It’s Wednesday.
You know what that means.
Or maybe you don’t.
There are fans who attend so many live professional wrestling events, they become blasé about it. They wake up, check their phone, see an announcement about a show and say to themselves, “Oh! Are there graps tonight? Will there be big meaty men slapping meat in the center of the fabled squared circle? Ho hum. I’ve nothing else going on. Perhaps I’ll purchase a ticket or twelve.”
That attitude has always confused me. It demeans professional wrestling, turns it into some kind of circus attraction. Listen: when you’re poor, you save up for those tickets. You look forward to it like a birthday, an anniversary. It becomes so important, you pray to your god that you don’t die before the bell rings for the first match. Professional wrestling is the thing that keeps you going, the singular entity that feeds your spirit.
Bear with me.
I’m making a point.
Who are your heroes? Who do you love? Who do you respect? When you close your eyes before another consecutive night of restless and unfulfilling sleep, who do you wish you were?
I’ll tell you my heroes.
The American Dream, Dusty Rhodes. Blackjack Mulligan. Tommy “Wildfire” Rich. Roddy Piper. The Icon, Sting. Those are my heroes. The men who worked the ring like it was their bitch. Their words. Their actions. The pure violence they perpetrated upon their enemies. Wish fulfillment? Sure. I was a fat kid with a propensity for books and horror movies and an allergy to grass. I wasn’t the guy to spend hours lifting weights and learning how to bodyslam some poor schmuck into oblivion.
I was a nerd.
Wrestlers were my surrogates. They did the things I could only dream of.
I needed them like the flowers needed the rain or something like that. They had reached the top of the pantheon. They were not just humans. They were gods in fragile bleeding skin. I quoted Randy Savage and Ric Flair in everyday conversation. Wrestlers became my alter egos, people who were strong where I wasn’t, brave when I couldn’t be, brash where I was understated or afraid.
My heroes have always been wrestlers.
They still are, it seems.
Blame my dad. Look: you can fault my dad for a lot of things, but my love of wrestling is one of the purest things I got from that man. I was a kid in the territory days and when Mid-Atlantic Wrestling came to the Cincinnati Gardens, we were always there. I remember seeing an old woman hock a loogie onto Roddy Piper’s head as he walked out of the tunnel towards the ring. When Greg “The Hammer” Valentine grabbed the ropes and refuse to run out of an Irish Whip, waggling his finger at his opponent as if to say “you can’t hurt me,” I fell in love with professional wrestling.
These people were everything I wanted to be. Wrestlers were Superman and Jesus the Christ embodied in unitards and singlets. They were my best self, all the dreams I had for my future, the ones who weren’t concerned about making good grades or getting laid. They were my mythology. The permanent denizens of my own private Mount Olympus.
They were my heroes.
We all need heroes, don’t we?
Jon Moxley grew up in Ohio, in the same area where my grandparents on my mother’s side lived. I don’t remember a whole lot about them, to my shame. But when Mox debuted at AEW Double or Nothing 2019 after a grotesque solo run in WWE (we’ll talk about my undying love for The SHIELD later) and tried to murder Kenny Omega, I became homesick for a home I barely had. Mox became my touchstone to memories I couldn’t place. He had that Ohio swagger, the attitude of an unbeatable man with the spirit of a rusted piece of machinery on a corn farm. Make no mistake: Jon Moxley is my favorite wrestler of all time. He’s everything I want from a worker and everything I forlornly wish I could be.
I’m too old for this shit.
I have to live vicariously through these wrestlers from a good, safe distance.
It’s people like Moxley. Cope. Darby Allin. They make me feel young again, like I can do things, like I don’t have to struggle for balance when I get out of bed in the middle of the night before I go take a weak piss. Like I’m not a used up, wasted piece of shit. Like I’m not old and staring my mortality right in its bony face.
Don’t get it twisted. I have raised a gorgeous family. I have wonderful and intelligent children and I could not be more proud of them. I have four grandchildren that never cease to amaze me. My wife loves me and I’ll be good and godsdamned if I’ll ever understand why. My life is good. Y’all want a legacy? I’ve got one.
But I’ve never done a tilt-a-whirl slam on anyone. I’ve never looked someone in the eye, told them I was sick of their shit, and given them a piledriver in the parking lot of a Shoney’s. I’ve never gotten to live out that violent, narcissistic dream of Making An Indelible Statement. I need these people, the men and women who have given everything to the business of wrestling that I love so much, to make my desires to come to life.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
“Wrestling is fake.”
“It’s all choreographed.”
“This is caca.”
I hear you. You’re not exactly wrong.
And I don’t care.
What, Game of Thrones is real?
Besides my family, wrestling is everything to me. It’s the eternal battle of good and evil. It’s the ultimate tension, waiting to see who turns bad or who becomes a hero. Wrestling is the worst Thanksgiving dinner ever, waiting for drunk Uncle Todd to finally pick a side and go ham on the person they disagree with. Wrestling is the church of the poison, yet somehow enlightened, mind.
This sport (and it is a sport, by the gods) has my heart. It has since I was a kid. Back when Dusty Rhodes told us about Hard Times, in the days when it was easy to tell who the good and bad guys were, those naive days of black and white, and the only shades of grey I cared about existed in a godsdamned Monkees song.
Nothing has changed.
Maybe I don’t need to meet my heroes, but I’ll tell you this. All of them live right now in All Elite Wrestling. Being in the same building as Adam Copeland, Kenny Omega, and Samoan Joseph is going to turn this grandfather into a child again. Because, all of a sudden, my icons will be there.
And I need them, probably more than they need me.
Listen: I’m not here to convince you to become a wrestling fan. I’m certainly not out to convert you to the All Elite Wrestling side. All I want is for you to understand why professional wrestling is important to me. Why it rings in my soul like a fire alarm at midnight. Why it infuses damned near everything I say and do. You don’t have to get it. Not everyone does. That’s fine.
Regardless, it’s Wednesday.
Do you know what that means?
It means my inner youngster meets my outer old dude. It means I’m going to cry more than I want to. It means, if I’m lucky, I’ll get to start consolidating those two ages and become something better than I am now. More whole. More balanced. Someone with a better grasp of the past and the future. A person with a better sense of morality and justice than I had before. Let the carnage settle me.
I’m about to walk into the arena with the sounds of Greg Valentine and Roddy Piper echoing in my headbrain, the ones who surreptitiously told me anything is possible. All Elite Wrestling is the perfect and logical evolution of everything my past heroes worked so damned hard to build. I am excited. I have marked out. And I am humbled. This is the culmination of my fantasies, my dreams, my vicarious wishes.
It’s Wednesday. Now you know what that means.
Let’s fucking go.
AEW Dynamite broadcasts live from the Knoxville Civic Auditorium and Coliseum on Wednesday, January 22, 2025. Watch it on TBS or streaming on MAX. Get your tickets now at www.aewtix.com because why wouldn’t you? Come find me and let us break bread together at the altar of Samoan Joseph. Hold my hand if Mox shows up. Buy me a beer or nine. Tell me I’m pretty.
