By the time I had reached Grade eight I was obsessed with professional wrestling. Although I had lots of other interests, I couldn't help but be fascinated with this world of entertainment that had caught the world again by storm in the late 1990's. Wrestling was larger than life at this point, perhaps bigger than it's initial flirtation with Hollywood in the mid-1980's. All the kids I knew were even more obsessed than I was, with myself often having to play catch up from years of being banned from watching wrestling programs.
While I was playing catch-up with the world of professional wrestling my peers were engaging in their own amateur events at their houses. Constructing crude rings made of mattresses thrown together in living rooms or basements, the Canadian Wrestling Alliance (CWA) occupied the time and energy of the people in my peer group at school. Names like "Inferno", "Big Sexy" and "Fetus" matched up against one another on the weekend, hosting between 10-20 wrestlers to put on a show while the parents were gone for the day.
I ended up joining the CWA quite late into it's existence after they had been operating for a couple years. I remember distinctly going to CWA member Mike Graham's house for the first "event", not knowing what to expect. When I entered the house, I remember seeing a group of people engaging on a match in the upper level of the house. Diving off couches onto mattresses and rebounding off invisible ropes the members of CWA were what you would expect from a typical indoors backyard group in 1998. Despite stolen gimmicks and wrestling move repertoires, however, these guys were having fun. Here, in the privacy of our own, we could engage in perhaps the most common of all adolescent male activities, wrestling and rough-housing.
It wasn't long before my obsession with wrestling graduated to an obsession with backyard wrestling. As I attended CWA events over the course of Grade 8 I was now watching wrestling with a new perspective and purpose. I now watched matches to learn moves and wrestling sequences and began liking the athletic and dare-devil type wrestlers over the dramatic or funny wrestlers. Through the help of small wrestling publications I discovered the world of independent and international wrestling, particularly Stampede Wrestling, ECW and Japan. I practiced incessantly with my friends on the trampoline, often for hours every day after school.
By this time I was wrestling as the "Edgecrusher" in the CWA, lifting the name from the popular Fear Factory song. Due to my ability in athletics at that time I was able to learn backyard wrestling fairly well and won a couple titles in our play, backyard wrestling league. I had joined a stable called the "Escarpments" where we took every chance to rip off our shirts and flex our Grade eight non-muscles. We had moved from the indoors in the winter, to the trampoline in the spring time too, allowing for more intricate matches to transpire with our newly developed spots and sequences. Over the summer we developed a website together in the computer room of the local C.A.W facility. Despite having no footage online, our photos were included in a contest by the movie "Backyard Dogs" for the best backyard wrestling group. Sadly we did not win.
Edgecrusher, Face-smusher
By the tail-end of Grade 8 we learned of another backyard wrestling group in our small town called the Amateur Wrestling Federation (AWF). This league was composed of older students who wrestled on the ground and with weapons. I tried to get my hands on the footage or see an event in-person. The group was more underground than ours was. How do I see the footage? How can I attend an event? I had to find answers.