My uncle was my best friend. We had always been close. He was my dad’s best friend and was the only piece of my dad I had left after he passed. He grew up a huge wrestling fan, tombstone-ing his friends in the yard like so many other people grew up doing. But life happens and he got busy. Wrestling became a less and less part of his life until I started watching in 2014. He was thrilled, and soon my life was filled with PPV parties and tickets to all the local (and not so local) shows. He introduced me to NJPW and catching WrestleKingdom at the ass crack of dawn became our January tradition.
I remember it all too well. It was the first episode of Dynamite during the pandemic. We were AEW fans , of course, but this episode of Dynamite was the start of something really special, and the beginning of all my favorite memories. We watched together over FaceTime, taking pandemic guidelines seriously. I don’t know what it was, but soon, watching AEW consumed us. It was just fun. And we turned Wednesday nights into snacks and wrestling and everything comforting. The second AEW starting touring again we were off. I couldn’t tell you how many shows we went to together. Just me and my uncle. We took it as a need to go to every show within the vicinity of our area. Nothing was off limits, as long as we could both get off work. AEW made our already strong bond even stronger.
My favorite show of all time is Forbidden Door, something my uncle took me to as a surprise, pulling up to my house the night before and telling me to back for Chicago. It was a combination of our two favorite wrestling promotions, and one of the best wrestling weekends we had ever experienced. The show in itself was enough to make that true, but it was the memory we made of it that turned it something even more. Two weeks or so after we got back from Chicago, my uncle had a doctors appointment. I won’t get into the nitty gritty but it was bad, “enjoy the time you have left” type of bad. Our last show together was All Out of this year. It wasn’t a trip either of us could afford to take, but a trip neither of us could afford to miss. The truth is, it wouldn’t have matter what the hell happened at that show. It was one last live wrestling show with my best friend, my favorite person- he was cheering for CM Punk and I was cheering for Jon Moxley and for one moment nothing else existed. For one moment, a few short hours we had years and years ahead of us and thousands of wrestling shows to attend. We made plans for Dynamite in Cincinnati upon returning from All Out weekend. It was a long shot he’d make it, but not making plans to go would have been too hard for either of us. But the time came and he was too sick to go. He pushed me out the door and told me to have a great time. I had him on the phone the entire show. He passed on October 31st. I’ve barely allowed myself to grieve, it’s too hard. I ignored it for a while, but then Orange Cassidy vs Shibata got announced for Rampage and I couldn’t ignore it anymore. We would have been front row at that show the second we saw the match graphic. It was too much for me to try and watch it, or even acknowledge that it was happening. But I knew I’d watch wrestling again some day. That some day happened to be yesterday.
Full Gear was risky for me. Knowing it would open up feelings I didn’t and don’t want to have. Yeah, we probably would have been there last night, cheering for MJF while cursing him under our breaths because that’s what we’re supposed to do. We would have shed tears during Eddie Kingston and Akiyama, and his face would have lit up when “Carry On My Wayward Son” hit. But instead of being there live and in the flesh, I watched the PPV from the suffocating silence of my bedroom. It could have been the most loneliest time of my life, but it wasn’t. He was still there, right there next to me somehow. I still cried during Kingston vs Akiyama. I still flipped my shit over MJF. The Elite made their entrance and I knew he was right there watching with me.
In his book, Jon Moxley described wrestling as “everything.” It said it can be anything, it can be everything. Wrestling means something different to everyone. For some, it’s just something to watch to kill time. For others, it‘s something much more. And that’s the beauty of it. So much can be said about AEW from a wrestling standpoint, but not enough can be said about AEW from a personal standpoint. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to be in the crowd again, but I do know that it will be apart of my life for as long as it and I exist on this planet. I am so eternally grateful to that company and those wrestlers for giving me the best times of my life. Those memories, those shows, those moments are irreplaceable. I’ll never get my uncle back, but I will always have the thing him and I could never get enough of.
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