Dead Mags - No. 4 Power Slam, No. 5 Fighting Spirit Magazine
These I have written for that no longer are...
First things first, the love of pro wrestling - it dates back to my childhood and afternoons spent watching Johnny Saint, Marty Jones and Dave 'Fit' Finlay grunt 'n' groan while the football scores filtered through on ITV.
Though my fondness for it has ebbed and flowed over the years, when the opportunity came to write about wrestling, I grabbed it with both hands and whipped it into the turnbuckle.
It was while I was living in Sydney and working for the Australian incarnation of Empire magazine (a future Dead Mags entry, folks!) that I was invited to Queensland's Gold Coast to visit the set of See No Evil, a horror movie starring Glenn Jacobs, aka Isaac Yankem DDS, aka Unabomb, aka Diesel (fake), aka Bruiser Mastino, aka The Christmas Creature, aka Kane.
It was this final guise that had propelled Jacobs to prominence in the WWE. Now, with the company's head honcho Vince McMahon having long harboured ambitions to put his 'sports entertainers' on the big screen, 'The Big Red Machine' had headed down under to star in a picture directed by former porn filmmaker Gregory Dark, aka Alexander Hippolyte, aka Gregory Hippolyte, aka Gregory Brown.
The most memorable thing about the day was that my interview with Jacobs had to be conducted in character. So it was that I came away with a series of gruff, one-word answers, the brevity and unhelpfulness of which was made that much more ridiculous by the fact that, once the interview proper was done, Jacobs became the affable man on Australia's East Coast.
Anyway, as I flew back to New South Wales, I knew I had nothing for my employers. However, I did have material that might be of interest to the good people at Power Slam, then Britain's biggest wrestling publication. A few short emails to the estimable editor Fin Martin and there I was, ticking another item off my rather idiosyncratic bucket list:
Go on safari
Write for wrestling magazine
Try humus
It was after I returned to the UK in 2005 that my wrestling mag writing really began to ramp up. A trip to the HMV Shop in Piccadilly revealed that there was a new mag on the block, FSM (aka Fighting Spirit Magazine). So it was that I dropped a line to its estimable editor James Denton (aka James Artaius, aka Leggy Mountbatten) and before too long I was contributing features pretty much every other month.
I really can't say enough good things about James nor his successors Martin Mathers and Brian Elliott. It was thanks to them that I was sat at ringside at Wembley Arena when Ric Flair wrestled one of his last bouts on British soil. The guys also gave me the opportunity to sit down and chat with hardcore legend and personal hero Mick Foley, meet Olympic champion Kurt Angle and tell him that he really ought to take things more easily these days, and explain to then Impact heavyweight champion Bobby Roode that Big Ben is actually the bell within Elizabeth's Tower rather than the tower itself - as you can imagine, he was fascinated.
Truth be told, FSM was responsible for some of my happiest times both in writing and wrestling. Of the articles I wrote, it was a piece about depression, addiction and suicide - all of which are prevalent in pro wrestling circles - that I'm most proud of and about which I received some really affecting feedback. And then there are the enduring friendships t- with James, with fellow scribes Luke Dormehl and Matt Davies, and with Impact press officer Simon Rothstein who was always generous with time, access to talent and free tickets.
Given the nature of the Dead Mags strand, it won't come as a shock to learn that neither Power Slam or FSM are still going, at least not in their original guise. For a couple of years ago, Fin Martin hooked up with the talented YouTubers at WreslteTalk to launch a magazine of that name, the contributors to which include FSM alums such as Brian Elliott.
As it's great to have a new British wrestling title around, I'm finding that the role of reader suits me better than that of contributor, at least as far as pro wrestling's concerned. With names like Adam Blampied, Katarina Waters and Sean Ross Sapp on the WrestleTalk masthead, I know this is one young man's game where I could easily find myself out of my depth.
Cheering on from ringside's a wonderful thing. But it'd be torture had Fin, James and Co. not given me, Old Man Wrestling, the opportunity to write about big sweaty men for a while.
Oh, and in case you're wondering, were I to wrestle, it would be in a tag team with FSM alum Matt Davies. A classic big man-small man combination, we'd be called The Scribes what with all the time we've spent at our keyboards. And as for our finishing move? Why, it'd be the Exclamation Mark, of course!
I am almost 50 years old.