Last night I worte out this blog but due to issues with the site, I lost it all! So I'm going to re-type it the best I can. Again sorry for posting this after a little while, but since I got the BAW post out of the way, I figured I'd go ahead and post the WCWA blog.

In the month of June of 2005, I contacted the promoter of WCWA and we set up a meeting to where I would go their where the WCWA was being ran in Pleasant Hil, CA. Concord's a few cities away from where I currently live now, so it was a short drive for me. When I got there, I wasn't sure I had the right place. The building from the outside was bare. It was this big building that had no signs, nothing on the outside of it, and you really couldn't see into the building from the outside, just because there were no windows, there were two glass doors but they were tinted, but even though the building looked empty from the outside, one of the two doors were left open, so I made my way over to the building.

As I got closer, I could see into the building better as I got closer and the first thing I saw was a wrestling ring that was placed right in the middle of the floor. When I entered the building I saw that there were two guys in the ring talking about something, one of them noticed me and asked me "Are you Toby?" I said yes and walked over to them to shake their hands. They introduced themselves as Jason and Dave. Jason wrestles as Jason Vega and Daves wrestles under different masked gimmicks, I'm not going to say who just because he stills wrestles under those masks and even though none of you may ever see him wrestle, I'd like to protect those gimmicks just in case. He does however wrestle under one un-masked gimmick and thats sorta his main gimmick, which is U.S. Steel.

After introduing myself to Jason and Dave, the promoter came out and I introduced myself to him as well. His name is Paul Brown. Paul is a big man, not as in he's a fat guy because he really is, I ment big as he's a strong man. Trust me, when I took a clothesline from him, it was like being hit with a thick tree branch and if he was going to hip toss you or give you a push to help you get your ass in the air for something, you were going over weather you wanted to or not. He was literally that strong of a guy. After introducing myself to Paul, he took me to the side of the building away from the ring so we could talk. As we sat and talked, I had a view of the ring and noticed that Jason and Dave were practicing as myself and Paul talked.

Paul and I talked about a few things. We talked about the building we were in, how he ran his promotion, and most important the thing we talked about was about training. The building we were in was a old bank that even still had the vault, it was a two story building. The first floor of the building was where the ring was placed. When shows were ran, chairs were set up on 3 sides of the ring. No chairs were set up on the 4th side because thats where the sound set up and where the ring annoucer sat were. There was this big platform with two tables on it. One for the sound set up and the other table was for the ring annoucer. The platform and the ring were connected by a ramp. The ramp was so the ring annoucer could get from his seat to the ring without having to walk down or up down stairs, plus the crowd could see him the entire time. I'll explain why the crowd would want to see the ring annoucer later on. The second floor was the bathroom and the locker room, along with a weight room. There was a black curtain between the locker room and the bathroom so fans couldn't really see into the locker room without having to move the curtain. I should probably mention that Paul was renting out the building, so he could run a show out of it and pretty much do whatever he wanted to it when he wanted to.

The WCWA was ran as a family promotion and Paul let me know it. The wrestlers were not allowed to cuss, they were not allowed to use any enterance music that had cuss words in it and if a song had cuss words in it, Paul told me he had no problem coming over to the sound and destorying their cd with his own bare hands. According to Paul (because I hadn't seen their crowds), the crowds he drew were parents who brought their little kids and their friends to the shows. I hadn't attended any of the WCWA shows before so this being explained to me was a good thing. After we discussed about the building and about how the WCWA was ran, we talked about training. Paul also ran shows every two weeks on a Saturday.

Training sessions were every Tuesday afternoon, Thursday afternoon, and Saturday morning...well not so much on Saturday morning because...well everyone liked sleeping in plus all the trainers had something to do on Saturdays so a practice rarely happened on a Saturday. I think the compete total fee for training was $1,500.00. It's hard for me to remember because it was such a long time ago. Paul said it was a pay as you go kind of deal, I didn't have to sign any contract's with him and he wasn't going to force me to sign something or force me to do anything as a trainee like Roland Alexander does down in Hayward. After finding things out, I took a few seconds and decided that I liked how things were ran and two days later on a Thursday I was back, ready to train.....and it hurt. My trainers were going to be Paul, Jason, Dave, and two more guys who'd I meet later and would be Helfyre and Eric West. Helfyre's gimmick is sorta crosss between a Death Metal guy crossed with the Undertaker.....if that makes sense. Its basically him being himself, but you'd really have to know Helfyre to understand what I ment. Eric West basically wrestled under his own name and was basically himself.

I sucked at bumping, I really did. I knew I was going to suck and that I wasn't going to catch on right away, but I had no clue I was going to be as bad as I was. I was horrible. When you bump, your suppose to land on your back flat with your hands and feet hitting the ring all at the same time. I couldn't do that at all. Either I kept putting my hands behind me, rolling my back, not tucking my neck, which resulted in a neck whiplashing motion, or I couldn't lift one of my feet off the ground. One of the best piece's of advice I ever got from a wrestler about bumping and training was this, "When it comes to training, not everyone will be the same and will be able to learn all at the same pace. Either you'll get it or you won't but when you get it, everything starts clicking." and thats very true. Since I sucked at bumping, my trainers all had the idea to help me out, was to slam me. Which ment quite a few different slams, bodyslams, spinebusters, things like that. It helped but not so much. I kept coming home banged up, sore, bruised, and at times limping because I was in so much pain from not being able to bump correctly.

There were times early on when I kept questioning why I was putting myself through the pain I was in, I kept telling myself that some day it would all be worth it and that one of these days, I'll get it and it won't hurt as much. Ok the truth is, I kept going because I had paid for the month and I hate spending money which could result in me wasting it, so thats really why I kept going. After a couple of months, I started improving. Luckily I was the only one training so the trainers could put their focus on me and help me learn how to bump and take moves correctly. I also started running the ropes and let me be one of the first to tell you this, THE ROPES FUCKING HURT! Even if you hit them right, those fuckers hurt like a bitch. You train your body to toughen up while hitting them and while your body is trying to do that, you get really bruised. I had a brusie under my shoulder blade, one right above my ass, and one a little bit above my foot, yeah that shit does NOT tickle. As time went on I was understanding more and more and was doing better and better. I really started enjoying training.

Like I said before, Paul ran shows every two weeks on a Saturday. I would get up early in the morning and would get to the building around 10 in the morning to help set up. Setting up ment, hooking up the sound, setting up chairs around the ring, sweeping the floor, rolling up these wrestling mats (Paul also coaches High School wrestling), vaccuming these small rugs that were placed around the ring (we didn't use mats), and also cleaning up the upstairs locker rooms and bathrooms. The first show I did, I sat back and watched. I met a lot of local wrestlers there for the very time. All were very nice to me and introduced themselves to me. I won't go through and talk about everyone that I have met this blog because the blog will become VERY long if I sit here and introduce you to everyone I have met but my next blog will be deicated just to that. Two people I met I will talk about are Blackie and Alexis Smirnoff Jr.

Blackie was the ring annoucer, he was also the co-booker of the WCWA with Paul. Blackie also managed Helfyre and the heel team of Devil Mountain Wrestling. Imagine it as the nWo only with like a death metal/punk edge to them....plus it was a lot smaller group of people. Devil Mountain were Blackie as the heel manager, Helfyre as the leader (in my view anyways), Shane Dynasty, Risa De Merte, and Rage. The crowd HATED Blackie and he enjoyed every minute of it and had a lot of fun while pissing off the crowd. Alexis Smirnoff Jr is a wrestler who wrestles as a evil Russian. He wasn't one of my trainers but he worked very closely to the WCWA and with Paul Brown. He would take me aside before shows and help me improve myself in the ring a little bit, he actually got me to do a forward roll. I couldn't do one for anything and he was able to get me to do one. Me and Smirnoff still do shows together as most recently me, him, and Jason Vega all travled to Oregon for the BAW show together.

So anyways, the first WCWA show I did, I sat back and watched. I enjoyed the show but one thing that bugged me the most was the music. Paul's son was running the music, and I hate to put it so brutally honest, but he sucked. By the next show, I had voluntered to run music and became the soung guy for the WCWA. Which was cool because I got to work with the wrestlers a little bit more closely, and it also gave me the best seat in the house, but it also got me involved here and there. One time, and I'm gonig to go in much detail about it, but a brawl broke out near the sound system and because I was "protecting" it I ended up being chopped and hit with some kind of object, across my back. That was fun! Everything was going really good for me......but then just like that, I hit a few big roadblocks.

The first roadblock was that my medical coverage was going to expire when I turned 22 in November. I didn't want to train without any medical because I feared that I would get really hurt and would get a really big medical bill that I couldn't pay for. So in Sept. I decided I would stop training by the month of Oct. and would work on being able to get some medical coverage and after getting some medical, I would get back in the ring and train. I talked to Paul about this and he understood just fine and as much as I didn't want to stop training, I had to stop by Oct. Another roadblock I hit was from my job. I worked in retail at a gamestore and I started going through new managers and because of it, I started loosing hours. One of the new managers I had gotten really started screwing me over in hours and even though I told him I needed the hours so I could pay for wrestling, he kept cutting them in favor of other employes and because of it, my monthly payments kept getting lower and lower. I hated doing that to Paul, but again he understood and let me keep on training even though I was making lower and lower payments and because Paul let me keep going, I respect the hell out of Paul for that and I owe him a lot.

The third roadblock I hit, had nothing to do with me, it had to do with the owners of the building and property we were running out of and on.The owners of the building wanted us to leave for a month in a half because they wanted to put a halloween store in for the end of Sept of all of Oct.. Paul didn't like that because apprently last year when the Halloween store took over, they had destoryed a lot, which includes some of Paul's own personnal things. Plus the WCWA was drawing really well, we had a lot of returning fans and we were getting newer and newer fans each show and it would have been stupid to just stop running and risk loosing some of our fans. The owners of the building didn't feel the same way and there was a big conflict because of this. Not only did we have to deal with this but in the same shopping center we were in, a Kohl's was being built and it was going to be focused on as the main store in the plaza and the owners of Kohl's felt we were drawing the wrong type of people.....even though our crowds consited mostly of kids, we were drawing the wrong type of crowd. So by the end of Oct. the WCWA had it last show in that building, which was a Halloween themed show.

It was a fun show which ended in a gimmick battle royal that had all the wrestlers dressing up as wrestlers who were in the WWE, WCW, or ECW at one time or another. After the show, that week and that week, we started moving everything out of the building and into a new one in the next city over in Concord, CA but their were so many problems with this new building. It was some kind of store that was TORE up. The wiring was horrible, and yeah it just needed a lot of work done to it. Plus being in Concord, we needed permits and other shit to run a show out of that building and being RIGHT NEXT to a police station didn't help matters either. They made sure we needed to get all the permits and paperwork for us to run shows and actually sent inspectors to the building to see if we were safe enough to run. As the months passed, nothing was happening. Their were being practices being held but I didn't really go because I couldn't get in the ring and train and I wans't about to try and get into Paul's ring to train when I wasn't paying him.

In Jan. I decided to attend a practice to stop in and say hi and to see what was going on as I really hadn't heard much about what was going on. When I got there, Jason was there along with Eric West and the new trainee named Tim. There were also a few other wrestlers there that ran another promotion called BRAWL. After a little bit of catching up, I found out that Paul had lost this new building and that the wrestlers were there getting their stuff out of the building before it all got locked up in it. I started helping getting stuff out of there and randomly said "Does anyone need a wrestling techie?" and one of the BRAWL owners spoke up and said they needed a new sound guy. I agreeed and told them I would be at their next show in Feb.

That night, I pretty much knew that the WCWA was done. We had no building to go to and Paul's stuff was going to be locked up in that building for a little while. I wasn't sure where I was going to go now for wrestling, I just had to see where things would go for me. I was going to go to BRAWL and help them out, but I had no clue if that was a one time deal or what that was even going to be.

The month of Feb was quickly coming, was my life in wrestling going to continue or would it stop after that show? I'll leave you at that question and will answer it for you in a blog. Not the next blog because thats where I'm going to introduce to you and talk about the wrestlers that I have met , but you'll find out soon enough. Stay tuned.