal and Myspace are long distant memories that I really don’t use anymore, resurrecting these old stories is fun since the majority of my readers might not know me personally or might not have heard any of these. I don’t really want to ONLY use this blog to review things and post news, I want to share stuff with you guys as well. This week is a road trip story, one that involves a trek across our state to an area we aren’t used to in order to watch some simulated fighting. I hope that even those who could not care one-half of a cat’s fart about wrestling will still get a chuckle out of this. I managed to resurrect things like crappy M.S. paint drawings of stuff that happened because this, while not an era before phone cameras, was an era when most folks still had flip-phones and iPhones were exorbitantly priced.

It was April of 2007, and my buddies and I saved up some cash to attend a wrestling Pay Per View in St. Louis, Missouri. It’s funny having to explain what a Pay Per View is, but the entire concept has basically gone out the window in the past five years. basically, wrestling feds would use their weekly television shows as a commercial of sorts for a BIG monthly show that cost a ton of money and usually had cooler stuff happen. Now people have Netflix and WWE Network, so folks are not willing to throw down that sort of cash on a monthly basis for three hours of entertainment. It also feels bizarre that this was more-or-less ten years ago, and I now feel very old. When I think “ten years ago” my mind jumps the the late nineties, which is in fact, nearly twenty years ago. The federation in question, TNA wrestling was sort of the alternative wrestling federation out there at the time, and Pay Per Views were usually big news and rarely came to our state at the time. This was before our Sprint Center opened allowing bigger shows to go on, and something about the death of Owen Heart in Kemper Arena seemed to keep WWE and other groups away for many years.

The day started with my friends Dave, Mike, Marco and I hauling up and driving the three and one-half hours to the PPV venue. Immediately, out of the gate, this trip was weird as we passed a dude that was legit wearing a white cloak, Quaker hat, and a walking staff and walking down the highway. I think most of us saw him, but we were all in shock and could not vocalize our feelings for a bit. Finally I broke the ice:

“Can we discuss the fact that we just drove past a god damned wizard back there!?”

“Holy Crap dude I know!”

During our long car ride, we created an entire backstory for this guy, his name was Mordecai and he was in fact some sort of Warlock now. Hey, it helped us pass the time I suppose.

In hindsight, this was likely a local person that was mentally unstable and claimed to be a time traveler. I recall seeing him try to warn everyone at a bank that the end of the world was coming when I was younger – all whilst carrying a huge wooden staff and a robe of some sort. The town I lived in sadly had a few guys like this after a homeless shelter shut down, all with varying degrees of instability.

We ended up there a tad bit early (around 2 o’clock) so we had some time to kill. Being in a rural area near a big city, we didn’t really want to drive so far, and went across the parking lot to a shopping center. We attempted to go to Bass Pro shop, not because any of us are outdoorsmen (although I do like to fish), but we didn’t want to drive too far away from the arena. The only thing we successfully did was scare the crap out of ourselves by walking past this abomination of a statue that was on display. I really wish we would have taken a picture of this thing, because it was like the Burger king and a deformed cigar Indian statue had a kid. This thing was so terrifying that it had a smile that would send chills down Chuck Norris’s Spine. I believe Chuck Norris was a period specific reference to use here, maybe something about voting for Pedro etc. We all joked that it would be in the car when we got back to it, and tons of other hypothetical horror movie starters that we could think of. Perhaps this thing was actually Mordecai, once again trying to warn us of impending doom? Realizing that none of us really needed any bear mace or razor tipped hunting arrows, we all drove back to the arena.

We decided to go ahead and get in line because a line was beginning to start, and sometimes people at the beginning of the line get to be on TV during the pre-shows. Once, in the line we struck up conversation with some guys from Houston TX, that were pretty cool, and generally just talked about what we felt was going to happen at the event. That’s when we saw him: the finest specimen of redneck-dom if I have ever seen one. This guy was a scrawny man with very few teeth wearing a TNA shirt for a tag team called “Team 3-D” or “The Dudley Boys”, which ironically used to have the gimmick of being inbred rednecks. I know what most of you are saying “That doesn’t sound that out of the ordinary…” Well on top of that this guy and his friend were both sporting bright ass red Luchador (Mexican wrestler) Masks. To top it off, he also had a mullet under the mask. After this realization, what we all had to endure was 2 hours of the most inane drunken cat calling and sheer insanity that we could handle. I didn’t want to make fun of this guy, but he was so bad that it was hard not to. He was either insanely drunk, or on the shallow end of the gene pool, and since he had no alcohol on him, i’d unfortunately say the second.

At one point they began taping the crowd for the pre-show that airs just prior to the Pay-per view. We felt that we all had a good chance of being on TV, because we were at the front of the line, but Lucha-Redneck was so annoying and vulgar that the camera stayed well away from our area. As wrestlers began to walk in he got really bad. At one point a female wrestler by the name of Gail Kim came walking out to cut a promo.

(picture capture from the DVD)

This was a set up for a match that was essentially the first all-female steel cage match that the promotion has ever had. All of the sudden Lucha-Redneck starts shouting:

The “you tell’er daddy” part was that this guy happened to have what I would assume was a wife and 2 kids, and he was always being encouraged by them to say more and more idiotic things. Don’t believe me? here is photographic proof of this guys existence. Supposedly, this guy went to the fanfest the day before and was trying to pick fights with wrestlers and acting very similar to the day of the event.

Once we got inside were were all worried that this guy would be right beside us in the seats, thankfully he wasn’t but we did see that he brought some signs with him to the event, with hopes of being on TV. One that said “We Want Rats” (eingrats is a somewhat derogatory term for female wrestling fans, that implies all they are there to do is try to have sex with wrestlers), and another that simply said “who wants a rimjob?” (classy!) So yeah if you look up the word “redneck” in the dictionary, I bet this guys face is on there. I have family from Arkansas and I have NEVER EVER seen somebody as bad as this guy.

In the line, it was made very clear that there were basically two types of wrestling fans:

1) The Smart wrestling fan – this fan (like myself) is essentially a wrestling nerd. We watch matches for the athleticism more than anything. this type of fan has some knowledge of how the business of booking works, and will sometimes keep up with indy organizations. sometimes these fans are terrible as they think they know everything and that they are part of the show.

2) The Norms – These are the fans that to some degree think wrestling is real, they watch what is on TV and usually like trashy stuff like lingerie matches. This is the stereotypical fan that most think of when they imagine a wrestling fan.

Sadly we were around a lot of guys that were the bad side of both, including a guy that attempted to start a fight with the somewhat infamous wrestling writer and personality Vince Russo.

Fun Fact: The camera zoomed over us a few times, but since the house lights were lowered we seldom appeared on TV. The best I could find was this:

Note: Lucha-redneck, thank god his sign didn’t show up.

The one thing that struck me about this PPV was the amount of fan interactivity that they offered to us. Right from the start the wrestlers were walking around in the audience and signing autographs before the show. Even the owner of the company at the time, Dixie Carter, was talking to people, a few of us shook her hand and told her that we really appreciated them coming to St. Louis (they normally tape in Orlando). The experience that I’ve had with a WWE show was that it was really distanced from the fans, and it seemed like we were all named “Franklin”,” Washington”, and “Lincoln” rather than fans. Since this show, I actually attended a few more TNA shows and each one was similar. I even have a book somewhere full of autographs of pretty close to the entire roster from a local show we went to a few years later. I’ve met guys like Jeff Hardy and AJ Styles, TNA knows how to make fans have a great time.

The Matches themselves were awesome, aside from one match that was too gimmicky (a blindfold match) and a match that could have been handled better for realism (an “electrified cage” match, never a good idea from the realism standpoint). The problem with the electrified cage match was that for something that everyone knows is fake, they could have done a better job to help us suspend disbelief. The premise was that these two tag teams were so at eachother’s throats that even a normal cage would not suffice. allegedly, if somebody was tossed into the metal of the cage they would receive some exaggerated shock from wires going into the metal. What actually happened was that the lights flickered and they piped a noise into the sound system. In Japan, they used to do matches like this where pyro would shoot off if somebody touched the ropes, something that looks equally fake and stupid. The cage itself looked like the electric fences from Jurassic Park, a fact that actually made it hard to see the show live. The wrestling itself in the match more than made up for it though, it could have been so much better without the goofy crap.

So there it is, watch out for redneck Luchadors and highway wizards folks, it’s scary out there!

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