Wrestling Saved My Life

The first time I watched AEW was, I think, 2019’s Full Gear pay-per-view.

I had some friends who were getting into wrestling, and we had watched PPVs with them. They were fun gatherings, where we ate tasty food while watching a bunch of people punch the tar out of each other. It started with WWE (my friend Erin was a big Becky Lynch fan), but quickly turned to focus mostly on AEW.

WWE…I never really got. I enjoyed the time spent with friends, but the actual matches didn’t do much for me. I had a brief phase in middle school where I tried to like wrestling because a minor character from the Artemis Fowl novels, Juliet, loved wrestling, but it never clicked for me. It was male dominated, the storylines were generally uninteresting, and the women felt pretty cookie cutter.

But as an adult, as I watched more wrestling, I started to get it more. 

I was a theater kid growing up–involved in small town theater productions of Shakespeare, Dickens, and Neil Simon, making scripted YouTube videos with friends in high school, running musical theater camps for kids in the summers, and getting deep into cosplay in college–and pro-wrestling, with its bizarre combination of athleticism, operatic storytelling, costuming, and showboating, appealed to that innate, dramatic dorkiness.

I love comic books and video games and anime and rap, all things that pro-wrestling intersects with.

I could see how someone could fall in love with it.

Then came AEW’s Revolution. 

It was February 2020, just before the world melted into panic over COVID-19.

For the most part, I enjoyed the matches, being told what was happening in-story, munching on snacks…

And then 

He showed up

From the moment Orange Cassidy slumped into the ring, accompanied by the Best Friends, Chuck Taylor and Trent? [sic], over a field of daisies projected onto the video walkway, I was hooked.

The moment he rolled under the ropes, because he was too lazy to go over them…perfection!

When the crowd started screaming “holy shit” and Orange attempted to put his hands in his pockets…before flipping PAC completely over and…putting his hands in his pockets. Astounding!

I was blown away. I had not seen theatrics and comedy like this before.

The kick fight between Orange and PAC sealed the deal for me.

I was enamored.

This whole essay isn’t specifically about Orange Cassidy, but he was the reason I actually started watching wrestling. There’s something incredible about watching a person flip through the air with their hands securely tucked in their pockets.

So I was hooked.

And then COVID hit.

I watched Double or Nothing in May 2020 remotely, chatting with my friends over Discord during the matches. During the PPV, I fell in love with the Best Friends and Private Party. I thought Nyla Rose was one of the coolest women I had seen and that Hikaru Shida had incredible moves. I laughed through the entire ladder match. I was baffled and enchanted by the Stadium Stampede.

I was also recovering from COVID at the time.

I was diagnosed with COVID in the last week of April 2020. Despite being fortunate enough to work from home during that time, despite rarely going out, always wearing a mask, using hand sanitizer, washing my hands for 20 seconds…despite all the precautions my household took, I still caught the virus.

I didn’t have any of the expected symptoms at the time, no fever, no real cough, normal oxygen levels. I was tested because my belly button had started spontaneously bleeding, and, during a video call with a doctor, they said some other symptoms I described had just been added to the list that indicated the possibility of COVID.

My partner had to quarantine away from me for a week. I was alone and barely had the energy, let alone appetite, to make toast for myself.

I was lucky to have a minor case of COVID, but it was still debilitating. I would sit down, just to take a quick break from my remote desk job, and suddenly find myself waking up 3 hours later, still fatigued. I would walk around my block, when I felt brave enough to even go outside, and barely make it a quarter of the way I used to regularly walk before getting winded. I would do slow yoga just to maintain my stamina, and find myself on the edge of collapsing into tears because I just couldn’t do the things I used to do with ease.

When we watched Double or Nothing, I was still experiencing long-term symptoms of COVID–I didn’t have much stamina, experienced physical weakness when pushing myself, had phantom smells and tastes, and, if I laughed too hard, I would lapse into a heavy cough.

A lot of these symptoms were really hard to deal with. The motivation to leave the house after having been diagnosed was also almost impossible. I was scared to get sick again, I was scared to make someone else sick. I struggled to keep my body moving and active, and I lapsed into a depression, combined with anxiety and panic attacks.

Erin, who had isolated herself almost completely during COVID, suggested we start watching AEW Dynamite together weekly, chatting over Discord. She caught me up on the storylines and the ritual became something that kept me grounded throughout the week.

The first storyline I remember vividly following culminated in the parking lot fight between the Best Friends and Santana and Ortiz in September 2020. Prior to the match, Santana and Ortiz, the heels (bad guys) in the fight, had destroyed Trent’s mom Sue’s van, and while “you guys can do whatever you want to us, we don’t care. Throw a chair at our heads, hit us with your little socks, but you do NOT touch my mom’s van!”

(Have I mentioned that wrestling is inherently silly?)

Meanwhile, in a simultaneous storyline, Orange was facing off against Santana and Ortiz’s stable leader, Chris Jericho. Through defeat after defeat, Orange didn’t back down from Jericho. Instead, he fought back. When he was bullied and battered with a bag of oranges, he responded by dropping orange juice on Jericho. When he was bloodied, he shot a nonchalant thumbs up.

Penultimately, the laconic slacker faced off against Jericho in a debate prior to their pay-per-view match, but instead of saying nothing, he came out with an incredible response about rising sea levels (while wearing a tie clipped onto his t-shirt), surprising not just his opponent, but everyone watching. Then he went on to take home the PPV win by Orange Punching Jericho into a vat of mimosa.

After that, the Best Friends faced off against Santana and Ortiz in a hardcore parking lot brawl, and Orange appeared from the trunk of a car, making a huge save for Chuck and Trent. As the Best Friends were crowned the victors, Trent’s mom Sue arrived in a brand new van, picked up the three friends and flipped the bird to the men who had destroyed her old vehicle as they drove away.

The biggest gimmick of the Best Friends is that they hug. I’m sure it’s a gimmick that’s been done before in wrestling, but the friendship between Chuck, Trent, and Orange seems so sincere and tender, and they aren’t afraid to show this loving male relationship on national television. They would often stop in the middle of matches to get a hug one another, and then the camera would crash zoom out to reveal the crowd cheering behind them, as a commentator would happily yell “you’ve GOT to give the people what they want.”

There’s a sense of the unorthodox when you look at Orange Cassidy and the Best Friends, and that might be why the faction appealed to me so much. As much as wrestling is about fighting and winning, the Best Friends primarily focused on being together. The little peeks at them behind the stage in the YouTube show Being The Elite showed them being goofballs, having inside jokes, having a casual, comfortable connection. While many of the other storyline and players within AEW were self-serious and dramatic, the Best Friends never strayed too far from who they were: funny guys.

In a documentary on the Comedy in Wrestling, Orange Cassidy said, “If you think that wrestling should just be serious, then I don’t think you know what wrestling is.“ Most of the talent in AEW shares this sensibility to some degree. No story is all serious or all comedy; much like the best stories, AEW contains a little bit of everything. 

AEW also has a diverse roster, including openly trans and openly gay wrestlers. Within the company, “everything is canon.” Instead of existing in its own insular world, all wrestling is a part of AEW. Commentary references achievements that the roster has done in other companies, acknowledges changes within the wrestling world. AEW also works together with other promotions in other parts of the world, exposing the audience to different styles of wrestling and storytelling, like lucha, joshi, and puroresu.

During the pandemic, when I started watching regularly, they had two televised shows, and a YouTube show. This then expanded to two YouTube shows, and then a third televised show and Ring of Honor (another wrestling company that was purchased by AEW owner Tony Khan and became a streaming service and show). On top of that, AEW put out comedy content and short form video on YouTube, including BTE, a Shot of Brandi, AEW Unrestricted, Outside the Ring, and Hey! EW. AEW has a lot of touchpoints, a lot of small, shareable clips that you can show to friends to both entertain them and encourage them to start watching. It’s great for sharing with friends who weren’t as invested in wrestling, but had a passing interest.

It’s also great because it provided more of a personal connection to fans. Because of the nature of wrestling, there is a parasocial relationship that forms between fans and the characters that wrestlers play. Most wrestlers tend to play more exaggerated versions of themselves, which makes it easier to build a connection to both the character and the actor. It can be a double edged sword, as it makes some fans feel like they have a personal connection with someone who, in reality, doesn’t know them.

Some wrestlers draw firm lines between their character and themselves, others blur the lines. Orange Cassidy is a wrestler who tends to stay entirely in character. Even when streaming on Twitch, he maintains his Paul-Rudd-in-Wet-Hot-American-Summer-by-way-of-Ryan-Gosling-in-Drive character, rarely corpsing, disregarding comments that would blur the line between reality and character, not revealing any personal information, and building his own in-universe lore.

Other wrestlers are more open about their personal lives. As I was going through physical therapy, so was Kris Statlander, the Best Friends’ muscle and resident alien. Kris shared her PT progress (and pet pictures) on Instagram, which became a huge motivation for me. Seeing Kris hard at work helped me push myself to keep up my exercises and work harder to improve both my knee and my stamina, which was still tampered by long Covid.

If it weren’t for the structure that AEW unintentionally provided, with regular programming on regular days… 

If it weren’t for the cast of characters that felt like friends… 

Surviving the pandemic would have been a lot harder for me.

I was in physical therapy as Orange had to fight Miro and Kip Sabian to save Chuck from being Miro’s butler.

I regained stamina as Wheeler Yuta joined the faction.

I pushed myself with resiliency training as Orange yelled at Kris during her match with Britt Baker, motivating her to get back in the ring, to keep fighting.

I had sleep studies done when Kazuchika Okada offered all of the Best Friends a place in the New Japan stable CHAOS.

I struggled through brain fog as Orange defended the International Champion belt in 31 consecutive matches.

I was no longer afraid to go outside because of COVID.

I was in Boston when Yuta fought Jon Moxley and joined the BCC.

I got to see Hangman, disguised as the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, attack the Young Bucks and Kenny Omega. I got to see Penta Oscuro creep out from behind a grave. I got to see Daniel Garcia and Sammy Guevara dance battle Adam Cole and MJF. I got to see Orange rap…twice. I got to see Blood and Guts and Kota Ibushi’s return to wrestling. I got to see Kenny Omega and MJF have a banger match. I got to make signs and art for shows I’ve been to. I got to scream my head off. I got to do meet and greets. I got waved over by Orange and had my sign complimented. I’ve had my poster shared by Danhausen. I’ve made friendships because of wrestling, expanded my professional knowledge because of wrestling.

I have cheered.

I have cried.

I have experienced every kind of emotion because of wrestling.

But most of all, I have found the motivation to keep going. To push myself, my boundaries, my comfort levels. Because of wrestling, I have become braver.

This essay has been sitting in my drafts for over 2 years now. There never felt like a “right” time to finish it up, to post it. We live in an unfair, tumultuous, scary time, and sometimes it seems silly to just sit down and write about how much I love wrestling, and how much wrestling helped me through an ongoing healing process. 

I am still dealing with the fallout of long COVID, and it may be something that I deal with for the rest of my life, but that’s also a great reminder that I should not only value the things that bring me joy, but I should express the joy, and the pain, that I experience with others, as it may help them find their own coping mechanisms.

It was announced earlier today through WON that Chuck Taylor’s in-ring wrestling career is likely over due to injury. Because of that, and the kayfabe of the Best Friends splitting up–as Trent (and maybe Orange?) turns heel–it seemed like now was the time to finish writing this, to sum up my thoughts, and to thank the Best Friends–Chuck, Trent, Orange, Kris, Sue, Yuta, Rocky, Danhausen, and all of CHAOS–for being there for me.

The impact wrestling has had on me is hard to state. It gave me stability in an unstable time. It gave me a new view on storytelling. It gave me little moments of hope. It gave me aspiration while I was struggling. It gave me comfort. Wrestling gave me joy. Wrestling gave me tears.

But most of all, wrestling gave me what the people wanted.

And I’m so glad for that.