On Saturday, April 25, it’s going to be exactly 26 years since I attended my first live wrestling event, where I saw David Arquette win the World Heavyweight Championship at an infamous taping of “WCW Thunder.” And now, here I’m, a quarter-of-a-century later, planning a marriage a thousand miles away, watching one other wrestling event taped within the Syracuse War Memorial, where I used to attend the Syracuse Auto Expo with my classic-car-obsessed father, now named for the hospital where I spent many days as a chronically-ill child, within the shadow of the Equitable Towers where I learned what grown-ups do at work, next to the Civic Center where I used to take acting classes, across the road from the convention center where I graduated highschool, and just a brief drive from the synagogue where I used to be Bar Mitzvah’d, that’s now being became student housing. One friend I attended that “Thunder” taping with died in an expert snowmobile race, speeding right into a wall, crashing into oblivion on Kentucky Derby Day, a few years ago.
All of those ghosts got here flooding back to me in a Proustian rush of memory throughout the show, as Mike Santana made a Jey Uso-esque entrance through hallways that I have never walked in at the least 15 years.
I saw one WCW taping and two WWE house shows in that arena, and none of them were nearly as good as what “Impact” presented tonight. WCW in 2000 was in a sorry state of affairs, and WWE never really took Syracuse audiences seriously in my time as a wrestling fan, often phoning it in and dealing on spots for TV and PPV. So I can firmly say that tonight’s “Impact,” as boilerplate as it would’ve been, was the very best wrestling I’ve ever seen within the War Memorial at OnCenter.
It was weird to see Syracuse taken so seriously. TNA might’ve taken the town more seriously in these couple of days of tapings than I did in my whole 18 years there. There was a shoutout to Upstate NY favorite, Dinosaur BBQ, and diverse references to the town being a dump, which it’s, but it surely was my dump for some time; the dump that made me the person I’m today.
I’m not even the standard “Impact” editor. I just happened to be filling in.
Call it “fate,” call it “God,” call it “windfall,” I used to be probably meant to see this show and realize how far that little 9-year-old WCW fan, who plugged his ears before every pyro burst, has come.
Within the introductions, I normally say we’ll get “deep in our feelings” in regards to the show, and boy howdy was I telling the reality with this one.
Written by Ross Berman