on writing & wrestling
On Writing & Wrestling
Most of my written work no longer exists online. Call the pieces victims of an early internet before everything was forever preserved, for better or worse. This includes personal blogs like my first Xanga, pseudo-professional pursuits like my early writing for The Madbury Club (& other #blogera publications), and my first forays into brand writing with various sportswear behemoths. I’d rather move forward than look back, but I do enjoy the occasional reflection. I believe by looking back at who you were, you can better see who you are becoming. And, unfortunately, that’s just not possible for so many writers, bloggers, & journalists that published work in/on unreliable servers…or whatever.
I can't remember who I used to cover or what I used to say or how I used to say it with the specificity or clarity that, say, a Google search or Internet Archive scroll inherently achieves. I’m sure most of the writing itself would actually make me cringe, but in absence of their online existence, I entertain the idea that I might be proud of some of the writing from my past lives & prior selves.
But of all the thousands upon thousands (upon thousands and so on) words I’ve scrawled online there’s undoubtedly no body of writing I’d rather revisit than my time spent writing in E-Federations, or E-Feds, for short.
Now seems like a good moment to pause before we wind back the clocks of broadband, dial up time. What in the blue hell is an e-fed you may be wondering. Let’s wind back, shall we?
On E-Feds & Wrestling Fandom
It’s 2001. I’m 10 years old, having just survived the once-dreaded millennium passing, with an eye on ABC’s Dick Clark New Year celebration, and arms around my purple 2000-themed Beanie Baby, purchased from Papyrus in the Cerritos Mall, from a strange middle aged man with awfully rosy skin. Turns out, in spite of my parents’ early prediction, the internet proves itself to be here to stay. We decide to get a home computer, a bulky, greyish Dell something-or-other, from the Office Max neighboring the Oshman’s Sporting Goods & Regal Cinemas, where I spent many an evening as a kid & teen. The only issue? We have no room in our humble home to actually house said computer. I volunteer my room, so long as I can use it. And use it, I did.
My earliest online memories are dominated by AOL; from the startup, three-step sound & graphics screens, to the seemingly endless populous of chat rooms, that I likely had no business being in as a mere preteen. My other earliest memory, neck and neck with all things AOL: E-feds. An e-fed is essentially wrestling fan fiction meets fantasy sports. Imagine competing in your fantasy football or basketball leagues—but also having to write several hundreds of words weekly from the perspective of your team’s best players. That's e-wrestling in a nutshell.
My introduction to e-feds came at a time when I was at the peak of my wrestling fandom. Wrestlemania 2000 had just taken place at the Anaheim Pond and my Pops had taken me to the Fan Access event the Saturday prior to the show. It was a fan’s chance to take photos, watch a ‘dark match’ (see: non-televised exhibition), meet a wrestler or two, & soak up the feeling of being surrounded by hundreds of other wrestling fans. It’s a core memory to this day. But it didn’t matter whether it was WWF or WCW, if there were two dudes talking shit to each other, then taking turns hitting each other with moves with names like the piledriver, choke slam, or powerbomb, I was tuned in.
This time also coincided with the one of the peaks of pro wrestling in terms of mass popularity & pop cultural appeal. The Rock & Stone Cold were household names, whether you watched weekly or not. Kids on every playground around the country were telling each other to Suck It, while slashing their arms across their crotch like HHH, Shawn Michaels, and the rest of D Generation X. David Arquette, a genuine movie star at the time, starred in a full length feature film all about pro wrestling called Ready To Rumble, and became the actual heavyweight champion in WCW, a crossover event that wrestling enthusiasts cite as a sign of the end times for WCW, but that’s neither here nor there.
All to say: Wrestling was hot when I was 10 years old. And while we’re living through another peak right now, arguably a bigger peak than even back then (Hi, Netflix), nothing was bigger in my world than wrestling. Period.
An e-fed, however, solely exists online. It operates like an online ‘league,’ with a multitude of key players involved: You need a promoter, aka somebody to actually run the operation. Promoter duties include, pretty much, everything: Coming up with the fed’s name & identity, attracting willing talent (also known as RPers, ‘role-players’), programming the weekly simulator to generate matchup results (a simulator allows a promoter to swap-in names of RPers & generate a script that details the results of the match—I can’t imagine that AI isn’t playing a huge role in these Feds today), and generally, just keeping things interesting for those involved. Feds came and went, seemingly weekly, with promises of better promotion, better competition, & longer-term storylines to incentivize RPers who would want to continue to develop their characters, so a good, trustworthy promoter is critical.
The other most important player in an E-Fed is, of course, the talent themselves. Roleplayers. RPers, for short, though I don’t quite know if that shorthand is still used in modern e-fed environments or became a relic similar to those free AOL discs. An RPer is/was a wrestling enthusiast, amateur writer, & fan fiction devotee, all in one. A good RPer was somebody who could develop a character, write a compelling narrative (a “promo”), format the script in a way that felt creative & captivating (think: basic HTML know-how with colorful text, complimentary photos, perhaps a graphic or two), and maintain consistency. It wasn’t good enough to write one compelling RP. Usually, you had to write multiple RPs per week to win your match, and dedicate yourselves even further, if you wanted to climb up the ranks and pursue a championship or main event card. An RPer could make up their own characters or draft promos from the POV of real-life wrestlers. A sample RP could begin something like this:
*4:40 PM. T-minus 20 minutes 'til showtime. It's Monday Night. We're nearly live from Los Angeles and the floor is shaking with excitement for what's to come. The live show hasn't yet begun, but fans are taking their seats, wrestlers are continuing to arrive backstage, & production teams are playing with lighting & sound, to get everything just right. We go behind the curtains and see 'No Good Hollywood' Aaron Hart pacing back & forth, feet away from the steel barricades holding the foundation of the Jumbotron screens. He stops pacing. He blows a snot rocket on the floor. He looks directly at the camera.
'No Good Hollywood' Aaron Hart: I usually don't let the cameras follow me backstage. This is my sanctuary, my temple, my time. I don't need to distract myself with silly little messages said into silly little microphones. That's for those other guys. I'm a wrestler's wrestler. And tonight? I show you why this is in my blood. I show you why I'm the best alive. And I show you--in fact, I show EVERYBODY--why I'm the only one in this got-damn place that deserves to hold the Heavyweight championship.*
That was a quick, pretty piss-poor RP freestyle but hopefully you get the idea.
Generally speaking, all of this took place on a message board.
In some cases, certain e-feds were ran via e-mail only, to maintain an even closer-knit feel amongst the league, but that approach was more cumbersome and usually a bit more limiting. The internet forum preceded both, blogging platforms (like Wordpress or Blogger) & social media (like Myspace and you know the others) and served as the earliest homes to niche, online communities. Enthusiasts of all sorts and interests could gather and bond over a vast range of topics from cars to parenting to hoops desktop wallpapers to health research to pro wrestling, all in relative anonymity. The most prevalent example of this behavior & format today is Reddit, though other hubs from this time, a la 4Chan, have gone onto pervade modern society in ways people could never anticipate. But for the most part: Forums were simply online hubs where people grappled (pun fully intended) with the earliest ideas of online community building.
And for e-fedders, the Forum was our version of Madison Square Garden or the Intuit Dome. They were hosted on platforms like Angelfire and Geocities. We would post our own RPs, follow along with others, and each week, sometimes more if there was a big event (a PPV or a PLE as it’s now known in the actual wrestling business), to comb through the results and see what story we’d need to write to next. These forums became the home to these online wrestling leagues boasting names like XWF (Extreme Wrestling Federation), hWa (The Hardcore Association), WWWL (Worldwide Wrestling League), and countless others, with similar acronym-fronted branding. And like, most other things, word of mouth was most effective in getting people to join forums. Often, RPers would juggle participating in multiple Feds at once. And once a Fed showed signs of dwindling, or a promoter did some janky shit, like failing to simulate results on-time or, worse, going host altogether, RPers would jump ship. In a lot of ways, it was no different than the real pro wrestling landscape, just with different variables.
I spent the earliest years of my online days obsessing with e-feds.
Usually, I would develop my own characters—I particularly liked pairing my real first name with a variety of made-up last names and gimmicks like: ‘The Greatest Show On TV,’ ‘No Good Hollywood,’ ‘The Stone’ (a terrible nod to The Rock), or ‘Hardcore Heavy.’ I wish I could remember more of my actual character names, but alas, 20+ years is a long time ago. Most were inspired by gimmicks associated with the Attitude Era. Occasionally, I would write from the POV of an actual pro wrestler, but only if an e-fed stipulated that you had to. Each e-fed had their own slate of roles & regulations, ranging from the types of characters one could use to the preferred length & frequency of RPs. Generally, the most present & important rules were: Make shit interesting. Don’t be boring. And don’t steal from other peoples’ work. These were often unwritten but widely understood in the sprawling communities around e-feds. The entire purpose of these feds were to bond over a shared passion, get a little creative, and compete for bragging rights—I’m a better writer than you, each RP implicitly attempted to say.
Today, one’s ‘online self’ and actual self are intrinsically tied. You see friends & family, teammates & co-workers, often overshare on social media to the extent of causing discomfort for those around them. It’s become apart of our human behavior and I’m sure, in a thousand years, if our species persists for that long, society will look back and judge us for just how comfortable we became sharing intimate details about ourselves with anyone/everyone with an internet connection.
But back then? E-feds were a secret. I didn’t speak to my friends about them and I damn sure didn’t share my RPs with my family. The social internet was more niche—you didn’t make friends online, unless you were a nerd. You didn’t associate with ‘online communities’ because most people didn’t even understand what the terms meant together. It was a foreign concept, an embarrassing one at that. So I spent hours upon hours, each week, dedicating myself to these fleeting online communities, and keeping it secret from my ‘real world’ of friends at school, in baseball, in basketball, in band practice. There was no connection, no shared fabric. Perhaps it was because I was at an age where any & everything was a possibility to be made fun of for. I simply wanted to blend in. Watching Stone Cold toss beers & DX tell the public to suck it every Monday? Totally cool. Pretending to be these wrestlers by writing hundreds of words in a match against total strangers, who could’ve been twice my age & thrice my level of nerd-dom? Definitely not cool. It was always like I was playing pretend, a little past the socially acceptable age where one was supposed to play pretend.
Ironically, by pretending, I found myself becoming a more authentic version of myself.
And the foundation for this whole ‘secret’ online world—writing—would go onto become the basis for how I started my career.
On Writing Foundations
I credit a few different sources for sparking my interest in writing. No book changed my life. I never saw a movie that inspired me to stay inside my room & pick up a pen. The sources were two-fold: Wrestling and people.
When it comes to people, I start with my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Loughman, who carried herself with a creative levity, that seemed so unique from my other elementary teachers. I still remember a phrase she used—Skyblue Pink— when referring to her favorite color in our weekly ‘About Me’ student spotlights. The joke, obviously, being that Skyblue Pink is not a real color. The message, less obviously but increasingly vital, being to not limit yourself based on what you see in a Crayon Box or anywhere else, for that matter. She taught me the value in being yourself.
Secondly, I think of two teachers from high school: My sophomore year Language Arts teacher, Mrs. Condou, and my freshman AND junior year History teacher, Mr. Costa.
Mrs. Condou carried a joy with her that felt contagious. Amongst a jaded class of mostly disinterested 15-year olds, she spoke of language arts with such an excitement that you could sometimes feel it coursing through your veins like some sort of telepathic hand-off. Her cheeks would become red with joy as her monologues often started in one direction about literature, but soon morphed into wider lessons on life. She taught me the base-line of how to compose a compelling paragraph; she taught me the difference between summarizing and analyzing; and most importantly, she taught me that reading could be just as enjoyable as watching TV for hours on end. It was also in her classroom where I first became aware of the college I would later attend—a small, liberal arts institution, right outside of Los Angeles, called Whittier College, which boasted a Poet for a mascot.
Mr. Costa, conversely, was not as excitable or as red-in-the-face as Mrs. Condou. But he was effective in his lesson plans. And through weekly repetition and practice, in preparation for forthcoming AP Tests, he forced me to become a more capable & confident writer. His belief was pretty easy to understand: Multiple choice is a crap’s shoot, you may get some topics you’re familiar with and you may get some you’re not, no matter how well-studied you are. But the essay portion of the test, is something you can control, something you can prepare for, by simply understanding how to approach it. You introduce an idea, provide a concrete example of it, follow it up with your own unique commentary, then repeat that twice, before wrapping it up with a clear conclusion. I still use this approach today in my writing—and often I use it as a lens for other subjects.
I owe a great deal to my business writing professor Professor Crain. He was a bit of a curmudgeon, but provided me with unbelievably valuable feedback that would mirror what came from my further editors at LA Weekly & SLAM: Keep it concise. Lose the flowery language. Don’t lose the plot. Write for effectiveness, not for yourself. And, admittedly, I stray from that advice when it comes to my personal writing, but he made me far more conscious of how to say the most while writing the least.
Of course, I’ve gathered more lessons & learnings along the way, well after my formative schooling years. My time spent with Madbury Club comes to mind. It was both awe inspiring and imposter syndrome-inducing to write alongside such a gifted group of wordsmiths. Any time I read a piece from Matthew Trammell or Bryan Stevenson or Hyun Kim, I was left with a sense of humility and, frankly, inadequacy. They were just so damn good at conveying a point or spotlighting a subject, while also signaling who they were. Their writing made me write and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite anything I published (and most things I didn’t). Soon after, I would benefit from editors like Ben Westhoff and Benjamin Meadows Ingram, who would ‘red-line’ my work, affording the purpose of my piece to shine instead of drowning in long-winded prose. This combination of teachers, peers, and editors is something I’m forever grateful for.
And while every person I’ve mentioned above is vital to my understanding of and appreciation for language, they are spokes to the wheel that is pro wrestling.
These forums, these e-feds are where I first found my voice in writing. They’re where I first distinguished ‘good’ writing from bad. They’re where I realized that style applied to much more than the clothes you wore or the music you listened to. They served as the first place I began to understand the importance of writing. They too served as the first time I began to recognize the inherit politics in anything humans touched—Promoters of e-feds would often favor their friends, or lazily award the roleplayer who wrote the longest promos, instead of seriously digging through each promo in search of quality over quantity.
I hadn’t thought of this whole arc—the connection between my wrestling fandom, involvement in e-feds, and baseline for my career—until a couple years ago. I had phased out of wrestling for a few years, ironically, because I felt the writing had become stale. A certain promoter, who I will not mention here, had successfully bought out most of his competition, and was propagating a series of half-baked, often disconnected storylines that felt more like bad C-grade movies than the wrestling I grew up with. This is not to say wrestling was ever written with the same nuance of what’s typically labeled high-brow craft, but when it’s good, it’s as emotionally resonant and captivating as anything you’ll see on the big screen. You don’t gotta believe me; juts watch CM Punk’s infamous pipebomb promo, that masterfully blurs the line between reality and script, so much so that it created a paradigm shift in the business. Even through this down period, I kept up with what was happening from afar, reading the online ‘dirt sheets’ and sites like WrestlingInc, just to make sure I kept up with who was doing what.
But it wasn’t until the rise of Roman Reigns, and specifically, the Bloodline Family saga, where I got pulled back in with such a force, that my weeks felt incomplete if I wasn’t watching WWE’s RAW and Smackdown. That led me to getting back in-touch with independents like GCW. And subscribing to podcasts like The Masked Man Show and Cheap Heat. I believe fandom is essential to truly enjoying life, whether that fandom comes in the shape of a sport team, a musician, a genre of film, or some other mass or niche interest. Being able to root for something, somebody, without feeling compelled by any other reason, simply feels good. If you find all your interests are tied up with some other aspect of your life, albeit a professional one or one tied to social belonging, I highly encourage you to dig around this vast time & space for something that you enjoy with no strings attached.
Advice to Self
Great writers will often say: If you want to get better at writing, read more. I don’t claim to be a great writer, but if you asked my advice about writing, I would encourage you to watch pro wrestling. And, uh, read more too.
It’s my humble opinion that pro wrestling is the most impressive form of entertainment in the world.
Humor me for a moment: Pro wrestling combines the live theatricality of a Broadway play, with the boundless creativity of an instrumental jazz show, with the acrobatic flair of a ballet dance, with the athletic prowess of a gymnastics routine, with the stage production value of a film set, all while dealing with an enormous amount of danger, every single second they’re in the squared circle. It requires showmanship, teamwork, the ability to memorize a verbal & physical script, and the ability to naturally improvise when the scripts aren’t working. It requires committing yourself to long-term storytelling, while recognizing that a story can change at any moment. And further: It requires you to understand that the story is never, ever finished. No matter what aspirations Cody Rhodes set for himself.
That’s one massively important lesson that writers can take away from pro wrestling: The story is never finished. When one ends, another begins. Keep going. It’s not about plot, conflict, or character development. It’s not about what makes a good promo or what contributes to a stale persona. There are no seasons in pro wrestling, there are no significant off-seasons. There is one ongoing act, with layers upon layers of storylines, and an evolving cast of characters that audiences can choose to love or hate, or worse, be indifferent to, at any given moment. And while time is finite, wrestling can often feel infinite, because of all of this. Writers have no truer obligation, to themselves or to audiences, than to keep going, to keep chasing the infinite despite a definite reality.
Sublime’s Bradley Nowell, another formative voice in my mental framework, once crooned: In school, they never taught me ‘bout hamburgers or steak, Elijah Muhammad or the welfare state. But I know—And I know because of KRS-One.
In my non-acoustic, slightly altered, & certainly slurred version of this ode to teachers, & lessons taught, I’d have no other choice but to say: But I know--I know because of professional wrestling.