Struggle For Power - 11,600 Miles
I've read and heard plenty of stories of people who have thanked wrestling for helping them out in some way. There have been famous wrestlers that made the decision to become the person they eventually became after watching a particular moment on a wrestling show. There are others who have used wrestling as an escape from an otherwise awful life. Some have even had their life saved by wrestling, as our friend Steve vividly narrated a few weeks ago.
I honestly don't have any of those stories to tell. Not even close.
Wrestling came into my life when I was a child, and it's stuck with me throughout the 35 years I've been alive on this planet. I can't associate wrestling with any moment of my life. Sure, I can fondly remember special moments in wrestling history, but those moments didn't help me with something in my own life. I also can't associate wrestling with periods of my life where things weren't going well since, thankfully, I haven't had many bad times. Most of my life, I've been as strait-laced as any human can be. I did my homework on time. I seldom went out at night or cause worry with my mom by her not knowing where I was. I've never tried drugs or even smoke a cigarette. I haven't had any vices run my life. I always got along well with most people, from family to friends to co-workers. The name "Degenerate" is as far removed from my personality as can possibly be. This has led to a relatively stable environment.
Even though I can't say wrestling changed me in an instant or pulled me out of dark moments, the one thing I have with wrestling is that it has never, ever left my side in my entire life, and because of that, it has enriched my life more than anything else has.
Birthplace
I lived the first eight years of my life in Chicago. I've mentioned previously in these forums that some of my earliest memories are the times when I watched wrestling in the basement of my home with my older brother. I was around 4 years old at this time, and he was 9. My brother likes wrestling and still watches regularly, but he's not really into it as most of us here are. He occasionally reads the news on LOP but he doesn't spend his time dissecting the business like we tend to do. We sometimes talk about it when he asks me about recent storylines when he misses a few episodes, but that's the extent of our wrestling talk now. But despite us not having the same level of interest in pro wrestling now, I truly believe having something to join us together early on in my life has caused our relationship to always be in great condition. Sure, we've had our silly arguments like any siblings, but nothing that fractured our link as brothers.
Another early memory I had was my dad showing me the Sports section from the March 29, 1987 edition of the Chicago Tribune. That day, Wrestlemania III was scheduled to take place in the Pontiac Silverdome in Michigan. The Tribune had a "Tale of the Tape" that compared the basic stats of Hulk Hogan and Andre The Giant - height, weight, and previous accomplishments. I still remember clearly how I worried I became because Andre surpassed Hogan in every measurable way, and my dad would just chuckle. My dad never watched wrestling, but he never discouraged me from watching it. In fact, he would encourage it. He would make sure I watched the shows. He also knew I loved reading, so he would buy me a copy of the WWF Magazine for the month, along with Archie comic books - I loved those.
I was still too young to realize what wrestling was to me at this point. All I know is that I liked watching wrestling. I had no idea that it helped strengthen my connection to people. That would continue to grow with me throughout the years.
Separation
My parents separated in November 1988, and just a few days after my birthday, most of my immediate family moved to Puerto Rico. Having grown up in the United States, I didn't know how to speak any Spanish besides "Gracias". My parents are both natives from Puerto Rico, and my brother and sister knew some Spanish having been born on the island - their biological father being different from mine. So the move was a bit easier on the rest of the family. For me, that first year was terrifying, not knowing the language and not being able to play much with the other kids because I couldn't talk with them. I almost got held back a grade because of the language, but I made up for it with my math skills, whatever that means for an eight-year-old child.
One of the first things that tranquilized me was the fact that the local Telemundo channel had WWF programming. I was happy to be able to continue watching something familiar to me when everything else around me was vastly different. However, the local programming was in Spanish. That was actually a great help because it helped me train my young brain to the sounds of the Spanish language. This was the same technique that Kevin Owens applied in his own life when he would similarly practice his language skills by listening to Jim Ross. Soon, I also discovered that there was local wrestling too, with the World Wrestling Council having a weekly television show. The WWC is run by current WWE Hall of Famer Carlos Colón, and I remember his feuds against Abdullah the Butcher, Chicky Starr and El Invader. I also began watching their shows because it was so different and continued to help me train my Spanish vocabulary and abilities.
A few years later, I met my good friend Victor. The way we met was a bit unusual. He was in the 3rd grade while I was a grade ahead, and he got into a fight with one of my classmates. I later discovered my classmate started the whole thing by making fun of Victor's lack of Spanish speaking abilities. The next day I went to him for some reason - maybe I knew all too well the struggle he was having - and started talking with him in English. We started hanging out more after that, and I found out that his life mirrored mine up to that point. We were both born in the U.S., both our mothers divorced and moved to Puerto Rico, our Spanish was horrible and we were avid video game players. We were also the same age - he was held back a grade because of his Spanish. Above all, we both loved professional wrestling. This naturally drew us together and I would spend most of my childhood with him. His house had cable television and he would diligently record Monday Night Raw for us to watch every Tuesday afternoon after school. Every month, we went to a local bar - where the owner would let us come in despite being underage - to watch WWE's Pay-Per-Views. He still gives me crap about almost crying when I saw Shawn Michaels win the WWF Championship at Wrestlemania 12. Regardless, I'm glad I found someone to bond with during my early days in Puerto Rico.
I lived in Puerto Rico for 19 years. Needless to say, the wrestling world transformed many times throughout that period. The Monday Night Wars changed the way the WWF was putting on shows. Wrestling became one of the most popular things to watch on TV. I remember in high school and my early days of college having people talk with me to ask me questions about wrestling because I was that guy who always watched and knew what was going on. These people would have probably never talked to me had it not been for wrestling being so popular during the late-90's and early-2000's. But because of wrestling, my circle expanded a bit, albeit temporarily.
The Internet also came into play while I lived in Puerto Rico. I started discovering sites like LOP and eventually the Columns Forum. After reading columns on the Main Page for a few years, and then lurking in the forums for a few months, I thought it would be cool to write a column. I remember writing the first version of Struggle For Power in June 2005, posting it here, and having other people talk about it. The topic choice was a typical one for a first column - I talked about the current state of the WWE championships and what I thought should be done with each title. I was happy that I was told the column was decent and was given pointers on how to improve. But I was happier that I found people to talk about wrestling again. At this point, wrestling was no longer a cool thing to talk about and many people I knew, including Victor, had stopped watching the shows. So having someone to chat about wrestling was wonderful.
At this time in my life, I was stuck in a rut. I was fortunate to get a job in Puerto Rico immediately after graduating from college, but I wasn't happy there. The pay was pretty low, and I had to move to the opposite side of Puerto Rico. Although I was only 90 minutes from my family and friends, I wouldn't be able to see them often, which caused more of my friendships to dry up. The distance also caused the breakup of my relationship of four years, since my then-girlfriend wanted me to drive 75 miles in rush hour traffic to visit her at least 3 times a week - and drive back late at night - after I worked for nine hours. After I declined and arguments ensued, she felt the relationship wouldn't work in these circumstances. Oh well, you can't please everyone all the time.
I wouldn't say my life was bad at this point, but I felt a bit unfulfilled. So I kept on writing. As I kept on doing so and improving, I felt like I formed bonds with many around these forums. It's obviously not a bond as in a real-life friendship where I can physically see and hang out with them on a regular basis. But it's a bond that showed to me that no matter where someone is, you can feel connected with them - you don't always need to physically be there. This lesson I learned came into play in a huge way later in my life.
I have pro wrestling to thank for that. In my nineteen years living in Puerto Rico, it was always there for me and brought many people into my life that otherwise wouldn't have been a part of my life.
Migration
The economy in Puerto Rico wasn't doing very well in 2008. The unemployment rate was slowly climbing. I started noticing business slowing down at the company I worked at. The writing was on the wall - I had to find something else. After realizing I wouldn't find anything worthwhile in Puerto Rico, I started to look to the United States. After months of searching, I got a lucky break with a startup in New York City. The founders, a married couple, were coincidentally having a layover at the main airport in Puerto Rico on their way to the Virgin Islands. So on Christmas Day in 2007, I drove to the airport, had an impromptu interview with them, and after they came back from vacation they called and said they wanted to hire me.
It's a bit ironic that when I moved to Puerto Rico, I was feeling terrified, and I was feeling terrified again when I was leaving Puerto Rico. Leaving the place you spent more than two-thirds of your life is not an easy transition. I moved to New York City in January 2008 - during the same weekend of the Royal Rumble in Madison Square Garden, where John Cena made his surprise return after having a serious injury that was supposed to keep him out of wrestling for a much longer period of time. I couldn't go to that show because it was already sold out if I'm not mistaken. But even if there were still tickets available, I only had $500 to my name, which I wanted to save in case things went horribly wrong and I had to buy a plane ticket to go back to Puerto Rico.
Thankfully, things didn't go bad and I ended up living in New York City for two years. I was ecstatic about living in the Big Apple. As a WWE fan my entire life, I was taught early in my life that Madison Square Garden is the place to go for wrestling. Watching all the big shows that took place inside the building made me constantly dream of going there. Now here I was, working just three blocks from the Garden. I walked almost every day past the Garden, just to take in the atmosphere of the arena. It felt surreal at the time.
The first show at Madison Square Garden I was able to go to was a house show in August 2008. I honestly can't recall a lot about the show. I remember the main event of CM Punk versus JBL in a steel cage match. I also remember Primo having a match against William Regal, which was shortly before Primo debuted on WWE television. Hey, I'm still Puerto Rican, and I'll always be full of pride seeing one of my fellow countrymen on such a large stage. The thing I remember the most is that I spent most of the show in awe of being inside Madison Square Garden, and thinking about how it must have felt being in there in the Wrestlemanias that happened there, or how loud the fans were during the heydays of Hulk Hogan and Bruno Sammartino.
I managed to go to a few more shows at the Garden, including a couple of Raws and Smackdowns. I have two great memories of going to those shows. The first was seeing Shawn Michaels for the first time in person. This was during one of the last formations of Degeneration X with Triple H, and Triple H hit the Pedigree on Hornswoggle, who wanted to join DX. The other memory was during Kofi Kingston's feud with Randy Orton. This was the moment when Kofi did the Boom Drop on Orton through a table to a thunderous ovation. I was sitting 20 feet from where that happened, and it was the loudest noise I've ever heard at the point.
The bonds I formed online spilled onto the real world. While I was in New York City, I managed to meet a few members of the LOP community while going to a few shows. I went to a few Ring of Honor shows at the Manhattan Center with Uncle Joe and Cold, and I went to a Smackdown taping at Madison Square Garden with Johnny Boomerang. For whatever reason, we never hung out much outside of that, but it was fun having these meetings and sharing something we all enjoyed in pro wrestling. These meetups also came into play later in my life.
I was still active in the Columns Forum during this time. Truth be told, I kept on writing because, just like when I was in Puerto Rico, my life felt like it was missing something. The only family I had was my cousin, who I barely saw. I didn't have many friends - mostly my own doing since I'm pretty introverted. The startup I got hired to work for was not doing very well and they cut my salary significantly. I started to look elsewhere for work and decided to try my hand in California. The Bay Area was the spot I originally wanted to live in when I was trying to find a new job a few years prior. With more experience and an apparent lack of decent computer programmers in the U.S., I was able to early get a new job in the San Francisco Bay Area in January 2010, and a few weeks later I would be on a plane flying across the country to yet another new place.
Moving (to start a new job)
New York City and San Francisco feel like entirely different worlds. NYC is an amazing city and I'm happy that I got to experience living there, but I felt a lot more comfortable in the laid-back culture of the Bay Area. Life moved at a more manageable pace for me. It's less crowded and people were a lot nicer. I enjoyed the calm as opposed to the always-rushed pace of New York City living. Additionally, for the first time in my life, I was becoming financially independent. I was finally getting compensated well for my work and didn't have to worry about carefully managing my finances. It's not like I lived paycheck to paycheck, which I'm appreciative of, but I didn't have much of a discretionary income.
If you were in the Columns Forum during this period of time, you would have noticed that I became non-existent around these parts. I stopped writing columns, and I stopped reading and trying to help others with feedback. I mentioned in a previous column that this was largely in part of my attempt to minimize the negativity I was consistently encountering on the Internet. But it was also partly due to my life finally having a sense of fulfillment and order. I didn't feel the need to fill that void that I had felt before.
Even though I wasn't actively participating online, the bonds of wrestling continued working in their awesome ways. Before I moved to the Bay Area, I reached out to Columns Forum Hall of Famer Zuma to ask a few questions about living here, which he was helpful with. A month or so after I arrived in the Bay Area, he reached out to me and asked if I wanted to go to a preseason baseball game between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland A's. I went to that game. That evening, he had gathered a lot of his family and friends because they were celebrating a birthday - Al.pYro's birthday. After that day, I was able to hang out with them for wrestling events, sporting events, and anything else interesting that came along the way during the six years I lived in the Bay Area. Even after Zuma moved away, the rest of the group continued to hang out with me. They made my life in the Bay Area a lot more enjoyable, especially since when I arrived here I knew no one.
While living in the Bay Area, I met the woman who would eventually become my wife. Thanks to a mutual friend - a co-worker from the startup I worked in while living in New York City - I was introduced to her while she was visiting San Francisco. We only spent a short amount of time together while she was in the Bay Area, but for some reason, I felt a closeness to her - more than I had ever felt with anyone, ever. After she left, I knew in my heart that I had found a genuine connection with someone. She agreed and we worked hard to keep that connection alive. We had a long-distance relationship for almost three years, only seeing each other in person two or three times a year. Although no one ever told me directly that they thought this wouldn't work out, I did find out that some people thought I was an idiot. I didn't care because I knew what I felt was real and sometimes that's really all that you need.
Like I mentioned before, I learned that no matter where someone is, you can feel connected with them. I wrote about how this is a big reason about why I like being on these forums, but I also think that's a big part of why a lot of us continue to be drawn into wrestling in general - we feel a connection with some of these wrestlers and what they go through. The WWE crowd has always been conditioned to be in awe of the larger-than-life personalities in the show. But then you have times like Shawn Michaels achieving his boyhood dream, Eddie Guerrero climbing out of the darkness and straight to the top, and Daniel Bryan shattering his B+ underdog status to accomplish success and popularity rarely reached by anyone. We don't know these people personally, and their stories are carefully laid out ahead of time and presented to us under ideal circumstances, but the connection is real.
Opposite side
When you're in a long-distance relationship, the end game only has two way to go: at least one of the parties has to move closer to the other, or you don't and eventually break up. In 2015, I decided to make the move. I was lucky to have landed a job which lets me work from anywhere in the world. I enjoyed Japan the times I traveled to the country. I also dug the idea of living in a foreign country. So I cleaned up my apartment, sold almost all of my stuff, and moved over 5000 miles away to my current residence in Osaka. Not a lot of people do that, especially to a country that's so vastly different than their own.
I consider myself someone who can easily adapt to any situation. After living in so many different places throughout my adult life, I thought I got the hang of this. And for the most part, I have. I can't complain about anything, really. I've managed to get married here and live in a much nicer apartment than I had back in New York or California. My wife's family has accepted me as part of the family and treat me very well whenever we meet. I can manage handling daily life tasks like buying things at a store and finding my way around the complex train system. If I need to ask someone a basic question, I'm able to manage it.
However, adjusting to life here has admittedly been a bit rough for me, personally. My Japanese language skills are very basic, so I can't really hold conversations with most people. The only people I've had extended conversations with are other expats or tourists, which is nice but I don't run into these groups very often. The time difference is also brutal. Right now, I'm 13 hours ahead of my family in Puerto Rico, and 16 hours ahead of my friends in California. Because of this, I haven't had much contact with anyone I know - whenever I'm awake, they're asleep and vice versa. Outside of my mom, do you want to know how many times other family or friends have called me on Skype or Facetime? Just one person in nine months. I really don't have any friendships outside of my marriage. I love my wife and love spending time with her, but I don't want to be relying on her to keep my company 24/7. I don't think any marriage would survive that. She'd definitely go out of her mind with me being around all the time.
Thankfully, wrestling came to my rescue again. I'm extremely fortunate to live in a country where pro wrestling is very much alive and well. The heavy hitters of Japanese wrestling, like New Japan, DDT, and Dragon Gate, pass by Osaka every couple of months. Additionally, there seems to be at least one local show taking place most weeks. I began going to some of the shows, first with my wife, then by myself since she doesn't really like wrestling. Going to these shows on my own, I obviously didn't know a single person. As a matter of fact, I was probably the only Westerner in the crowd for most of the shows. But despite all of that, I felt like we were all connected for those three or four hours of the show. It's really weird to explain, but I felt like we were all on the same wavelength, like all of those people were my friends. Going to these shows are the only time I feel like I belong in Japan and am not an outsider.
The Columns Forum also came to my rescue recently. It was fun seeing these shows, but I didn't have anyone to talk with to discuss them. I would briefly chat about it with some of my Facebook friends with very little reaction. So I came back to the Columns Forum and nervously submitted a column about my experience going to my first Japanese wrestling show. I say "nervously" because my head was full of doubt. It had been a couple of years since I posted anything in the forums. Did my writing skills suffer during my leave? How would people react to this type of column? Would anyone remember who I was? Those questions were answered quickly - I received very nice feedback from those still around, I spotted a few familiar faces who seemed happy to see me posting again, and the column was voted as the Column of the Month. I remembered my connection with this place, and I wanted to get that bond strengthened again.
Bond
I carefully chose each one of the Japanese words that I used throughout the different sections of this column. Each one of these words consists of two characters. However, each character has its own meaning:
Birthplace: The first character means "exit", the second means "oneself"
Separation: The first character means "part", the second means "stand up"
Migration: The first character means "shift", the second means "reside"
Moving (to start a new job): The first character means "proceed", the second means "responsibility"
Opposite side: The first character means "anti-", the second means "surface"
Bond: The first character means "cause", the second means "relation"
When I began studying the Japanese language, this was one of the first things that caught my attention. Each character has its own meaning but combined with other characters, it can mean something different - often something with a richer, deeper meaning. I like to think that we, as wrestling fans, are the same way. We all mean something on our own, but together we have a stronger purpose of being, whether it's watching a show on TV with close friends, attending a live event with hundreds or thousands of strangers, or chatting online with individuals who you've never seen.
The total distance I've traveled in all the times I've moved is approximately 11,600 miles - about 18,668 kilometers for my friends who still wonder why the hell the U.S. hasn't adopted the Metric System yet. That's a lot of miles going to vastly different places. The one common denominator in all of those places for me has always been wrestling. Most of my life, I thought I was just watching some enjoyable distraction on TV. But reflecting back on how things have gone for me during my life, I can clearly see it's done a lot more than provide me with a few hours of entertainment. Wrestling has provided something to connect me with amazing people that I otherwise wouldn't have any type of association with. It has afforded me friendships that I hope will carry on where I'm living on this planet. For that, I'll always be thankful.
'Til Next Time,
Degenerate