You know what is really frustrating? That an injury can take you out of the action and I know that I am going to have to put in all the hard work I have put into the past to get back to the amount of shows I do.
I worked hard in the gym to impress my trainers to get onto shows, I worked hard to impress other promoters to prove to them I am good enough to be on their shows and through a calamitous string of unlucky events, I feel I have to prove myself again.
I hinted in my last tenet that wrestling is a fickle world, you fall off and someone is more than willing to take your place, it is not a nice feeling to be faced with the prospect but it does give me a better insight into the mind of the professional wrestler. You see if you face an opponent who injures you, you don’t have just the injury to face.
When you are forced to let people down on bookings your reputation slips and people look elsewhere to book, promoters want to put on shows and unless you can make a name for yourself as an independent, they will not look at you, yet seem to go for the cesspool of freebie wrestlers who think they can wrestle.
This is fortunately not the case with me, my arm is getting better and I have found an elbow pad supports the arm when training. However, sometimes I feel that fear of losing what you have, being a wrestler is not an easy thing to be, you are constantly frightened.
Constantly frightened the person you face doesn’t know what they are doing, frightened that they are going to injure you, frightened that letting down a promoter means that you are going to be blackballed.
I know my biggest fear is that I am just being allowed to wrestle because I have a car, to ferry the real talent about. One promoter told me straight that he books me because of my size and that I look like a wrestler, so I am quite loyal to that promoter, as well as my home grown promotion.
Others seem to realise that fear though, I have been dropped from a show by another promoter because I wasn’t able to pick people up.
Before any confusion sets in, someone has to drive and usually it is me, but you tend to know when you are driving as a part of something and not because of something. I’m hoping the people who regularly get in the car with me know me a little better than to think I am talking about them.
So what happens when I finally recover only to find someone has taken my place? Work hard at it again, hell I’ve hardly been wrestling for 2 years and done much more than I had even expected to do in 5, ok, so I’ve been used to ferry better wrestlers around, but I have used that opportunity to learn from their experience.
A wrestler lives with that fear each time he steps into the ring, we are harsh with each other sometimes when mistakes are made because we have to be 100% safe. This moves into the social life too, we have to trust one another to work together. I met a 20 year veteran who looked at me as though I was the crap on their shoe, they had never met me before and here I was shaking their hand proclaiming I was a wrestler. That moment I kind of understood something about being a wrestler…
Wrestlers are ten a penny but the intricately important thing is that the show itself is much more important that the people who take part in it. You have to be selfless in this game and our main problem is that there are too many primadonnas and too many selfish wrestlers who “have to get this move into the match”.
So I’ve missed out on a few things because of certain events, well my time will come again, I will train in the gym and I will work hard at becoming a good wrestler, someone may fill my shoes but it’s for the good of the show, it isn’t personal, if it is, then that is just sad.
If any promotion wants my services, they know my email:)
Saz