Most people in the world get up and go to work every day, do their job, and go home. Certain dedicated folks become the example: always showing up to work, giving their best, and, in a just world, being rewarded handsomely for a job well done. This archetype has become so common that we’ve started to apply the term “lunch pail guys” to certain athletes because they seem to represent that head-down, hard-working mentality that has become the exception rather than the rule in pro sports. This kind of guy is almost antithetical to professional wrestling. An art form that requires not only the physical but the emotional, and where loud and brash personalities dominate the landscape, hardly seems like the place for a guy who shows up, does his job better than anybody, and leaves the pomp and circumstance at the door. Thankfully, Daisuke Sekimoto is not any ordinary wrestler.


In 2026, fans have become enamored with a certain type of body. The days of needing to be 260 pounds of chiseled muscle are over, but so are the days where a wrestler could just look like your fattest, drunkest uncle. Many different types of wrestlers and bodies exist these days, and it’s a great thing that people are afforded the opportunity to prove themselves based on talent rather than looks. However, it’s become obvious over the last few years that for a certain section of the fanbase, MEAT (and I don’t mean Sean Stasiak) is back on the menu. We’re seeing a renaissance of burly men built like refrigerators, with chants of “meat” echoing through arenas anytime two guys with a waist size above 36 face off across from one another, guys who are often as wide and muscular as they are tall.


Big E seems like the flashpoint for this particular resurgence in our collective appreciation for these kinds of guys (and was a prime example himself) when he coined the phrase “big meaty men slapping meat.” This was in reference to him wanting a match with Goldberg, but he spends the rant talking about how that’s his favorite style of wrestling. I have to give it to Big E, because it’s mine too, and in the six-ish years since that quote started making its way around the internet, more and more of us have come out of the woodwork to proclaim our affinity for strong, physical, realistic-looking pro wrestling. If Big E is the apostle Paul, then Daisuke Sekimoto is our Jesus Christ.


Sekimoto spent almost all of his career plying his trade for Big Japan Pro Wrestling, a smaller company in Japan that never had the money or production values of the big promotions but was able to find its niche and survive for over 30 years. Big Japan is notable for having two distinct styles that dominated their events. There was the deathmatch division, where some of the masters of the style took it to new, innovative, and terrifying heights. There was also the Strong division, full of the hard-hitting, meat-slapping violence that I love. Discovering a promotion that specialized in my two favorite kinds of wrestling was like manna from heaven. Sekimoto worked in both divisions, but he was always more of a Strong wrestler, and by the late ’00s he would be almost exclusively in that division, usually in main events. This didn’t stop him from breaking out the occasional deathmatch tactic, and more importantly, it made him tough enough to withstand anything his opponents could throw at him. What’s a stiff chop when you’ve taken a light tube? What’s a goon to a goblin?


This was the era when I was downloading any Big Japan I could get my hands on thanks to the download and torrent sites of the time. Sekimoto grabbed me, and I was seeking out anything with his name attached to it. Despite only standing 5’9” (and that may be generous), he wrestled with the intensity and drive of someone a foot taller, throwing chops that sounded like shotgun blasts, suplexes that seemed horrifyingly dangerous, knowing when and how to sell despite his character, and carrying an edge that felt effortlessly cool. Sekimoto was everything I wanted to see in a pro wrestler.


Sekimoto’s matches would often follow a deceptively simple rhythm, and that’s where the magic lives. There’s a moment early on where he plants his feet, squares his shoulders, and invites his opponent to hit him as hard as they possibly can. This is sometimes called “Dumb Jock Wrestling” and for good reason. This is a challenge, a meathead who knows he can take whatever is thrown at him. The chop lands, loud enough to make the crowd wince, and Sekimoto barely reacts. He exhales, nods once, and fires back something twice as heavy. The crowd starts to buzz, not because something flashy happened, but because they understand what kind of night they’re in for. Sekimoto doesn’t rush, doesn’t panic, and doesn’t look for shortcuts. He keeps pressing forward, an unrelenting force of nature, the kind that saps both men’s energy with every repetition. By the end, his opponent looks spent in a way that feels real, like someone who’s just worked a full shift and realized there’s still an hour left on the clock.


I was vaguely aware of the Japanese tendency to stay with one company, and as much as I would fantasy-book him against the big stars and best workers of the day, I knew it was probably a futile exercise. While this has started to change in recent years, often where you start in Japan is where you finish. There’s a loyalty to the employer that isn’t seen here in America, especially in the cutthroat world of pro wrestling. Sekimoto would occasionally tour Europe or America, and he was highly in demand on the Japanese indies. These excursions were a glimpse into what really drives Sekimoto, and that was work. He showed up everywhere and worked all over the world. Always looking ready in his plain black boots and trunks, Sekimoto comes off like he doesn’t have time for frivolities like flashy costumes and showy technique. He approaches the ring like a man who wants to finish work early so he can go eat a steak.
He became a reliable presence on small indies throughout Japan, someone people would pay to see because he delivered every time. The kind of guy who could reliably add a couple hundred tickets to any card, but only a couple hundred tickets. Big Japan itself is only so big, usually sitting in the bottom half of the ten biggest wrestling companies in Japan at any given time. Sekimoto became a king of the small room, the kind of guy who feels destined for somewhere much bigger. Seeing Sekimoto on a small indie has to feel like seeing a legend in a tiny venue. I can only imagine the denizens of Shin-Kiba 1st Ring felt the same way I did seeing KRS-ONE at a bar attached to a bowling alley.


As much as I wished he would end up somewhere else, to have a chance to be the star I knew he could be, as big as anyone in Japan, he wasn’t ever going anywhere bigger than Big Japan. The loss of a career that could have been looms bigger than any single loss on a booking sheet. He accepts his fate, the crowd accepts it, the booking makes sense, and life moves on. These are losses that don’t diminish him in the ring, but they quietly reinforce the idea that he exists to sustain the ecosystem rather than transcend it. What makes that limitation sting is how clearly he understands it. Sekimoto wrestles like someone who knows exactly where he stands in the hierarchy and has made peace with it. There’s no sense of chasing stardom or trying to reinvent himself to fit the moment. He doesn’t beg the audience to see him differently, and he doesn’t rage against the role he’s been given. He just keeps working, because the work itself is the point. In a business obsessed with becoming something more, Sekimoto has spent his career being exactly what he is, and paying the price for it.


Sekimoto is a small-scale entertainer, and while that may sound like a slight, it isn’t meant to be one. He gets to pay his mortgage with his art, and that’s a luxury many of us dream of but very few get to live out. Living in a tourist town has given me the opportunity to meet a lot of people who fall into this category, and the one commonality among all the athletes, musicians, dancers, and actors is that they hustle hard because their art usually isn’t enough. These people give private lessons, coach, drive Lyft and DoorDash, and do anything else they can to make ends meet, but they do it because at the end of the day, they still get to do the thing they love most. Sekimoto was hustling on these indies, but like the artists I’m so lucky to know, he never dogged it. He made sure everyone who paid to see him got his best effort, and hopefully he made a lot more on Polaroids and T-shirts than his booking fee.


Professional wrestling loves to dress exploitation up as passion. It tells you that if you really love this, you’ll sacrifice for it, grind through pain, stay loyal, and trust that things will eventually work out. That story is convenient for the people making money and devastating for the people doing the work. Passion becomes a leash. Loyalty becomes an excuse, and anyone who questions the arrangement is framed as bitter or ungrateful rather than realistic.


Sekimoto did everything the mythology of wrestling tells you to do. He stayed. He worked. He carried shows, trained bodies, anchored cards, and made companies look more legitimate than their bank accounts suggested. In artistic terms, his career is unimpeachable. In economic terms, it’s a warning. Big Japan needed him to survive, but when survival itself became shaky, Big Japan simply couldn’t offer what was necessary to stay afloat. The quality of his work never dipped, yet the stability attached to it eroded anyway. That’s not a failure of effort, that’s capitalism functioning exactly as designed.


As time wore on, Big Japan was able to launch a streaming service like so many other promotions before them. Hopefully this could give people an outlet to watch and discover Big Japan and its style of pro wrestling. Unfortunately, it turned out that the people in Japan who wanted to watch Big Japan were already doing so, and the small but dedicated Western fanbase was iffy about actually spending money on the product. Business declined, and when COVID hit, the company came very close to going under completely. This is where art and capitalism invariably clash. A guy like Sekimoto has bills to pay, and as loyal as he’d been to his company, there was a shrinking opportunity for him to secure his future as his career and body began to wind down. We all want to be able to create, but if we can’t sustain ourselves and our families, what joy is there in creating anything at all?


This is the part wrestling doesn’t like to talk about. There is no reward for being dependable if you aren’t profitable enough. There’s no pension for carrying a company through its lean years, no protection for aging bodies that gave their best years to the grind. The industry feeds on people like Sekimoto because they believe in the work more than the business believes in them. And when the math stops working, the romance evaporates, leaving wrestlers to make cold, practical decisions.


Post-COVID, he once again began teaming more frequently with friend and rival Yuji Okabayashi, and now he had a partner to tear up Big Japan and the indies with. Okabayashi was a kindred spirit to Sekimoto, another short, stocky tank of a man who loved to fight physically and could take punishment as well as dish it out. The two of them made waste of all the young pretty boys put in front of them. They made the best of a bad situation by combining forces and doing what they could to keep working and keep living their dream. Sadly, by mid-2023 Okabayashi’s body had been battered too badly, and he entered a state of semi-permanent retirement. Sekimoto was back to his solo grind, a lonely warrior looking for his next chance to prove himself and collect a check.
Eventually, Sekimoto had to look out for himself and his future. Bookings came more frequently from promotions happy to have him around. In 2025, he officially became a freelancer, no longer tied to any one company. While this was expected, he’d effectively been one in all but name for years, it still felt strange to see him fully divorced from Big Japan. Sekimoto becoming a freelancer wasn’t betrayal; it was acknowledgment of reality. You can’t pay bills with respect. You can’t fix your body with reputation. At some point, belief has to give way to survival. That doesn’t make him cynical. It makes him honest.


Wrestling will continue to celebrate passion in public while quietly relying on people to absorb the cost in private. Careers like Sekimoto’s will remain admirable, necessary, and fundamentally undervalued. The guy gave over 25 years of his life to a company, carried it through its leanest years, and never stopped delivering. When the lights flickered, he adapted. He kept working. He stayed true to his craft. He didn’t need a belt or a spotlight to validate him; he needed a ring, a crowd, and the work itself. Today, he has a full belly, bills caught up, and a job that is also his creative passion. Not everyone gets that. Not everyone endures like he has. And maybe that’s the point: survival and artistry, labor and love, they can coexist, even when the world forgets to notice. We should all be so lucky.

Living in 2026 can be rough. It seems as if every day a new horror awaits our eyes. Some days, it can be really hard to keep getting up and giving the world an honest chance. This goes doubly so if you work in a public-facing direction, such as retail or food service, where a veneer of politeness is expected at all times. Many of us go into work every day feeling like the weight of the world is on our shoulders, and are expected to be a ray of sunshine for people who are dealing with the same anxieties you are. The emotional whiplash of reading the news, seeing some new terrible thing happening, then having to go be happy, as if you aren’t perilously close to snapping under the pressure, can be impossible to navigate.
When I start to feel like this, I just remember: Nothing matters. Smile anyway.
This project is the culmination of spending most of my life obsessed with pro wrestling. It’s difficult to pare down 40 years of fandom to 40 acts, especially when you’ve consumed as much wrestling from different places as I have. I have to be judicious with my choices because I simply don’t have the time to cover every wrestler who meant something special to me. That said, most of my list will be people who affected me in my youth, or at least those who are likely at the peak or later stages of their careers. Willow Nightingale is one of only three people on this list younger than me, and the only one I am confident has her best days ahead, despite already being so talented and accomplished.
Willow Nightingale embodies a quality I see in so many of my millennial peers, especially those I most closely associate with: a seemingly existential dread that she chooses to combat with kindness and love, taking sorrow and forcing us to see joy.
Her aesthetic reads like Lisa Frank at a seedy punk show in a dive bar. Even her stylized logo plays into this, with “Willow” in bright colors with stars and hearts, while “Nightingale” appears in a classic death-metal band font. This combination of cute and brutal is one that many of us have adopted in adulthood. The folks with colorful hair, multiple piercings, and tattoos are often the softest, most caring people you will ever meet. Sweetness and darkness living alongside each other in harmony is the calling card of our generation, and Willow personifies that our smiles are not rooted in naivete, but earned through the trials we have faced.
Her nickname, “Babe with the Power,” is apt, as she has the size and strength that many of her opponents can’t match. Even the name is special to me: Willow was my favorite character on ’90s TV classic Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I would eventually bestow that name on a cat when I was 19, she is still around almost 20 years later. Though she’s not in my home, she’s with people who love her and treat her like the queen she is.
The independent scene of the late 2010s was coming off a peak a few years earlier, and while opportunities existed, they always come in smaller doses for women, especially Black women. Over the years, I’ve seen so many talented acts with “potential” who never rose above that station in the business. Potential is excellent in your 20s, but eventually it must transform into something undeniable, especially with race and gender unfortunately working against you. The indie scene is littered with people who were “next” but stalled out and never made the leap necessary to become among the best in the world.
I first saw Willow Nightingale as part of her team with Solo Darling, “The Bird and the Bee,” in Chikara in 2019, and she immediately caught my attention. Her work in the ring was already coming together; she was powerful and held her own in matches against women and some men. Her look was there too, with that particularly charming blend of optimistic nihilism at the forefront of her presentation, a force of nature, but also of good. Like a hurricane that rains down hugs. She was someone I knew would be worth keeping an eye on, but unfortunately, COVID put us all in stasis for a while.
When wrestling returned in late 2020 and into 2021, Willow emerged ready to take on the world and prove her place among the biggest names on the independent scene. She appeared in most of the major independent promotions across the country, including Ring of Honor (just before it was bought by Tony Khan) and some AEW Dark episodes, doing job duty for established stars.
This hard work paid off in the coming years, as she would eventually sign an AEW contract and achieve the recognition that so many independent wrestlers dream of. Her grinding had finally paid off, but she was just beginning to show us what she was capable of.
She would spend the next years traveling the world: Japan, Mexico, Europe, and across the United States. In the ring, she faced all kinds of competition, which helped foster a meteoric rise into the force of nature on our TV screens most weeks.
This was the era that truly became a revelation to me. Willow played all kinds of roles: scrappy underdog against established legends, big TV star guiding younger talent, dominating monster dismantling the lesser woman before her, or a young prospect ready to show the whole world just how great she could be.
Her 2022 match against Mia Yim for Prestige Wrestling was one of my favorite underrated matches that year. Mia, recently fired by WWE, returned to the independent scene with a chip on her shoulder, looking to prove the world wrong. Willow, at that time booked occasionally by AEW, and Ring of Honor, put on a clinic that made fans and skeptics alike pay attention. Using her size and power to dominate, Willow faced Mia’s ingenuity head-on. In the end, Mia won, but Willow showed the world she couldn’t be stopped for much longer.
It can’t be understated how important times like these are to a wrestler’s development. Working against different people, styles, and skill levels is the best way to improve your mechanics inside the ring. It also forces creativity in structuring a match, since you never know how a crowd will react on any given night, anywhere in the world.
There’s something special about this portion of every wrestler’s career, where they seem to jump into another stratosphere—from “good” to “one of the best.” It’s why I love independent wrestling. So many people flirt with greatness but lose what made them special or never get the chance to hang with the best. Good is often the enemy of great, and far too many stall at simply being good because life intervenes. Willow got over that hump, proving she belonged on everybody’s lists. Seeing someone with potential become something more is rare, and therefore sweeter.
It’s like when a band you discover on Bandcamp suddenly plays the big festivals and lands a spot on Conan. We see early potential, and when it’s realized and surpassed, it feels like we were, in some small way, part of that success. When you’re a fan, their failures hurt worse, but their successes are that much sweeter. Willow was no longer a well-kept secret or the “next up”, she was the best and most entertaining woman in professional wrestling.
This is where I reveal my inherent bias: I can’t see Willow without thinking of a powerful, beautiful, alternative Black woman—my wife. So much so that I timed this article around her birthday. I know I’m reading parts of my own life into Willow, but that doesn’t lessen the truth of what she inspires in me. What is fandom, and what are heroes, if not people who shape your life choices and the way you see the world? While I was initially struck by the physical similarities, the core is much deeper than skin.
I first met my wife nearly 21 years ago, and the attraction was immediate, so immediate that I pursued her while I still had a girlfriend. That turned out poorly, and a couple of months later, I had no girlfriend, and I was persona non grata to my future beloved. Six years later, through a mutual friend, we reconnected, and the spark was still there. It immediately felt like the six years apart had been the biggest mistake of my life.
Within months we were officially dating, and I knew I had found my person. Her intellect, wit, beauty, and heart were no match for my cynicism and self-doubt. She made me a better person, more compassionate, more aware, and more willing to give and receive love.
I spent my life being told that marriage was hard work, but it turns out that when you like your partner (not just love them, but actually like them), it’s one of the easiest things in the world. The world outside our four walls can throw anything at us, but inside is always easy because we have each other. It’s always us against the world. A tag team for the ages, a partnership no manager or interference can break. Ricky and Robert could never have what we have (Hangman and Swerve could come close though)
The physical similarities between my wife and Willow were the first thing I noticed, but her personality is what truly made her one of my favorites. Her bright smile reminds me of my wife’s laugh, which is forever etched in my brain. Her friendships, with frenemy Kris Statlander and adorable lap dog Harley Cameron, mirror my wife’s amazing ability to be friendly to everyone, even people she may not like, and to drop everything to help those she loves.
Her feats of strength and power remind me of my wife (a competitive powerlifter!) pushing herself to lift heavier while maintaining joy in her sport. Most importantly, her bubbly demeanor reminds me not to let the world defeat me. Through it all, Willow has helped us both keep smiling, even when it seems impossible.
There’s something so inspiring about someone who chooses joy in the face of sadness, anger, and hatred. People our age seem to endure a new “worst thing ever” every few years, and yet we persist. Millennials should be drowning in despair over the state of the world, and yet some of us keep going. Willow is the avatar for that persistence in my eyes. She is the kind of person I want to be more like—someone who chooses to see the good even when it’s harder and harder. She implores us to “find whatever shreds of joy and hope we can to keep going and get each other through the day,” and that’s something I haven’t done enough, but Willow makes me want to be better.
Even in the smallest moments, Willow’s philosophy shows up. When getting out of bed feels Herculean, or going to work feels like it may drain the last of your sanity, choosing to smile instead of getting frustrated is a quiet act of defiance. Sometimes it’s as simple as answering a friend’s text when you don’t feel like it, or laughing at something that went wrong instead of letting it ruin your day. She reminds us that joy isn’t something that happens to you, it’s something you carry forward, even when it seems impossible. Maybe that’s what fandom, at its best, really is: finding sparks of hope in someone else’s light, letting it guide how we live our own lives, and passing that light to others along the way.
Nothing matters. Smile anyway.

In 2026, it’s difficult for me to write anything positive about WWE. It is not now, nor has ever really been my preferred “style” of pro wrestling presentation, and the fact that Vince and company did their best to monopolize and drive out anything other than their own distorted vision of what pro wrestling should be, it’s hard to feel any love for this company. That’s before we delve into the horrifying and despicable crimes of Vince McMahon. Today, I try to avoid anything the company does, which is easier and easier with their cozy relationship with the fascist administration in the White House and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (where journalists are dismembered). Truthfully, it’s hard to go back and watch things I did like when I was keeping up with the company, knowing that everything that came on screen was filtered through the lens of a man who, at the very least, needed serious therapy, and at the most deserves lethal injection. Unfortunately, due to the way the wrestling business went, a lot of my memories are tied to them, if not directly then at least tangentially.

I was never a WWF kid. I grew up in South Carolina, too young to see the peak of Jim Crockett Promotions, but just old enough to see almost all of WCW after they switched from using the NWA name. I discovered the WWF when Ric Flair left in 1991 and showed up in “New York.” As a 5-year-old, I was just happy there was more wrestling, even if it wasn’t the guys I was used to. As Flair found his footing in the WWF, I began to notice guys, and surely, favorites started to form. Obviously, Hulk Hogan was a big deal still, and I liked him a lot. Ultimate Warrior was also cool, but there was a guy who wrestled differently than the big stars. He did more moves, holds, and submissions that made the punches and kicks of the steroid filled giants seem silly. He wrestled with an air of confidence, dressed in pink and black, and he wasn’t even fighting for the world title (yet). He was the Intercontinental Champion, Bret ‘The Hitman’ Hart.

Bret immediately struck me when I first picked up the WWF, my first memories being him and The Mountie feuding over the IC title, and then him being the centrepiece of SummerSlam ’92 against his brother-in-law Davey Boy Smith, in front of Smith’s hometown crowd of over 80,000 at Wembley Stadium in England. By the end of the year, Bret was the World Champion, and while he wasn’t quite a hero on the level of Sting in my eyes, he was more than enough to be my #1 WWF guy. It didn’t hurt that his finishing submission hold, called the Sharpshooter here, was the same Scorpion Death Lock that Sting also used.

Bret wasn’t the first “great wrestler” I ever saw, but something about the way he wrestled captivated me. I was quickly becoming more and more appreciative of the guys who could do a variety of different things in the ring, rather than just punches, kicks, and slams. The commentators would play up his technical prowess, and before I could accurately place Russia on a map, I knew what a Russian leg sweep looked like. My habits as a fan were changing and growing as rapidly as I was, and I began to be a bit more selective with what I liked. All of a sudden, being a “good guy” didn’t mean I loved you, and when Shawn Michaels bounded around the ring, I had to admit that it was cool, even if I didn’t like how he acted.

WrestleMania IX was the event that truly crystallized it for me. After a grueling bout with Yokozuna (a large Samoan man portraying a Japanese sumo wrestler), Bret had been defeated and was no longer the champion. But out of nowhere, Hulk Hogan appeared after the match and immediately slammed and pinned Yoko to win the belt. Where I should have felt elation over the biggest star in the company coming out to save the day, I was underwhelmed and annoyed that if a good guy was gonna hold the belt, it should be Bret. 

In my six-year-old mind, that was the day I “smartened up” to what wrestling was. It wasn’t about  being the best wrestler at all, if Bret wasn’t the champ. It was also an important early lesson that being the best at something doesn’t necessarily mean that you will always be the one who gets the accolades and appreciation for it. Whether you’re the best wrestler in the wrestling company, or the kid who got the best score on the test, sometimes it’s more about attitude than aptitude.

Bret would be my WWF avatar throughout his time there, and in 1994 I got to go to my first “big” wrestling show. WCW had run our town’s high school football stadium a couple years prior, but it was outside with a few hundred people. This would be with a few thousand other fans at the Florence Civic Center, about an hour and a half away from my hometown of Myrtle Beach. Bret would be there, and I would get to see him wrestle! What was even cooler was that I would get to see him have an actual, competitive match. This was a taping of several episodes of the syndicated Wrestling Challenge show, which would consist of short squash matches where an established star would show off and make short work of some schlub whose only job was to get beaten from pillar to post and make his opponent look good. 

Bret, however, was going to be in one of the “dark” matches put on in front of the fans to keep them there through the long stretches of boring wrestling. Bret and his little brother Owen had been teaming together, and they would be taking on my favorite tag team as a young kid, The Steiner Brothers. The Steiners had just arrived in the WWF after making their name in WCW, on the back of Scott Steiner’s freakish strength and agility, and brother Rick’s impressive amateur skill set. These two made even those uncompetitive “squash” matches entertaining to watch by way of their sheer brutality. Two sets of brothers at the top of their game, giving it all in the ring, and putting on one of the best matches I’ve ever seen live, still to this day, 30-plus years and over 60 live shows later. This was everything I loved about pro wrestling, even if I was too young to truly understand and appreciate it.

Just a couple weeks later, at the Royal Rumble, Owen would turn on Bret, setting off their feud against each other and capturing my attention. Through the spring and summer of ’94, I think I was more interested in the WWF than anything else. This did happen to coincide with Hulk Hogan coming to WCW, and I knew that with him there, Sting (my favorite) would probably be stuck behind him in the pecking order when it came to who was the champion. Bret had won the Royal Rumble and the World Championship, and the matches with Owen were some of the most exciting and fun wrestling I had ever seen. 

While I had seen great wrestlers and great matches before, Bret was when I started to pay closer attention to things like the structure of matches, the way holds and moves were applied, the way the guys acted in the ring, and the suspense that can be had when you play with an established formula. Bret taught me to appreciate the nuts and bolts of a wrestling match like nobody before him, and helped to create the kid who would obsess over the minutiae of the genre.

As the years wore on, Bret would remain my guy, and when he had his match against “Stone Cold” Steve Austin at WrestleMania 13 in 1997, I was firmly in his corner. Austin wasn’t quite the biggest star in the world yet, and this would be the feud that cemented his place in the main event scene of the WWF, a couple years before the famed “Attitude Era” would make his name as famous as Jerry Springer, Fred Durst, or Tony Hawk in the late ’90s and early ’00s. This match was famous not only for its excellence (on most days I would say this is the best match the company ever produced), but for the “double turn” during the match.

Bret had gone into the match as the face, the vaunted champion who fought for what’s right and was trying to keep the WWF from descending into madness. Austin was the foul-mouthed redneck who chugged beers and preferred fists and stomps to flashy moves and interesting transitions. During the climax of the match, Bret had Austin locked in the sharpshooter. Austin, bloody and battered, refused to submit. He passed out instead of tapping. The bell rang, but Bret didn’t release the hold. He kept the assault going until guest referee Ken Shamrock finally pried him off (one of the first big stars of the very young UFC). 

By 1997, I was online, reading wrestling websites, and fully aware of the business behind the curtain. I knew exactly what I was watching, but I still sided with Bret. He was right. He was right about Austin, and he was right about the way the WWF was headed. This was the start of the WWF turning into something I had less and less desire to watch, and once the WWF was the most popular thing amongst adolescent boys, I was pretty disillusioned with the company as a whole. 

I wanted Pro Wrestlers who were good at Pro Wrestling and put on exciting, and fun matches, but wrestling was slipping deeper into the sleazy sex and over the top storylines that would draw fans, but turned me off big time. Bret was the last gasp of sanity and reality in the WWF, and once he was gone it would be years before I truly cared about anything the company would do again, even if I kept watching the product.

Bret’s most infamous moment came at the 1997 Survivor Series in Montreal. He was locked in a submission move, his own sharpshooter, against Shawn Michaels for the WWF Championship when the bell rang without him giving up. He was screwed.

Despite having creative control in his contract and an agreed-upon finish, the boss made a call behind his back and changed the outcome. Bret was about to leave for WCW, but he would not lose in Canada, where he was a national hero. In his homeland, he was a proud babyface; in the United States, a hated heel.

He had tried to handle things the right way. He had offered to do business properly. But the leader of the company chose to double-cross him live on pay-per-view. This was bigger than any storyline, bigger than kayfabe. It was real—a legitimate double cross in a world that once thrived on them, but hadn’t seen one like this in years.

This show happened on my 11th birthday, and thanks to a cable descrambler box (I hope the statute of limitations is up on that) I got to watch the show live with my Stepdad. He was convinced it was a work (storyline) so I went to bed disappointed but assuming it was all on the level. Once the news started filtering out into the chatrooms and newsgroups of the day however, we realized that we had actually been witness to history. This was a moment no wrestling fan at the time would ever forget.

Vince parlayed the Montreal screwjob into the company’s top heel spot, embracing every horrible quality he showed in real life. Bret, meanwhile, floundered in the chaos of the dying WCW. It felt so wrong. This guy had worked his ass off for years to reach the top. He had signed a 20-year deal the WWF no longer wanted to honor. They let him go, but still had to stick it to him.

I was too young to have a job, but I never forgot what Vince did to Bret. I resolved never to give myself fully to an organization without something tangible in return. Bret was screwed, plain and simple. At the time, we thought Vince was just a ruthless capitalist. Today we know his crimes run far deeper, but that was the moment I realized he was truly the personification of everything I never wanted to be.

He got to exploit and discard Bret Hart while making more money than ever by playing up the worst parts of himself. Bret, meanwhile, would get kicked in the head in 2000, suffering a career-ending concussion. The workers take the punishment. The bosses get richer for being their worst selves. This was the unfair world of pro wrestling, and as I quickly realized, most of corporate America.

In 2005, under the threat of being smeared in a DVD documentary, Bret returned to the WWF (now WWE). He participated in a retrospective documentary that finally did justice to his career, and he was inducted into the Hall of Fame.

The DVD came out my freshman year of college. That year was hard. I had come to school hoping to make great memories, meet new people, and expand my horizons. Instead, I developed severe anxiety, gained 60 pounds, and blacked out my windows so that even midday felt like night. To say that I was depressed would be an understatement. That DVD, along with the ECW doc, One Night Stand show and the first few seasons of The Simpsons, became my closest companions. Without them, I shudder to think where I might have gone at the height of my depression.

Watching those old matches, reliving the nostalgia, kept me from going to an even darker place. At 19, Bret was doing for me what he had done at 9. He gave me hope. He made me care. He made me pay attention. He kept me going when I didn’t want to.

The DVD wasn’t just nostalgia,it was a lifeline. Seeing him persevere, seeing the joy and craft in his work, reminded me that dedication and integrity mattered, even if the world didn’t always reward it. It was proof that passion could survive exploitation, disappointment, betrayal, and still inspire.

It was also the early days of YouTube, and soon I had access to plenty of old matches featuring Bret, and all my other favorites. I dove deep, discovering old rivalries,moves, and promos. It was like rediscovering a part of myself I had almost lost.

I even got to watch the incredible Wrestling with Shadows documentary again, filmed during the Montreal Screwjob. I had seen it once, years earlier, on A&E, but now it felt different. Paired with the DVD, it became more than a behind-the-scenes story, it was a companion piece, a meditation on resilience, betrayal, and what it means to hold onto your integrity in a corrupt world.

Through those long nights, as I sat alone in my darkened dorm room, Bret was more than a wrestler. He was a guide. A reminder that even when life doesn’t go the way you planned, there’s value in striving, in resisting, and in finding your own moral compass.

Bret eventually made peace with WWE. He participated in several documentaries about his era and time at the top. This journey culminated in a “return” and a WrestleMania match against Vince himself. On paper, it should have been a perfect story: a man finding redemption against the sigil of everything that had hurt him. Instead, it felt like a zany caper. Old men who could barely move, going through the motions, their bodies no longer able to tell the stories they once had. Having to be covered up by an endless parade of distractions, run ins, and fireworks. The classic WWE style that never really grabbed me, and I had now grown to despise

All of this came after everything Vince had done to him. After the Montreal Screwjob. After years of being exploited, betrayed, and discarded. After the brutal grind of the wrestling business itself. After the career-ending concussion that took him out of the ring for good. (That one we can blame on Goldberg, lord knows Bret will)

Bret continued to allow himself to be trotted out for special occasions. Each time, it broke my heart a little more. He seemed to have made peace with it—or perhaps he simply needed the money—but I couldn’t reconcile it. Watching him step back into the spotlight, knowing all he had endured, made the unfairness of the business painfully clear.

He had survived the worst the business could throw at him. He had endured betrayal, humiliation, injury, and the deaths of too many family and friends to count, but he was still there, still performing, still giving what he could. Yet the heartbreak lingered. Every time Bret was brought out for a Hall of Fame induction, or special event, it reminded me of the man he had been, and what he had lost. It made me angry at the industry that had chewed him up and spit him out. It reminded me of the cost of integrity in a world that rewards the ruthless.

I don’t think I will ever make peace with it in the same way he did. I guess that’s one more lesson I learned from Bret: there’s getting screwed, and then there’s bending over. You can endure, you can survive, but that doesn’t mean the injustice ever truly stops.

What makes a great babyface? It’s a question with many different answers depending on who you ask. For some, it’s a commitment to doing the right thing, both in the kayfabe context of professional wrestling and outside the ring as well. For others, it’s simply a reaction from the fans. Surely, if the crowd cheers them the most, they must be the most popular and virtuous. Still, others will say it’s all in the work: never bending the rules, selling a beatdown worse than death, always finding a way to inject a glimmer of hope when it seems like all is lost. People will often debate the finer points of the criteria and campaign for their personal choice, which is, I guess, what I’m about to do here for the Ace, Hiroshi Tanahashi.
Ace of the promotion is a title usually applied to the top guy by default. Over the course of his career, Tanahashi has not only embodied the title but made it a central part of his character. He is not just the top guy and face of the New Japan revival and western expansion of the 2010s, he IS New Japan Pro Wrestling. He rose to the top of the company, and throughout the “peak” era of New Japan, he was the mountain that Nakamura, Okada, Naito, Omega, and anybody else that wanted the glory of the IWGP title had to scale. His status as the ace, during one of the most successful runs of the company’s history combined with the rapid expansion of the product into the West, makes Tanahashi as synonymous with New Japan as anyone besides maybe Antonio Inoki.
I had heard the name and seen some of Tanahashi’s work in the mid-2000s, but at the time, NOAH was the promotion of choice for most American puro fans, and I was no exception. In April of 2007, however, I saw him lose the IWGP title to Yuji Nagata in a match that was, to me, at the time much more about Nagata’s refusal to lie down and die against one of the faces of the next generation. Tanahashi impressed me with his ability, especially at taking a beating and garnering sympathy. This was when I started following New Japan a little closer, checking out recommended matches, popping in for big shows, and familiarizing myself with the cast of characters as the company began to crawl out of the hole it had been in for years prior, thanks to what is now just called “Inokiism,” but is a more complicated combination of the rise of MMA, bad business decisions, and internal power struggles and politics. Nagata would be one of a few “old guard” guys that would trade the title with Tanahashi and his rival/contemporary Shunsuke Nakamura.
By the late 2000s, and into the early 2010s, NOAH was starting to decline, with its stars and draws feeling the ravages of age, Kenta Kobashi dealing with cancer, and eventually the death of its founder and top star, Mitsuharu Misawa. By this point, Tanahashi and Nakamura had firmly established themselves as the two top stars of the promotion, with Nakamura receiving the initial push in the mid-00s, and Tanahashi emerging as the guy to carry New Japan into the future. At this point, I was downloading and watching most of the big shows, and the style and in-ring work of Tanahashi were instrumental in keeping me around. This was a time when I was still more interested in the legends I had grown up watching, and as Tanahashi pulled off victories against the Mutohs, Kojimas, Tenzans, and Makabes of the world, I had to admit that I was becoming more and more invested in his rise, and quickly found myself rooting for him more often than not.

At the January 4, 2012 Tokyo Dome show, a couple of things happened that would forever alter the course of Tanahashi, New Japan Pro Wrestling, and myself. The main event saw Tanahashi retain the IWGP Heavyweight Title, the top prize in the promotion. When considering its history, prestige, and lineage, one could argue that it is the top prize in the entire industry. Tanahashi defended it in an excellent match against Minoru Suzuki. He had held the belt since the previous year, after defeating the decorated, multiple-time champion Satoshi Kojima. His victory over Suzuki felt like a declaration, he had finally conquered the ghosts of both Inokiism and the disgruntled “lost generation” whose careers had been hindered by it.
After the match, however, Tanahashi was confronted, not by Nakamura or any of the men who would later be lovingly referred to as the “dads”, but by a young kid who had just returned from an underwhelming excursion in the United States. He had won his match at the Dome, but certainly didn’t impress anyone. Out came Kazuchika Okada. Okada was someone I had been keeping an eye on after seeing him team with Tanahashi a couple of years earlier, when he was still a young lion with black hair, trunks, and boots, a blank canvas being molded into a star. The two teamed up to face a young team I was also very impressed with, despite their early careers: No Limit, consisting of Yujiro Takahashi and Tetsuya Naito. Tanahashi led the young lions through an incredibly entertaining match that made me immediately want to keep an eye on them. A few days later, Okada had his final match before leaving for the U.S. against Tanahashi in a singles match. It felt like those of us paying attention would soon see this matchup again.
Nearly two years later, though, Okada had been wasted in the U.S., his most notable role being that of “Okato,” a racist trope based on a TV show that had been popular 50 years prior. He returned to New Japan earlier in the show with bleached blonde hair, calling himself the “Rainmaker”, the man who makes it rain money. He was supposed to be a young, flashy playboy type, but his return match was nothing special, and it seemed like a massive risk to immediately give a title push to this unproven potential. We all thought he had the tools, but his excursion and return had Okada stock at its lowest point, lower than it would ever be again. In February, Okada shocked the world by defeating Tanahashi for the IWGP title. It was a move that surprised viewers but also felt like a true sea change. This was the start of a new era, with young wrestlers like Okada challenging Tanahashi, who had held the belt for over a year and defeated all challengers. Tanahashi would regain the title by summer, but Okada would win the G1 Climax tournament and challenge Tanahashi in the main event of the January 4, 2013, Tokyo Dome show.
This was one of the most important shows in my life as a wrestling fan, bar none. For the first time ever, fans from outside Japan could stream the show live on a new platform called Ustream. Internet pay-per-views were becoming more common, though with the hiccups and growing pains of any new technology. A number of notable U.S. indies had done them, but this was a chance to watch Japanese wrestling live, as it happened! I plunked down my (I believe) $30, brewed a pot of coffee, and fired up my girlfriend’s laptop around 3 or 4 a.m., headphones plugged in, trying not to wake her up as I finally got to experience this thing that had shaped so much of my fandom in real time with other fans in Japan and around the world, all of us excited to share the experience. Japanese shows would usually appear on download and torrent sites within a few days, a massive step up from waiting on nth-generation VHS tapes like many fans had to do. This time, though, it was happening live in front of our eyes, and the joy of being able to do this at all is a sentiment I’ll always remember when scrolling Twitter that night/morning.
Of course, as cool as the novelty was, if the show didn’t deliver, it would be just that: novelty. Thankfully, the show was amazing, and Tanahashi/Suzuki had what was considered by many people—including some of the most knowledgeable and informed fans, journalists, writers, and podcasters—the Match of the Year. It topped my own personal list, with a couple more Tanahashi matches rounding out my top 10. This show was their chance to show the world what those of us who were making the effort to watch the product knew when we praised it. They knocked it out of the park, and with the success of the show, many more international eyes would soon be on the product.
This was the signal to the people who wanted to watch great matches, and fill out their spreadsheets with star ratings, that New Japan’s horses were becoming amongst the best workers in the business and they were all ready to run. 2010s New Japan would put forth a level of in-ring action rivaled only by the vaunted era of 90s All Japan, but it seemed like New Japan had a seemingly endless pool of all-time greats to pick from. Whenever somebody decided pastures would be greener elsewhere, the company had world champion-level talent ready to hop in and get their chance to shine. This pattern would lead to an explosion in both in-ring quality and insufferable discourse over star ratings. By the 2013 Dome, we had the chance to watch the biggest show of the year live, and I would only miss watching one live ever since (a 2017 bout with pancreatitis where I have vague morphine memories of reading the results, watching it was the first thing I did when I got home from the hospital).
Within a couple of years, Ustream would give way to New Japan World, offering access to nearly all of their shows live, often with English commentary, another factor that undoubtedly helped expose a whole new audience to the product who may have found it inaccessible due to the language barrier. I had always watched shows with Japanese commentary and had no trouble following the stories being told in the ring, but I also fully admit I’m an outlier. Sometimes a familiar voice explaining things can help folks make sense of something, which is why the 2015 Dome seemed like such a big deal.
Tanahashi and Okada had traded victories and titles for a couple of years and were main-eventing the first show to be available on traditional American pay-per-view, including English commentary, provided by Jim Ross, considered by many the greatest commentator of all time and the voice of both WCW in the late 80s/early 90s and the famed “Attitude Era” of the WWF in the late 90s. This would be a chance for those of us who were already converted to evangelize. Prime time, order pizza, grab some beers, and sit down on the couch to watch this thing we keep telling you is so great. While the Shinsuke Nakamura vs Kota Ibushi semi-main event was praised effusively, and 10 years on, seems to be slightly preferred, Tanahashi and Okada had my favorite match of their series (which would eventually end with over a dozen singles matches between them) and my favorite Tanahashi match of all time. They were 3-3-1, with one of Tanahashi’s victories coming in the aforementioned young lion match in 2010, so most saw Okada as the one ahead, especially having won their “last” match. They hadn’t met in over a year after having so many matches when Okada came back, to truly establish him as a top-level guy, so the anticipation was high.
Okada, after another G1 victory, was ready to challenge for the belt, but in October, current champ AJ Styles was defeated by none other than Tanahashi, setting up another match between the two men who were already becoming responsible for the tangible uptick in business domestically and the explosion of popularity internationally. Tanahashi was the face of the company, the top star, the “ace” of the promotion, and Okada was ready to end Tanahashi’s era once and for all and prove himself as the true ace. After another all-time-great match, in which Tanahashi threw himself around and pulled out every ounce of love and energy from the crowd to defeat Okada and prove that he was the number-one guy in the number-one promotion in the world, post-match, he admonished Okada for even thinking he could be on Tanahashi’s level. Okada could do nothing but cry, real human tears of sadness, because not only did he lose, his opponent’s harsh words were right.
Okada would get his revenge and finally ascend to the top of New Japan the next year, but when I think back on the greatest rivalry of all time, the memory that sticks out most will be the Ace celebrating and Okada’s tears. Tanahashi would continue to be a top guy, challenging and holding the IWGP Heavyweight and Intercontinental titles multiple times, but he had also done something exceedingly rare in pro wrestling. He had put over the next generation. This was a man who saw the damage that could be done by people with egos who care more about themselves than the betterment of the scene as a whole. Wrestling is littered with people who held on too long and refused to give up their spots at the top. Tanahashi, meanwhile, did everything in his power to put over not just Okada, but Naito, Ibushi, Omega, and a litany of others who would not have had the chance to showcase their skills or be pushed into positions of prominence without his help.
Now, as Tanahashi steps into his retirement tour in 2025, I find myself thinking back on every moment he’s given us, every sacrifice, every match that felt like a battle for his very soul. As he winds his career down, he has taken on the role of president, using his years of knowledge to bridge the gaps with the corporate types that are signing the checks. Tanahashi seems like the perfect guy for this role, both as a real-life genius when it comes to pro wrestling but also as someone who should be the face of the company. Without him, I don’t know if there is a company. I loved Japanese wrestling before Tanahashi, and I will love it after he is gone. If not for his ability, selflessness, and dedication to New Japan, however, we very likely would not have had the era of wrestling I was most invested in and the memories I made on those late nights, trying not to wake up the rest of the house. I can’t help but think that, like his matches, his legacy isn’t just about the moments he created in the ring. It’s about what he inspired us to become. Because, for me, Hiroshi Tanahashi wasn’t just a wrestler. He was a teacher, a reminder that no matter how hard life hits, you always have the power to rise. GO ACE!

Gather a bunch of wrestling fans together, and invariably the question will come up: “Who is the greatest of all time?” It’s a many-faceted debate that can be argued many ways by many different people. The finer points of the debate will likely be made by me about various acts over the course of this year, but today I’m not concerned with the greatest, because that answer could switch between a few people. I’m also not concerned with my favorite, because once again, it could be any number of people depending on my mood. I want to talk about the coolest wrestler ever: Hayabusa.

I first saw Hayabusa on ECW sometime in 1997 and was immediately captivated. He moved with style and grace, but also a ferocity that felt right at home in the “Land of Extreme.” The genie pants, sash around his waist, his cut, but not quite shredded, physique, and the iconic mask: the Phoenix, risen from the ashes. His nose, mouth, and chin covered in one motif, forming a “beak,” colorful streaks from his cheeks to above his eyes making his “plumage,” and a color-coded headband with a small phoenix in the middle and two strands of fabric hanging at either side, forming his “wings.” When I saw him fly, I could have easily been convinced that he was part bird.

The thing about seeing something like that fleetingly on a TV show you could only see some of the time anyway was akin to finding gold. I would only have vague memories and scraps in my mind until a couple of years later, when the face appeared on a DVD that I immediately had to have. Tokyopop, a company that specialized in distributing Japanese anime and manga to Western audiences, had struck a deal with FMW to distribute some of their highlight matches in the U.S., and I had finally been reunited with this vision of brilliance I had glimpsed years before. This was also around the very beginnings of sites like eBay, which—until copyrights became much more enforced in the early-mid 00s—were a treasure trove of people selling TV shows and other media that weren’t yet available on DVD, which was a fairly new format at the time, or had been altered in some way from their original airing. It was also a place where the “tape traders” of a few years before my time could set up shop and, for a modest price, send you tapes and DVDs of wrestling from around the world. I was 13 and didn’t have access to much of my own money or a credit card, but thankfully my stepfather was both an early adopter of technology and the internet, and most importantly, also a wrestling fan.

I was given a budget and went for the classics: the 1994 Super J-Cup, the 1995 IWA King of the Death Match, and then a carefully selected few FMW shows, mostly figured out from cross-referencing the match lists with the little bits and bobs of information I could find online, but most of all prominently featuring Hayabusa. Some classic battles with Mike Awesome, Masato Tanaka, and Terry Funk. The match that impressed me the most however, and set me down the path of being the lover and appreciator (some would say sicko) of deathmatch wrestling I am today, was the 5/5/95 “No Ropes Barbed Wire Current Mine Explosion Time Bomb Death Match” against FMW’s founder and top star, Atsushi Onita.

Onita was one of the pioneers of the extreme style of wrestling that was FMW’s calling card and was promoting this as his retirement match. This would have been a passing of the torch to Hayabusa as the company’s top star going into the future without Onita at the helm. For those who can’t quite make sense of the title of the match, let’s break it down into pieces. “No ropes barbed wire” means that in place of the traditional ropes of a ring, barbed wire would be strung around the ring instead; this was in turn enclosed by a steel cage. “Current Mine Explosion” refers to the small explosive charges that lined the cage and would explode in a flash of fire and smoke when a man was thrown into them. “Time Bomb” comes from the fact that at the 15-minute mark of the match, large explosions would go off all around the ring, creating danger and chaos for anyone who may be in harm’s way.

I was glued to the screen the first time I popped in the tape and fast-forwarded immediately to the main event. The referee was decked out in a silver bodysuit for his protection—part hazmat, part spaceman. Hayabusa came down looking like a mixture of comic book hero, action star, and otherworldly creature. He motioned to the crowd, and they came alive for the heir apparent to the company. Onita came to the ring with 50,000-plus people screaming his name while a cover of “Wild Thing” by Japanese rock band X blared through the arena. This entrance was so incredibly cool and iconic, that Jon Moxley would openly swaggerjack it years later, and we all still thought it was awesome. This was also my first time being exposed to the production of FMW. The cameras made it look more like a movie than what I was accustomed to in American wrestling.

My hero seemed to have everything going against him, but pro wrestling taught me to always have hope. As the match progressed, Hayabusa spent the first few minutes doing everything he could to avoid the cage and the exploding charges, but after about five minutes that felt like twenty due to the suspense these two were building, they both tumbled into the cage and the first explosion struck. Something so massive that in my mind I swear I felt it in my bedroom that evening, nearly five years after the match had taken place. What I was actually feeling was the culmination of all the things I loved about pro wrestling: the stakes, the drama, the violence, all turned up to a level so high that it bordered on parody, but still felt dark and subversive. If Mick Foley was my deathmatch Tarantino, I would have just gotten a copy of Faces of Death.

The match would continue, with each near miss filling me with fear and dread, and each explosion filling me with excitement and a need to see more. Onita, being the deathmatch legend, was quickly cut and bloodied, but he also seemed to be getting the better of Hayabusa, punishing him with a flurry of offense and attempts to end the match before the timer went off and everybody went up in smoke. Even the referee was pushing Onita to hurry up and get this over with, but a phoenix will always rise from the ashes, sometimes literally.

Despite Onita’s best efforts, a change in momentum caused the clock to continue to tick down. Sirens began to blare in the stadium, signaling the incoming explosion. As the seconds approached and the inevitable arrived, Hayabusa ran toward Onita, who chose to tackle and cover the referee in order to protect him. This both paid off the outfit and actions of the referee during the match, and made Onita “the retiring star” a hero who sacrificed himself to save the innocent referee who was only there to count a pinfall. Hayabusa slammed into the cage as the alarm went off, and all of a sudden the entire arena was littered with popping sounds as the bombs went off. The smoke was so thick that the arena was temporarily in darkness, and the ring area was a haze while the two competitors tried to make sense of what they had just gone through. The two spent what felt like forever on the mat, barely able to gather the strength to continue after such madness. When the smoke cleared, the crowd was living and dying with Onita’s every move, desperate to see their noble hero go out on top. After a few minutes of desperate attempts to top one another, Hayabusa attempted a moonsault—his signature move—from the top of the cage. He missed, and this gave Onita the opportunity to capitalize, and before too much longer, the match was over. My guy lost.

It wasn’t about that, though. I had just found another favorite wrestler to discover and learn all about, in Onita, and more importantly, my mind had been expanded to the idea that pro wrestling could encompass so much more than what I had seen previously. It turned out that Onita wouldn’t even stay retired and would quickly return to the company, but FMW itself moved away from the Onita style of booking that had seen them achieve their highest success. Hayabusa would be pushed as their top star, and while he didn’t ever move business the way his predecessor did, he was able to resonate with FMW’s core fanbase.

More central to my story, however, was the way he resonated with me—and my generation of “smart” fans. The look, the moves, and what today is called “aura” would resonate with so many others in the online wrestling communities of the early 2000s. He was the favorite among so many that you could immediately see his influence on the emerging independent wrestling scene. This would continue throughout wrestling until Falcon Arrows, 450 splashes, and Phoenix Splashes became notable moves used by many of the biggest stars in the world across all the top promotions. He has become one of those wrestlers whose influence is so vast and far-reaching that far too many today only know the homages paid to the man, but not the one who innovated it.

One of the rough things about discovering something late is that you never know how close you are to the end. Roughly 18 months after I had that experience, and before I really had a chance to try and get “current” with the promotion, Hayabusa slipped on the middle rope while attempting a springboard moonsault. A move he had flawlessly executed hundreds of times, this time, the unthinkable happened, and he landed on his head. Two vertebrae were cracked, and just like that, his career was over. He would be paralyzed and wheelchair-bound for the rest of his life.

This clip was one of the very first to go “viral” in wrestling circles, and fairly soon I could view the permanent grounding of the Phoenix in QuickTime. It was one of those videos that felt sickening to watch, but I couldn’t look away from. It was the first time I grappled (pun slightly intended) with the concept of my own responsibility as a fan. Does our desire to see more fantastic and difficult-to-pull-off spots create a world in which people are inherently going to do extremely dangerous things to entertain us? If so, is it our fault in some way when accidents happen and they can no longer perform, let alone live a normal life? It’s a moral and ethical question I couldn’t get a good handle on at 14, and as I approach 40, I’m still not sure I have one.

In 2015, over a dozen years after the injury, Hayabusa was able to walk again with mobility aids, and when he walked into a ring for the first time under his own power in so many years, it filled me with a joy and emotion I couldn’t contain. Tears flowed from my eyes as he stood there, the crowd cheering for him the way they had all those years ago, finally getting to do it on his terms. By 2016, however, he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and passed away mere months after regaining his ability to walk, at the age of only 47. The wrestling world mourned his passing, and tributes poured in from those affected by him.

I spent the next few days rewatching a bunch of his classics, and it crystallized in my mind that of course I fell in love with a character like this. The outfit, the moves, the mask, and the dedication to the thing he loved most made him the perfect protagonist, and being from a grimy deathmatch promotion in Japan made him the kind of dangerous underground hero that appealed directly to a proto-hipster like myself. I own more Hayabusa merch than any other wrestler by a wide margin, and if and when I ever get a tattoo, it will undoubtedly be his mask. He was the perfect catalyst for a budding smark to find someone to truly obsess over. He might not have been the best worker or drawn the most money, but he was, hands down, the coolest damn pro wrestler to ever exist.

In the fall of 1995, I was about to turn nine years old and was in the third grade. That was the year I was placed into what we called PELICAN—Pursuing Excellence through Learning Innovation, Cognitive and Affectionate Nurturing. It was a program for the “smart” kids who tested well, designed to challenge us and help us develop beyond the standard curriculum. Being part of this select group meant access to the (new at the time) computer lab at our elementary school, mostly for math and word games.

One day, however, our teacher had a special treat: she was going to teach us how to use the Internet.

As she guided us through Netscape Navigator and explained the power of information suddenly at our fingertips, the possibilities were already forming in my little mind. The idea that anything I was curious about might already exist somewhere out there, just waiting for me to discover felt equal parts overwhelming and magical. Near the end of class, she had each of us come up to her computer individually and choose something we were interested in. She would search for it and show us how to find information online, like a librarian unlocking a secret room.

While TLC, Alan Jackson, and the Carolina Panthers (in their inaugural season) were popular choices among the third graders of Homewood Elementary, I knew exactly who I needed to know more about. I had only seen him wrestle once or twice, but every time his image appeared in Pro Wrestling Illustrated or Inside Wrestling, I felt a strange mix of intrigue and unease. He didn’t look like the other wrestlers I knew. He didn’t smile. He didn’t pose. He was covered in scars and strapped to a gurney before matches, seemingly as much for the safety of the audience as for that of his opponent. He looked dangerous in a way I didn’t yet have language for.

I needed to know more about the homicidal, suicidal, genocidal, death-defying Maniac: Sabu.

Sabu was unlike anything that had come before him. He wrestled with an incredibly reckless, violent style that often seemed—even within kayfabe—like he was doing more damage to himself than his opponent. He dashed around the ring and launched himself off ropes, chairs, guardrails, and anything else he could get halfway footing on (and often things he couldn’t). Watching him felt less like watching a match and more like witnessing a car crash unfold in slow motion. He moved like a junior heavyweight but carried himself like a force of nature.

At first, I could only follow his exploits through magazines and his brief, underwhelming WCW run, where he was never given the opportunity to show what he was capable of, thanks to the politics of wrestling and WCW’s desire at the time to only appease its top stars. However, the photos and articles I was able to see in Pro Wrestling Illustrated, and other publications painted the picture of someone truly unhinged. This wasn’t a wrestler, it was a weapon in human form, and I was immediately drawn to him.

By early 1996, our cable company carried a sports station out of Atlanta that aired ECW late Friday or early Saturday at 2 a.m. I watched as often as I could, depending on whether I managed to stay awake. (Cut me some slack, I was nine.) It was only available at my mom’s house, so on those weekends I did whatever I could to stay up late and sneak out to the living room. Stealing sodas from the fridge, trying coffee for the first time, a nap immediately after school on Friday, I tried it all to make sure I could be awake to see it. If I had known what cocaine was back then, I probably would have considered it just to get my hour of Extreme. There was always the low-grade anxiety of being caught, which only heightened the experience. Sabu didn’t feel like something meant for kids, which of course made him feel even more important. This wasn’t Sting on a Saturday evening, it was a secret, and it felt like it belonged to me. My mom never explicitly forbade me from being up late like that, or watching anything on TV, but I was a smart enough nine year old to know this was NOT appropriate viewing for a child my age.

Once I could see him in action, especially in ECW where he was presented with an aura that made him feel like an unstoppable star, my fearful intrigue gave way to amazement. Paul Heyman (the creative force behind ECW) presented him like a truly dangerous madman. He never spoke and any time he appeared on screen, he was talked about as if he could do something both fantastic and violent at a moment’s notice. He wasn’t just surviving the chaos, he was creating it, shaping it, daring the audience to look away. In 2026, it’s no longer out of place to see tables used for big spots, springboard offense, moonsaults, or even barbed wire. While Sabu did not invent these elements, he was their codifier.

His use of tables is the most obvious antecedent to modern wrestling, where many shows can’t go on without at least one or two being broken, often accompanied by Pavlovian “We Want Tables” chants echoing through the arena. (Another ECW influence, I didn’t say they were all positive.) While territories like Memphis and Southwest utilized them occasionally, as did Randy Savage and Terry Funk in the 80’s. What Sabu did with tables was akin to what bands like Nirvana, and Pearl Jam had done with the Poisons and Ratts that ruled the music world in the 80’s.  Those table spots in the ’90s paved the way for TLC matches in the Attitude Era, the formalization of “Tables” matches, and all those times Christian and Randy Orton just couldn’t break one. If we keep this analogy going, that makes Randy Orton akin to Nickelback which seems appropriate.

Barbed wire in wrestling certainly wasn’t his invention, but it was his domain. What had once been a southern territory staple became an art form in his hands. The infamous 1997 Terry Funk match at Born to Be Wired was so gruesome that they famously never ran another, yet the tape sold like gangbusters. Watching it felt transgressive, like seeing something you weren’t quite supposed to see. Sabu tore his bicep early in the match on the barbed wire and used surgical tape at ringside to tape the injury and finish the match. I was horrified and couldn’t look away; it was a shining example of doing whatever it took to get something done, even if it kills you. Even at that age, I could tell this wasn’t about winning. It was about endurance, about what someone was willing to give up in front of an audience. Sabu worked in tables and barbed wire the way other artists work in oils or watercolors—each scar was part of the canvas.


Sabu was too dangerous a performer and too independent to ever have a sustained run outside of ECW, but that was never the point. While he held championships, the real draw was always the act. He knew exactly what got his character over and spent years afterward earning paydays by “playing the hits,” his reputation doing as much work as his body still could. That all seemed to culminate in the 2006 ECW revival.

By then, in the eleven years since learning how to use the internet, I had become pretty adept and was devouring every rumor I could find. Heyman was booking with real money. We had RVD, Kurt Angle, a young indy hotshot named CM Punk, and we had Sabu. For a moment, it felt like the past and present were colliding in the best possible way.

The bloom came off the rose quickly. After the arrests of Sabu and RVD, the end was already in sight. Just weeks after the launch of the brand, RVD and Sabu were traveling together and were arrested for possession of a controlled substance and drug paraphernalia. It may be shocking to find out that a guy who referred to himself as “Mr. 420” (RVD) would enjoy Marijuana. Unfortunately due to WWE (and the United States in 2006) archaic policy, they would be suspended. While RVD was a big enough star to stick around near the upper midcard, Sabu would quickly find himself out of management’s favor, and his career trajectory would quickly roll downhill. I was even in attendance at the notorious December to Dismember pay-per-view, where Sabu was pulled from the Elimination Chamber match in favor of Hardcore Holly. It felt deflating in a way that was hard to articulate at the time—another reminder that the version of wrestling I loved was always slightly out of step with the one that existed. I’m always going to want more Sabu and less Bob Holly, and I’m always going to like the look of wrestling in front of 1000 rabid people above 5 or 10,000 bored people who just want to sing along to entrance music.  It’s the curse of coolness that plagues anyone drawn to things labeled “alternative.”

In wrestling, just as in music, film, fashion, or any other art form, the story is as old as time. Someone does something radically different, and it ignites passion in those who see the medium being pushed somewhere new, while provoking backlash from those who feel the break with tradition is so severe it should be considered something else entirely. Eventually, that exciting new thing is defanged until it’s fit for consumption.

Mapplethorpe becomes Banksy.
GG Allin becomes Green Day.
And Sabu becomes any number of faceless guys flipping through tables.

Liking Sabu trained me early to accept that the things I loved most would never quite belong to me forever. That eventually, they’d be diluted, misunderstood, or flattened into something easier to sell. But it also taught me that seeing something before it was safe was a kind of privilege.

Eventually, Sabu returned to the independent circuit, working anywhere that would meet his fee. He died on May 11, 2025, and it hit me harder than I expected.

Being a fan of this thing means getting used to death. Thankfully, those losses seem less frequent now than in the ’90s and early 2000s, when it felt like every few weeks another childhood hero’s enlarged heart finally gave out. As they’ve become rarer, and as I’ve gotten older, they’ve begun to cut deeper.

An integral part of my childhood was gone.

What surprised me most, though, was the outpouring of work dedicated to his legacy. Fans shared art, old music videos cut to his highlights, long-form essays about his impact, and hours of podcasts devoted to this man who had captivated me decades earlier. It felt like watching people grieve in the only way wrestling fans really know how—by remembering everything.

Sometimes it feels like our experiences are wholly unique. What I love about professional wrestling is how it dispels that illusion, offering the realization that countless others were moved by the same beauty and violence that compelled me all those years ago. That something so chaotic could also be communal still feels miraculous. Wrestling will keep moving forward, finding new ways to shock and reinvent itself. New fans will fall in love with new crazy highspots, new jacked bodies, new ideas of what’s possible. Some of them will probably never know Sabu’s name, even as they cheer for the echoes of his work. That’s the strange bargain of influence: you disappear so the thing you created can live on.

Sabu was revolutionary. His influence spread so far and wide that his DNA is embedded throughout modern wrestling, to the point where many newer fans don’t even realize what they’re watching was pioneered by this man. His work has been sanded down, made safer, packaged for mass consumption, yet that blueprint remains.

The Genghis Khan of professional wrestling.

The first thing I ever looked up on the internet was Sabu.

The second thing I ever looked up was “Sabu wrestler,” after my initial search returned only results about the actor.

They say you always remember your first. While I don’t remember the exact moment I first saw professional wrestling, I will always remember the first person that truly captivated me, and got me hooked on something I’m still obsessed with decades later, Sting.

Wrestling was always around when I was very young, due to my dad being a fan. He grew up, like I did, in the coastal South Carolina region meaning that he had spent much of the 70s and 80s seeing some of the greats come through our area. While by 1986 the territory system that had once governed wrestling was rapidly fading, Jim Crockett Promotions out of Charlotte had become the last great challenger to McMahon’s expanding WWF machine. Many people still argue that 1986 Crockett was one of the best creative years any promotion has ever had—which is to say, it was a hell of a time to be a fan. At 6:05 every Saturday night, the TV came on at my dad’s house. I can’t pinpoint the moment when those memories crystallized (probably the summer of 1990), but the who is carved in stone:

He does this, he does that, he’s big as a bull and quick as a cat… he’s a man called Sting.

Sting wasn’t just cool—he was everything I wanted heroes to be. He had the blonde flat-top, the neon face paint that looked like it had been splashed on by some god of Saturday morning cartoons, and a presence that felt larger than anything in my small world. He was fearless and colorful and earnest in a way that made sense to a kid who wanted desperately to believe in good guys. He was also, unfortunately, the reason I had a rat-tail haircut at age five. Some prices are worth paying.

Sting was one of the best babyfaces in wrestling during this period, and honestly, throughout most of his career. During his struggles with the Horsemen he was the perfect combination of noble and gullible that endeared him the hearts of tons of little Stingers across the world.

It can be hard to get sympathy for a cool guy that’s in great shape, and every tango takes two (or in wrestling, usually many more.) Sting was set up perfectly by his best foils in this era, Ric Flair, and Vader. Flair was the consummate foil for Sting. The long-established top star of the promotion, Flair and his cronies in the Horsemen would employ every dirty trick in the book in order to get one up on our intrepid hero. Their tactics (later carried on by the almost as good Dangerous Alliance) caused us to not only feel sympathy for him, but to understand the idea of fighting fair, and fighting honorably. Vader was perhaps the greatest “Monster” of all time. So much that calling him a monster feels reductive, but what else do you call the giant man who destroys everything in his path? Vader’s matches with Sting made us feel like he may never walk again, let alone wrestle, thanks to Vader’s rough and believable style and Stings ability to sell a beating.

Of Course, Sting was also the top pushed babyface in the company I was introduced into wrestling through so of course he was my favorite from age 3-9. When wrestling exploded in popularity again, suddenly half my class was watching thanks to the NWO angle and Hogan’s turn. Sting changed too. Gone were the colors. The hair grew long and dark. He haunted the rafters in black and white, dropping in with a baseball bat like a goth sheriff. By then I was ten years old and already the kind of insufferable little smark who thought he’d cracked the business open like a code. I drifted away from Sting for a while, cruiserweights and ECW felt cooler, edgier, more “my” thing. Even then, I circled Starrcade ‘97 on the mental calendar. After a year and a half of running roughshod over WCW, Sting would beat Hogan, and WCW would pull ahead once and for all. I knew what should happen. Everyone did.

WCW blew it.

It didn’t feel like Sting had been cheated. It felt like I had been. It was the first time I realized that something I loved—something that felt like part of my identity—could be mishandled by people who didn’t understand it the way I, a fifth grader, did. That feeling would revisit me many times as a wrestling fan, but the first hurt always leaves the deepest mark. That’s a lesson most wrestling fans learn eventually. If you’re lucky, the fallout only screws over one wrestler, not the entire promotion.

I kept up with WCW til the bitter end, and Sting had plenty of bright spots still, even as the light within the organization grew dimmer and dimmer. When it was finally over I drifted away from wrestling for a bit, as did Sting. By the mid-2000s, we were both back. TNA felt like the southern wrestling revival we were both hoping for. There were bright moments, and Sting produced some great ones (including a killer match with Samoa Joe) but he also got trapped in the eternal boondoggle of TNA booking.

Then came WWE in 2014: the Triple H match at WrestleMania, the injury, the retirement we assumed was final.

Thankfully, it wasn’t.

He returned at Winter is Coming 2020 for AEW. Old man Sting in AEW was booked about as perfectly as you could hope for someone befitting his stature. He immediately allied with Darby Allin, this strange, fearless kid who felt like he’d grown up reading Sting’s shadow. Sting didn’t just tag with Darby; he adopted him. Wrestling dad. They would have excting matches built around Darby’s recklessness, often building to Sting doing things that men half his age wouldn’t dare, like diving off a balcony. This all came to a conclusion in March of 2024 when Sting finally called it quits in what may have been the best retirement of all time. A moment that I am forever grateful to have experienced live.

Sting deciding to retire in Greensboro, North Carolina wasn’t just poetic—it was perfect. That was the city of his legendary 45-minute draw with Ric Flair in ‘88, the match that made him. Once that 45 minutes was over he had gone from young kid with potential, to a future champion. Greensboro is interesting because it was a massive venue in the Crockett era despite it not being that large of a city in comparison to the rest of the Carolinas and Virginia. This place had history coming out of it’s walls, Including pilgrimages to it from my dad, and many more from my Step-dad who was also a fan and grew up a stones throw away in Winston-Salem. The cheers of generations who watched Sting grow up in front of them, and now those of us who grew up with Sting, returned to send him off.

I was lucky enough to be there, not with any kind of father figure, but with three guys I’d be proud to call brothers, and are some of my best friends. Guys that never turned heel on me, and never swerved me. Sitting beside them, feeling the echoes of the people who had cheered before us, gave me a kind of peace I hadn’t felt in years. It might have been one of the sparks that inspired this whole project. That feeling felt like it was all over the arena, and the match itself absolutely reflected it as well.

We see highlights of his career on the screen, then Sting’s first son walked out in Surfer Sting gear. I didn’t realize who it was at first. I was far enough away that I briefly thought Sting was going to wrestle in that gear. It made zero sense, but I was ready to believe it. A moment later, another son in Wolfpac colors walked out, and suddenly the whole night tilted into something even more special.

Sting wasn’t just retiring. He was saying goodbye in the exact way he deserved: with his sons beside him, with his chosen successor at his side, against opponents who worked their asses off to make him look untouchable, (The Young Bucks, who were the stooging heels of a lifetime, and made sting look like a million dollars) in a city that had birthed his legend. He got to go out surrounded by people who loved him, respected him, and understood what he meant.

He went out in a match that made perfect use of what he still can do very well while his partner, opponents, sons, and special guests all put in the maximum possible effort in order to ensure it all came together as spectacular as someone like Sting deserves. Most of us won’t retire, and if we do, we’ll be lucky to get a cake. Sting got the greatest send off someone could possibly hope for because he’s that important and iconic to the wrestling business, and I got spend that moment with the guys that mean the most to me. Few people will ever experience what Sting did, but it’s my sincere hope that everybody reading this will get to experience what I did.

That’s what this whole project is about, really—the way wrestling bleeds into life, and life bleeds back. The way the things we love when we’re young become mirrors we carry into adulthood. The way a wrestling match can crack your heart open and show you something about yourself you didn’t expect.

After thirty-plus years of devoting energy, money, hope, and emotion to pro wrestling, I got something back: the love of my friends, the roar of a crowd united in purpose, and a single, perfect evening that made me feel grateful to be alive.

Lying in bed that night, I remember thinking:

If this had been my last day on Earth, it would’ve been a good one to go out on.