My goals in professional wrestling are always evolving.  When I achieve one, I add one.  For me, the feeling of being satisfied doesn’t last very long.  I always need a new goal to help motivate me and keep me moving forward.  I will say that of all the goals I have reached in professional wrestling, none were bigger than the first one:  Organize one professional wrestling show.

Since I was a child, I dreamed of putting together wrestling matches.  I would fill up notebooks with tournaments and dream cards.  I would do 32 man double elimination tournaments for guys that had never won a major singles title. It would sometimes take hours for me to decide a winner. I would also put together cards in different parts of the country that I thought would draw the best houses. I would guess at paydays (I was 12 when I started doing this) The matches would be played out in my head and the winner decided based on how the match flowed.  This was a daily occurrence from about 1985 to 1992.  Needless to say, I didn’t date a lot.

By 1992, I was a sophomore at Iowa State University and had discovered a variety of things that I thought were a lot cooler than wrestling at the time.  I never stopped loving it, but it didn’t consume me during this time.  It wasn’t until I had moved up to Minneapolis in the Mid 1990’s that my love for professional wrestling was rekindled.  Still, the thought of running my own professional wrestling company seemed far-fetched at best.  I would talk to people a lot about my intentions to start my own wrestling company, but it was just talk.  I met a lot of great people as a fan during this time.  Guys like JB Trask, Lenny Lane, Tim Larson, and others all inspired me in different ways to keep my wrestling dreams alive.

Flash ahead to 2001 and I was in Oskaloosa, Iowa.  I didn’t know anyone, I was bored, and for the most part I didn’t leave my house other than to run the furniture store that had pulled me away from Minneapolis to begin with.  Then I discovered HCWA (I believe it stood for Hardcore Wrestling Association) in Bussey, Iowa.  Bussey is a town of 422 people and there was an old rounded steel building in the middle of town where the shows were held.  
I went to the matches on a Saturday and the place was packed!!  The show was unlike anything I had seen before.  It was just utter chaos from beginning to end.  The first match started when two wrestlers began to fight around the ring, and then four guys came out and started fighting while the first two fought to the back.  Then two new guys came out and the other four went to the back.  Then those two fought to the back and then it was time for intermission!  There were no pin attempts or finishes in the first half of the show!!  It was nuts.  I didn’t really know what was going on at all.  I was at a loss.  I thought I was on a hidden camera show.  I felt like I was the only one that didn’t know what the hell I was watching.  They had this guy named Sin running it.  He came out after intermission and talked for WAY TOO long.  He then asked the fans to guess his birthday.  Somebody yelled a date out and he said “nope guess again.  We are not starting the show back up until someone guesses my birthday.”  It took probably 60 guesses before someone got it! (statistically speaking it could have been a lot worse)

That show ended and I remembering thinking two things:  What I had just seen didn’t even resemble what I would call professional wrestling, and the crowd LOVED IT!  I instantly formed a belief system that there is no one way to entertain fans.  And of the multiple ways to get the crowd emotionally invested in what you are doing, one way is not more noble than the others.  If you can entertain fans because you know a thousand variations of the arm drag, great.  If you can entertain the fans because you are 7 foot tall, 400 pounds, and eat turnbuckles, that is equally great in my opinion.

Wrestlers admire other wrestlers that have great in-ring technical ability.  I too admire that.  However, for me it is always about making matches entertaining and the wrestlers memorable.  There is a guy that wrestled for us several years ago named Chief Atakullakulla.  He still wrestles and has to be close to 50.  He was a big guy with a pink Mohawk.  He was memorable.  His in-ring technical skills weren’t up to par with a lot of other guys, but fans remembered him and talked about him to other people.  He adds value to every show he is a part of in that way.

Back to Bussey, Iowa.  I left that night more determined than ever to get involved with professional wrestling.  I had been talking to my friend Mike Ingebretson about what it would take to start running wrestling shows.  We needed wrestlers, a ring, a building, and an outlet for promotions.  We went to work immediately.  I spoke with the National Guard Armory in Oskaloosa, and they agreed to rent us the building for $400.  The next thing was finding a ring.  I met Travis Shillington through a Minnesota Wrestling message board online.  I knew he wrestled in Minnesota as TS Aggressor and I was impressed with him in the ring.  We exchanged a few emails and agreed upon a rental fee of $500 for the ring and he would wrestle on the show.  He suggested several guys that he liked to be on the show.  Mike had reached out to many of the Minnesota wrestlers that we enjoyed and we had the makings of a show.

For promotions we were set pretty well.  Through running ads for the furniture store, I had some good connections with different media outlets.  I went to KBOE radio station to cut my ads for the store.  It is there I met Steve Shettler, a fellow lifetime professional wrestling fan.  We hit it off immediately and he became an instrumental part of the formation and growth of Impact Pro Wrestling.  He was a great help in the producing of ads and helping in general with the promotional aspects of the event and with later shows, booking.

The show was set for February 9^th, 2001.  I will probably blog bout this date another time.  In short, we had to cancel our FIRST show due to weather.  It was a major financial setback.  I had already setup an after-show party that I had paid for at a bar with keg and a spread of food.  It didn’t all go to waste, but it was a pretty somber party.  Also, all the money we had spent on promoting the event, including our deposit with the armory, was gone.

That was a tough time.  I didn’t have a ton of money to begin with, and a lot of it was gone.  Against conventional wisdom, we decided to set another date.  May 9^th, 2001, was to be the debut of MWCW (Midwest Championship Wrestling).  We went through the whole process of promotion again, but we had lost a lot of momentum, having canceled our first event.  We had refunded about 70 of our presale tickets from the first show.  I don’t know what percentage of those fans purchased a ticket for our May event, but I doubt a lot.  The day of the show came.  I paid 12 of our wrestlers $125, 2 of them $50, and 4 of them $25.  The referee, manager and ring announcer each got $100.  I had friends of mine from college running the concession stand and my parents came down to take tickets.  I felt like I called in every favor and pestered every single person in my life to help out.

When 150 fans came through the doors to buy a ticket, I instantly knew it would be a financial disaster.  I had brought $1200 in cash with me not counting ticket sales.  That was basically all the money I had.  It wasn’t enough to cover the paydays, but I wasn’t going to go back on my word on the paydays we had agreed upon with the wrestlers.  I asked if they would take a check (from the furniture store, that I paid back later) would they take an extra $50 or so.  I ended up writing $750 in checks.  That made for a total game day loss of $1950.  That doesn’t count what I had spent beforehand on promotions and the previous show.

The show was over and everyone went to the bar.  My parents, a few college friends, and I were the last ones in the building mopping the floor and cleaning the kitchen.  At last the cleanup was done and I was shutting off the lights to the armory.  I was heading to the bar without a single cent in my pocket to party with the wrestlers that were already there.  I was filled with mixed emotions.  I will NEVER forget that moment.  A friend of mine came up to me and patted me on the back and said, “You did it.  You ran a wrestling show!”  It took me a minute for it to sink in and realize how great that felt.  I had done it.  Not successfully, but I had done it and there was nothing that could take that away.  If I never saw another professional wrestling match again, I had accomplished a life-long dream and it was incredible.  I felt like I could take over the world at that moment.  Immediately though, I had to ask for $20 from my mom and dad so I could go to the bar.