I listened to an old interview with Bad News Allen and he was talking about how what helped him is not being a mark for the business. As long as he got paid, he didn’t care about losing or looking bad. I nodded along in the car thinking “yeah, that’s what I got going for me too”. But then I started to think – wait, I’m not sure Bad News really made much money wrestling.
It got even worse when I started thinking about how most of the big stars in wrestling were the exact opposite. All they cared about was winning fake fights and looking good. So much so that they fucked over everyone they could to make sure they won the fake fights and no one else looked good but them ever. Not all the top stars were total assholes, but they were for sure self-centered and manipulative.
That was making me depressed but then I realized I was thinking about it wrong. You don’t have to be like that to make money, those are just the guys at the very top. You probably have to be a dick to make it to the top of the ladder, but I don’t want to be at the top of the ladder. I want to be Lance T Storm. By all accounts he’s a solid dude. And I think he made a good chunk of change in the business. He was never at the top or even near the top. My goal is to be somewhere between Bad News Allen and Lance Storm.
Lance Storm used to have a wrestling school where he trained a lot of women wrestlers. That’s as much of a segue as you’re going to get from me. Sometimes I see in the comments that a woman has found this blog and is excited to read about a woman who “kicks ass”. Then after a couple posts they don’t like me anymore because I say anti-feminist things. I admit I have a hard time relating to other women. It’s not a gender thing, I have a hard time relating to everyone.
I had a moment that helped me understand better last night. These three dudes approached me about doing an angle on the show. I don’t remember their working names but imagine they were something like Crowbar or Chisel or Ramdog or Smashfist. The angle they do is two of them come out and get all rapey with a woman wrestler after her match and then the third guy comes out and saves her and then they make out.
They probably wouldn’t have approached me about this but I was the only woman on the show. I bet they normally do it with . . . wait, I was about to say something anti-feminist . . . I bet they normally do it with a perfect nice woman who just looks different from me. I laughed and told them hell no and they got creepy and aggressive about it. This did not faze me.
But I realized in that moment what it might be like for someone else. I’ve been around these kind of people enough to know that their weird man anger isn’t going to lead to anything. It’s not like they were going to beat the shit out of me right there. One of them might try to take a dump in the gas tank of my car but they’re not going to attack me.
But if you’re “normal” and you have three big dudes surrounding you and getting all red in the face and arm-grabby about something, that probably scares the shit out of you. Why wouldn’t it? You might say “yes” just to get them to leave you alone.
I don’t know if this revelation helps anything, but it’s something.
T Storm, T Rex. I missed out on all the good names.