Professional wrestling used to be the most important thing in my life. It was a vehicle upon which I could escape from everything. It was somewhere where I could laugh and cry in equal measure, marvel at the athletic prowess and emotional puppetry on display without worrying about anything else except what was happening in the ring.

Professional wrestling was my lighthouse in stormy waters. 

I travelled the country during the BritWres boom of the mid 2010s, spending more weekends in sketchy nightclubs, 02 music venues and leisure centres than I spent at home. Time at home was spent devouring anything that had been missed from the previous weekend from America to Japan and beyond without a care for much else.

I was obsessed. I couldn’t imagine my life without professional wrestling. 

That changed in 2017 for personal reasons which were compounded by more public matters surrounding the business a few years later. Wrestling went from my lighthouse in stormy waters to a hazardous warning sign. I turned around, walked away and never planned on returning. 

For almost seven years, wrestling has rarely entered my mind. It was one of those distant memories that is so vague that you question its legitimacy until my 84-year-old Grandma asked me a question. 

“Whatever happened to that Japanese wrestling we used to watch. Should we pop it on”? 

It was a question spurred on by Jack Whitehall appearing on Good Morning Britain talking about a big wrestling show at Wembley (we’ll get onto that later) and the “Japanese wrestling” my Grandma was referring to was New Japan Pro Wrestling. 

Now, this wasn’t something I’d forced on her by commandeering the TV in the past. My Grandma has her own love affair with wrestling or more importantly, wrestling was in part how she met my late Grandad.

My Grandad wrestled. I’m not about to declare that I’m the grandson of Big Daddy or Mick McManus but, in my hometown of Middlesbrough, my Grandad learnt to wrestle at St Luke’s Amateur Matmen club – a club that has its roots in nurses needing to learn how to physically restrain patients at the local mental health institute.

The matmen of St Luke’s would hold charity shows in the town to raise money for various foundations and shops. Men like Dicky Swales, Alex and Bob McDonald, Stan Cogan. Big Ted Hunt, Des Stubbs and British Middle Heavyweight Champion Norman Walsh – who twiced faced Lou Thesz for the NWA International Heavyweight Title in the Boro – would perform on these shows. 

As, due to the way of the world back then, crowds truly believed that these men were hard bastards (and most of them indeed were) they would regularly feature in the North-East as enhancement talent when the likes of Joint Promotions came to town,

My Grandad would take my Grandma to these nights at Farrer Street Stadium then to the dancing or to New St. James Hall in Newcastle as part of his attempts to woo her, where they watched and rubbed shoulders with stars like McManus, Les Kellet, Jackie Pallo, Walsh, Billy Two Rivers and Masambula. 

Watching wrestling together was a chance for her to reminisce and regale me with stories about my Grandad so one Sunday afternoon we popped “the wrestling” on for the first time since 2017. 

Seeing the wrestling landscape for the first time in nearly seven years was a complete shock to the system. Seven years is a long time. This is the briefest snapshot of what has happened since 2017. 

Vince McMahon has left, returned, sold WWE then left again. Tony Khan has created the first genuine challenger brand to the WWE since WCW. Roman Reigns is finally a megastar. 

Jon Moxley crossed the divide. Will Ospreay has gone from a skinny dork jumping off balconies in Camden to being arguably the best professional wrestler on the planet. Cody Rhodes was instrumental in building AEW from the ground up then left to headline back-to-back WrestleManias.

CM Punk returned to wrestling, got suspended, returned, got fired and then went back to WWE alongside a thousand other things.

NXT UK started and ended. The BritWres scene is almost unrecognisable. TNA became Impact before re-branding as TNA again. Joe Hendry is a chart-topping sensation. Kazuchika Okada and Kenny Omega share a locker room with Bryan Danielson and Adam Copeland. Hiroshi Tanahashi is no longer a G1 entrant. Yoshi-Hashi is good? Logan Paul wrestles now?

A young chap once called The OJMO is now a man who is the standard bearer for British independent wrestling. Gabe Kidd went from being a nervous boy who I watched in town halls to a foreign berserker at the heart of NJPW’s new generation, carrying on the spirit of those destructive NEVER matches of the mid 2010s with Henare and Shingo.

That’s something I never saw coming and I certainly didn’t see myself being sat with my Grandma at 7am, tea and toast in hand, watching Kidd and the rest of the War Dogs face Ospreay’s United Empire in a steel cage, tearing literal chunks out of each other while she shouted, squirmed and cheered along to a masterpiece of violence. 

Bon Jovi once said that the more things change the more they stay the same. While so much has changed in wrestling since 2017, some things remain. Tomohiro Ishii and Hirooki Goto are still good for a banger match. Rev Pro is still the bastion of good and proper independent wrestling in the UK.

Naito, though ravaged by the sands of time, is still the ungovernable one. Thunder still rolls through arenas when the man now known as Gunther delivers a chop. Tyler Bate is still in his twenties, for Christ sake. 

Those familiarities have been almost comforting as I try to wrap my head around the wrestling world in 2024, like a reassuring embrace before departing on a big adventure. 

It’d be remiss to mention another thing that hasn’t changed since 2017 – Zack Sabre Jr. is still the best technical wrestler on the planet. He’s my Grandma’s favourite because he reminds her of those halcyon days of McManus, Kellett et al though she does have a soft spot for Ospreay (he’s magic), Ishii (he never gives up) and Okada (think she fancies him, to be honest). 

We’ve followed ZSJ’s G1 run in earnest, alongside the tournament at large, while watching him win the final on Sunday transported me back to a place I never thought I’d go to again when Red Shoes called for the bell. Leaping from the sofa, yelling and fistpumping was followed by a momentary tear up during Zack’s post-match speech.

It was that same roller coaster of emotion, the spikes in adrenaline that had me heading to places like Camden, Sheffield, Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, Wolverhampton and Cardiff routinely years prior.

I didn’t realise it on Sunday, but I’ve certainly realised it over the past few months. I love professional wrestling again. Watching professional wrestling with my 84-year-old Grandma and my younger brother has helped me fall in love with it again. It’s no longer a distant memory but a shining light again. To steal a phrase from AEW, watching with my Grandma has helped to restore the feeling and I need to tell someone. 

There have been multiple attempts at putting these exact feelings into words this summer but a number of things have held me back. There doesn’t seem to be a week that goes by without a controversy in wrestling. Whether domestically or internationally, wrestling is full of cunts which throws me back to 2017 when I walked away. 

Then there’s “tribalism”. Fuck me. What a bizarre stance to take when you want to treat a wrestling company like a grizzly bear treats her cubs and defend it viciously, without surrender. It’s a sad indictment of the world because it happens in all walks of life – politics, religion, TV + film fandoms, sports teams – but for it to happen in wrestling is laughable. 

We live in a world where Bryan Danielson, Will Ospreay, Kazuchika Okada and Zack Sabre Jr. have all faced each other in the past 12 months. We’ve had the dopamine feast that was Cody vs. Roman at WrestleMania. The Rock turns up to do old school wrasslin’ angles. 

Gunther is a world champion in WWE. Darby Allin does crazy shit ALL THE TIME. Konosuke Takeshita is a wrestling machine. There’s a wave of exciting young talents coming through in NJPW spearheaded by Yota Tsuji and Yuya Uemura. There are major shows happening in Europe from the biggest promotions in the world over consecutive weekends and people want to pick sides?

Why does it matter what alphabet acronym is on the turnbuckle pad? 

That’s made me dread writing this. Why throw myself into that particular cesspool?

Well, I love professional wrestling again and I need to let someone know, even if I’m shouting into a void. This isn’t the same love as it was in 2017 and it never will be nor do I want it to be. That was a teenage love, that first time you fall in love, all puppy eyes and extremities as you struggle to regulate these new emotions. Every flash of kindness is worthy of Shakespeare and every slight bump in the road is a devastating tragedy. 

This feels like a grown up relationship. I’m aware of what I like, my boundaries and my expectations. Not everything is to my taste – there’s a lot of people having identical “2016 indie banger” matches at the moment and the Hollyoaks acting is extremely off putting – but that doesn’t matter. 

This weekend will be my first real taste of live wrestling in seven years at the Copper Box for Rev Pro and at Wembley for All In. It’s going to be bizarre, amazing and a bit nerve wracking at the same time but I can’t wait. 

There will be hours of podcasting, thousands of words written and hundreds of YouTube videos dedicated to this weekend. I won’t be any part of that because I’m not analysing any of it. There’ll be no picking sides and dissecting ticket sales or star ratings.

On Monday after returning home from the capital, what I’ll be doing is sitting next to my Grandma on the sofa to watch it all with her, as my Grandad throws down on the big mat in the sky, because thanks to her; I love pro wrestling again. 

– James Woodgate

Photo Credits: Revolution Pro Wrestling, WWE, New Japan Pro Wrestling. If any image here belongs to any other party that are not credited, please message us @BeersandBslams on X/Twitter and we will rectify this.