A couple of weekends ago, all of my friends went to watch Middlesbrough Football Club in their seemingly annual slip-up at Ewood Park against Blackburn Rovers.

Any footy fan from a provincial town probably understands that when your football team has a massive away day – the Boro took 7000 fans to Blackburn – it’s kind of like a secondary school reunion.

Anyone who is anyone heads over, you put your best clobber on and you bump into people you haven’t seen in years at every single turn. Even people who don’t actually like football turn out because it’s a big day out.

The next day, all you have to show for it is a major headache and a few extra numbers in your contact book because you promised to arrange a “proper catch up” with Ste and Brad who you used to sit next to in Science.

However, I decided to go away by myself and watch 25 professional wrestling matches. Why?

That’s a question I’ve been asking myself for a couple of weeks now. Why? As I sat getting nauseous on a horrendously oversold train to Birmingham with people clustered in the aisles as my group chat was kicking off with all of the excitement that a day out on the piss with your pals brings, I asked myself why?

When I was nursing a pint of Coke before heading to a big warehouse on an industrial estate in Wolverhampton on my own while I scrolled through Instagram and saw photos of all my mates enjoying the sunshine and each other’s company, I asked myself why?

When I returned home on the Monday morning after three and a half hours on a train, with my bank account bruised and battered, I asked myself why?

The easy answer, I told myself, is because I love professional wrestling.

BUT WHY?

My relationship with wrestling has been a complicated one. Like so many kids wrestling, or more specifically WWE, was a massive part of my childhood.

I had all of the figures and playtime at primary school were spent (on non-football days) pretending to be Rey Mysterio, Eddie Guerrero or John Cena.

It was THE thing in those days. You felt like you were watching something that you shouldn’t. There were kids whose parents wouldn’t let them watch it and our lunchtime Rumbles were quickly banned when one boy in our class cracked his head off the concrete.

Like so many kids, when I reached a certain age and going out to sit in fields with a 2 litre bottle of cider became THE thing, my wrestling figures were packed away in a box in the loft and my break times at school were spent trying to impress the girls – trying being the key word there.

It was in 2014 where I really became a wrestling fan. Almost by accident, I discovered a whole new world beyond the one that had been sold to me as a kid by WWE and I was obsessed. I watched EVERYTHING that I could lay eyes on.

My childhood bucket list item of going to a WrestleMania was displaced by a desire to go to Reseda, California for a Battle of Los Angeles or to Tokyo for Wrestle Kingdom as PWG and New Japan opened my eyes to these different takes on wrestling.

All of my free time was spent catching up on the latest ROH show or learning about Lucha Libre and finding out where my heroes of yesteryear like Rey and Eddie had actually come from.

That free time was slashed in half when I found British Wrestling and weekends started to be swallowed up by journeys to Camden, Manchester, Preston, Cardiff and Wolverhampton. It was 30, 40, 50 shows a year.

Without a proper income at the time, I would sleep on people’s floors and get on the Megabus at ungodly hours to make the most out of my budget. I even kipped in Kings Cross Station toilets for two hours in between the last pub in Camden closing and the first train departing because it was cheaper than a hotel. The obsession was real and it wasn’t healthy at all.

Then in 2017, I stopped watching wrestling altogether and only found myself coming back to it at the back end of 2023.

Whereas in the past I couldn’t go a day without consuming something wrestling related, I can go weeks without watching a single match. If you’d told me in 2015 that there would be an alternative weekly wrestling show headed up by the Young Bucks and Kenny Omega, I would’ve cried. I don’t watch weekly wrestling TV at all, now.

I don’t scroll social media all day desperate to find out the latest shred of news and every big weekend of wrestling is followed by essentially a deep cleanse instead of eagerly booking up the next one.

And that all makes me question why I love professional wrestling because it doesn’t always feel like I do or at least not as much as other people seem to. Comparison is the thief of joy but it makes me wonder if I do actually love wrestling.

When I see people hitting up shows every weekend while I’m lazing out on the sofa or going mental live-tweeting shows that I’ve no intention of watching, it does make my brain go into overdrive. Do I love professional wrestling or am I simply trying to fill some space in my life as a now 30-year-old bloke with something familiar and comfortable?

Can you love something if you don’t fixate on it? Can you love something that you sometimes hold at arms length? Am I supporting the thing that I claim to love while making a conscious effort to dedicate less time to it?

Yes, you can and I do. I do love professional wrestling and it has been over the past couple of weeks that I’ve really been able to answer that question of why.

I love professional wrestling because I love creativity and there isn’t anything else on the planet that embraces creativity like professional wrestling. It allows everybody to be creative.

Everyone needs a creative outlet in their life, some way that they can express themselves and it doesn’t have to be in a traditional way. Whether it is through art, music, being on the football pitch or cooking, everyone needs something that allows them to be their true self.

In wrestling, you can be whoever you want to be. For the in-ring talent, they are able to “turn themselves up to 11” and unleash an unashamed version of themselves that might not be welcome in day-to-day life.

It doesn’t stop with the wrestlers. Be it commentators, refs, photographers, videographers, graphic designers or fans. Wrestling gives everyone an outlet to express themselves.

Mine has always been writing. As a kid, I would spend hours creating stories or filling up notebooks with match reports from the previous weekend’s football fixtures. Having recorded Match of the Day the night before, I would wake up on a Sunday and make notes on every single match.

Wrestling was a part of that too. Without knowing what the term for it was then, I would spend entire Saturdays fantasy booking months of storylines for my WWE figures, before acting them out.

Becoming a sports writer was my one and only dream. Throughout my school years, every choice I made was with becoming a sports journalist in mind. Rather than going to all of the college parties and sneaking into pubs/clubs, I’d be at home blogging about football, boxing and MMA.

I even decided to stay at home for university, rather than following my friends in going away, having made some good contacts at our local newspaper from incessantly writing and badgering people.

I absolutely fucking despised university. Everything about my time learning about the journalism industry put me off the journalism industry for life and I quit.

The reason that I “found” wrestling in 2014 was because I was in the midst of a battle with depression. In my head, my entire life had been an abject failure so I locked myself away in my room. My dreams of becoming a sports writer lay shattered on my bedroom floor alongside the empty crisp packets and dirty socks that started to pile up.

All I would do is wake up, put the telly on and watch like a mindless zombie. That was my life for months. It became so normal that it became incredibly easy to hide it from my friends and family. Lies were told about how things were going, feelings were masked and I learned to autopilot my way through enforced social situations.

I was numb to the world.

Then one night, after hours of staring blankly at the TV, I came across the BBC documentary Insane Fight Club which highlighted the rise of Grado in ICW.

Almost immediately, it was like someone had readjusted my internal settings so that I could see in colour again. The bizarre, brutal nature of ICW, the endearing “guy next door” charm of Grado and the rowdiness of the crowds hooked me in.

That’s where the obsession started. While I still confined myself to my bedroom most days, it was to watch wrestling. ICW and PROGRESS first, then RevPRO, New Japan, ROH, PWG all joined my personal party.

A few months later I would be at my first live shows – NGW, quickly followed by the PCW vs. ROH Supershows – and that’s when I decided to start writing again. I’d convinced a mate to come to the PCW/ROH shows with me and he had no idea about independent wrestling.

It had been almost a year since I’d even thought about writing but, with so much free time on my hands, I made a preview of the shows just for him.

Trying to explain what the fuck Delirious was, highlighting the physical prowess of Uhaa Nation and bursting with excitement about getting to see The Briscoes brought me right back to how I felt when I’d be mapping out the stories for my Batista figure or scribbling away about Harry Redknapp flip-flopping between rivals Portsmouth and Southampton.

That one preview became a dedicated wrestling blog and when, a couple of years ago, wrestling came back into my life I decided to revive it with a new lick of paint because writing is my escape.

For some people, the actual act is their escape, whether that’s wrestling, other sports or taking part in an activity.

For me, it’s writing about it. No matter what is going on in my life, being able to sit down in front of my laptop with my headphones on and documenting something brings me peace. It is almost impossible to think or care about anything else when you’re writing and there is nothing more enjoyable to write about than wrestling.

Writing is also an escape for me because I struggle with a stammer after a childhood operation. My line of work often means that I have to speak in front of hundreds of people a day, both kids and adults, and it doesn’t bother me in the slightest but in more intimate settings, it can cause me to panic.

That’s why you’ll never catch me on a podcast (another 30 year old bloke with a podcast, who needs that right?) and even though I’d love to, because of how directly you’re able to assist in telling people’s stories, I don’t foresee myself ever trying my hand at commentary.

I do want to try and help tell people’s stories within wrestling though, so I write. Even though we live in a world ruled by algorithms and short-form content, I will continue to write because I love writing and I love professional wrestling.

This has all been incredibly self-indulgent but I want this to act as a personal reminder to myself about what writing means to me and why writing about wrestling is so important to me.

Unlike my dreams of being a sports writer, I’m under no illusions that being a wrestling writer is going to be a full-time job that keeps a roof over my head.

You can get bogged down in numbers, interactions and clicks but at the end of the day, it’s the actual writing that I care about. I could review RAW every week and bang views or do silly reaction face thumbnails on YouTube about the latest goings on in AEW, but that wouldn’t give me any joy or fulfilment.

It’s writing that brings me that joy and I want to do more of it. I want to give a small bit back to wrestling for what it has given to me and that doesn’t just mean doing more show reviews.

Whether that’s through in-depth character pieces on individual wrestlers, going out to talk to the people that make wrestling tick, collaborating with other people to shout to the fucking rooftops about this mental thing we love, diving into different genres or even working alongside training schools in some way, I want to do it and write about it.

I want to do it because I love writing and I love professional wrestling.

– James Woodgate

Image Credits: PCW UK, PROGRESS Wrestling, Insane Championship Wrestling