Support for the No Fly Zone

It was refreshing to have so many vocal supporters backstage at 205 Live this week!

Come and Take It

I just got back to our hotel room in San Antonio before Smack Down Live! and 205 Live, aka “Plaza del Nese et Gulak,” and I got to check out the town with a certain unbiased announcer who is most certainly not named Vic Joseph. I’m no stranger to traveling. I have been incredibly lucky to experience many different places around the globe. It’s an incredible way to grow and to learn, and it certainly is surreal to see some of the textbook images from my elementary school days become real life exhibits in front of my eyes. As a kid, I always took those things for granted, but there is a certain sense of fulfillment when so many years later I get to check those history lessons out in person. I had that feeling when I got to venture to Stonehenge a couple years ago, and I just had another one this morning.

The Alamo was never on my to do list. No offense to the city of San Antonio or the historic activities that took place here, I never get excited to sight-see. I take it for granted that we have so much history preserved in the USA. I believe that comes from living in Philadelphia all my life where there is a wonderful museum or a landmark every 20 yards. That said, I loved visiting the Alamo. It reminded me of being back home in Philly. Whenever there would be photos of the legendary fort I would see it up close or in an artistic rendering placing it out in the Texas desert. This is not true today. They built the city of San Antonio up and around the old monument. When you go into the outdoors exhibits they have the gardens built up so that you don’t get distracted by the neighboring skyscrapers. I could take in the experience in its entirety. It was a beautiful and moving experience that I won’t soon forget, and I highly recommend anyone visiting San Antonio to take a half hour and see it for yourself.

Check out them resonably priced tours!

Reflecting before RAW in Houston

As of last month, it's been 14 years working in the pro wrestling industry, depending on what you classify working as. Me and my brother started on the ring crew for Combat Zone Wrestling in 2003. We would just help them break down and clean up, usually leaving thumbtacks stuck in my shoes only realizing the next day in high school that was where the clicking sound was coming from when I walked. Oh yeah, every CZW event back then had a thumbtacks or glass match, leaving my sneakers with a nice floor scratching coating of whatever goodness the wrestlers felt like falling into that night. If it wasn't for independent promotions like Combat Zone Wrestling and people like John Zandig who said, "screw it" and started promotions like CZW themselves, I wouldn't be sitting in Houston, Texas today working for the WWE.

World Wrestling Entertainment is such a large organization. For the people that are familiar with it you might see statistics thrown around touting their incredible reach to people across the world but the production itself is rarely talked about in detail. In short, compared to companies like a CZW, the scale of the operation itself is awe inducing. And no matter the amount of people who work here, or their years of experience and training, or the budget, or the scope of their production, the same principals I was taught 14 years ago as an independent wrestler, ring crew personnel, or production assistant, all hold true to what I do here in the company of hundreds. It's what we were taught by the CZW crew so long ago just breaking rings down in parking lots. Be respectful. Be willing to learn. Work hard. Have fun.