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Ecw Press - Elliot Greenberg Keith

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151 pages

English

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Keith Elliot Greenberg chronicles the growth of indie wrestling from bingo halls to a viable alternative to the WWE and speaks to those involved in the Alternative Wrestling League with remarkable candour, gaining behind-the-scenes knowledge of this growing enterprise.

Sujets

Lucha libre profesional

Wrestling

Informations

Publié par	Ecw Press
Date de parution	03 septembre 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781773055763
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0550€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Too Sweet
Inside the Indie Wrestling Revolution
Keith Elliot Greenberg

Contents Dedication Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33 Chapter 34 Chapter 35 Chapter 36 Epilogue Acknowledgments Photos About the Author Copyright

Dedication
“We didn’t do it for the money. We did it for the applause.”
— Maurice “Mad Dog” Vachon (1929–2013)

Chapter 1
“The Bad Boy” Joey Janela was nervous. He paced. He sat. He stood up. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, tapping it against the inside of his palm. With the butt shoved under his lip, he stepped outside the Sears Centre Arena and lit up.
He could see the cars converging on the utilitarian glass and concrete building, angling for spots in the parking lot. From a distance, he heard the doors creaking open, slamming shut, voices talking, laughing, chanting.
Wooooo!
After 12 years in the wrestling business, the sounds were familiar to him. So was the general look of the crowd: long hair and shaved heads, motorcycle boots and sneakers, hard bodies bursting through muscle shirts and balloon-shaped physiques wedged into wrestling tees. Occasionally, an attractive woman tottered by on high heels, holding the hand of a boyfriend rushing to keep up with his wrestling buddies. The parade of fans didn’t stop.
Janela pulled out his ponytail and shook his long brown hair from side to side. When the “Most Badass Professional Wrestler in the World” finally went back into the building, he passed the other wrestlers in the halls: Cody, the Young Bucks and Kenny Omega — the biggest stars on the North American indie scene — Kota Ibushi and Kazuchika Okada from Japan, Rey Fenix, Penta El Zero and Bandido from Mexico. Outside of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), these were some of the most important names in the business. And Janela, the five-foot-eight scrapper from South Jersey, who still lived at home with his mother, was among them. In fact, some of the fans had specifically come to suburban Chicago because Joey Janela — who earned social media infamy by being tossed from a roof into the flaming bed of a pickup truck — was included in this historic September 2018 show, known as All In .
Fifteen minutes later, Janela headed back outside for another smoke. The crowd had not abated. In fact, it had gotten larger. “Wow,” he said, the jitters again tingling through his body. “This is big .”
In fact, it was the largest show not staged by WWE or WCW — WWE’s chief rival until 2001 — in 25 years.
“There’s something happening here that hasn’t happened in a long time,” said Awesome Kong, the charismatic Amazon who later signed with All Elite Wrestling (AEW), the company that grew out of All In . “It’s kinetic. There’s an energy. There’s a sheer will of wanting something different to succeed. And this all started on a dare.”
I first subscribed to Dave Meltzer’s Wrestling Observer newsletter in the 1980s, after I began writing for WWF Magazine , before the lawsuit with the World Wildlife Fund that forced the World Wrestling Federation to become WWE. Although the Wrestling Observer has a significant online presence, I still look forward to the paper edition each week, an exhaustive collection of wrestling history, match results, business analysis and gossip in single-spaced seven-point type. Meltzer, who has lectured at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, also popularized a star rating system for major matches, one that even the performers who claim to hate him take extremely seriously. While I was working on this book, Meltzer and I were guests on a public access show in which he was asked about his taste in movies and bands. He paused and fumbled for words. A movie? But when it comes to professional wrestling, not to mention MMA and old-school roller derby, nobody knows more — or ever will.
In May 2017, Meltzer was asked on Twitter about whether Ring of Honor, the primary American indie league at that time, could draw more than 10,000 fans. “Not any time soon,” he responded. Cody Rhodes — the youngest son of the “American Dream” Dusty Rhodes and an indie prince since he parted ways with WWE the year before — then tweeted, “I’ll take that bet, Dave.”
For the next 16 months, Cody and the Young Bucks, brothers Nick and Matt Jackson, worked to prove that Dave Meltzer was wrong, as well as to create All In .
The effort became “a worldwide movement for professional wrestling [and] everyone that wants an alternative,” Kenny Omega, who went into All In wearing the vaunted International Wrestling Grand Prix (IWGP) Heavyweight Championship for the New Japan Pro-Wrestling promotion, told the group’s website. “Especially in America because in America, you’re kind of forced to believe that WWE is the best.” All In , he continued, was “a rally to show support for people who have a different vision.”
Initially, the three men rejected outside efforts to fund the experiment and relied on their families and friends. Cody’s sister, Teil, created the name All-In , the Bucks’ father, Matt Massie Sr., the musical score. Alabama mortgage broker Conrad Thompson, a wrestling podcaster who married the legendary Ric Flair’s oldest daughter, Megan, coordinated Starcast, the fan convention surrounding the event. Cody’s wife, Brandi — a WWE-trained wrestler herself — and Matt Jackson’s wife, Dana, were deeply involved in organizational decisions.
Like Cody, WWE Hall of Famer Jeff Jarrett had grown up in the wrestling business, learning promotion from his father, Jerry Jarrett, and step-grandfather, Eddie Marlin, in the old Memphis wrestling territory. “I love to see guys take risks,” he observed. “Sometimes, that gets you into big trouble. Sometimes, it pays off. Reward is always measured by your level of risk. But when I saw All In lining up, I felt they had a pretty good chance. The concept was good. The independent wrestling revolution started quite a few years ago. Now we were on the cusp of a wrestling boom.”
Since the advent of television, promoters had used the medium to generate interest in upcoming matches. But Cody, Omega, the Bucks and assorted friends had begun reaching their audience another way: through a YouTube series they’d branded Being the Elite , or BTE , all shot on the wrestlers’ cell phones as they traveled around the world. Each installment combined documentary elements — the guys sitting on airplanes, lounging in hotel rooms and preparing for matches backstage — comedy sketches and wrestling highlights. “We didn’t treat Being the Elite like pro wrestling,” Matt explained. “‘Ah, it’s just wrestling.’ You put together these angles, and there’s plotholes, and you just don’t care. Being the Elite was more like Netflix, HBO, Showtime. We tried to tie up every loose end, pay attention to every detail. When we started building the All In card, we said, ‘[How] can we blow off the stories that fans have been following on Being the Elite ?’ We wanted people to be satisfied after watching six months of episodes. We wanted them to feel rewarded in the end.”
Former Ring of Honor owner Cary Silkin, a friend of the Jackson brothers, tried offering advice. “They did everything wrong,” Silkin said. “I suggested they shouldn’t put tickets on sale on Sunday afternoon. But it didn’t matter. They could have put tickets on sale at three in the morning. They had the spirit of the people with them.”
Within the first 30 minutes that tickets were available, 10,541 were sold. In total, 11,263 fans filled the Sears Centre Arena, the maximum that the fire department would allow. Even the suites were overflowing.
Over the course of the Starcast weekend, nearly $500,000 worth of merchandise was sold. Ninety minutes before bell time, not one All In t-shirt was available.
When the show finally took place, Jarrett noted, All In was “independent wrestling’s version of WrestleMania . From top to bottom, the card was stacked. And the vibe in the arena, the energy in the building, carried you through the matches.”
Silkin compared the “rock ’n’ roll frenzy” in the building to watching Jethro Tull performing “Locomotive Breath” live. “I’ve never seen a crowd — Bruno Sammartino in Madison Square Garden, Hulk Hogan and Roddy Piper, ECW, Led Zeppelin, Metallica in 1987, the Yankees in the World Series — hot like this from beginning to end. Never, never, never.”
Yet, backstage, Cody appeared nonchalant, as if this most public testament to the vitality of indie wrestling was preordained. To those who knew his father, as both a headliner and a booker — the person responsible for outlining matches and storylines — the similarity was striking. “I was watching Cody back there,” former WCW World Heavyweight Champion Diamond Dallas Page said on announcer Jim Ross’ podcast, “and everyone’s coming up to him and asking him everything, and he was getting ready for the biggest match of his life, but having fun . . . just like Dusty used to do.”
Dusty Rhodes was an essential player in the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA), a conglomeration of international promotions all sharing a touring world champion. The “American Dream” had captured the belt on three separate occasions before its meaning was eclipsed by honors affiliated with the World Wrestling Federation. In 2017, Smashing Pumpkins lead singer Billy Corgan purchased the NWA