My Wrestling Weekend!

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Whew! I’m back from a whirlwind weekend of wrestling! Am I, like Danny Glover, getting too old for this shit? Quite possibly! Do I know that Danny Glover was 17 years my junior when he first delivered that line? Yes!

Anyway, Friday night I trekked to the Mill City, aka Lowell, Massachusetts, for a Chaotic Wrestling show. Former Heavyweight Champ Mortar was returning to action after nearly a year off, and I wanted to see it live, because it’s fun to watch wrestling on TV (Or YouTube in this case), but that can’t compare to being there.

I was late buying my ticket, so the floor was sold out and I had to perch on the bleachers. (we were in a high school gym.) I wasn’t too mad about this because a) I am a short man and so being a little elevated meant I could see pretty well and b) I had plenty of space around me. It can get a little intimate being shoulder to shoulder in those folding chairs. Having said that, boy did my ass hurt by the end of the show.

I had had a late lunch, so I wasn’t hungry when I left home, and by the time I got there, it was too late for me to grab food anywhere, so I had popcorn from the concession stand for dinner. How I suffer for...whatever this is to me!

But it was worth it! There were 3 big screens--and I mean BIG screens—set up. One in the middle that was probably a ten foot diagonal flanked by two column-like screens that were about ten feet high by three feet wide. There was no pyro (thank GOD because pyro makes me extremely nervous), but it was the most big-time feeling Chaotic show I’ve ever been to. Gone are the days when 2 TVs flanked the entrance curtain!

Also the crowd was larger than any I’ve experienced at a Chaotic show. I’m not good at guessing crowd sizes, but I think this place probably held twice the number of people as the Sons of Italy in Watertown, where I usually go to shows.

This is of course a mixed bag because I love Chaotic and want them to succeed, and so butts in seats will help them continue, but also I enjoy the intimacy of a smaller show like the ones I attended at Night Shift Brewing over the summer.

Anyway, the show was a barn-burner. During the opening tag team match between the Breadwinners and The Vegan Society, the crowd was hotter than I’ve ever heard a Chaotic crowd be. (The crowds are usually pretty hot, but this was next level.) The falls count anywhere Heavyweight Championship match between Armani Kayos got me and pretty much everyone else in the crowd EXTREMELY up close and personal with the action which took place everywhere. Highlight of the match for me was Tyree throwing Armani to the ground next to some seats and demanding that an older gentleman perched on his mobility scooter run Armani over. The guy took a while to get the scooter moving and the action moved on, but he was gonna do it! Have you seen Tyree Taylor? This is a guy one does not say no to.

Mortar’s return was everything I hoped it would be and, once he’d dispatched Brian Fury, (And Jaleesa got Fury with Richard Holliday’s signature move, the bent arm crotch shot from behind) he and Jaleesa were beaten senseless by a new absolutely terrifying masked villain named, apparently, Serenity, who was accompanied, I think, by Arcturus, the cult leader supervillain who has also been absent from the proceedings for about a year. (I say I think because he removed his mask like we were supposed to know who he was, but he wasn’t wearing Arcturus’ signature makeup and also if that was Arcturus, dude has lost a lot of weight since last we saw him.)

Anyway, it was a delight to be in the room for a big show where a lot changed and a couple of storylines wrapped up, and it was worth the drive to Lowell! Hell, it was even worth the drive home, which was about an hour, but then I got home and was still kind of pumped up and it took me a long time to get to sleep, so I felt like hell on Saturday morning.

But I had to rally! Because I had tickets for AEW Collision in Springfield for that night! No rest for the wicked! (Wicked obsessed with professional wrestling, that is!)

I was on the fence about going to this for a while because I felt kind of meh about the Dynamite show I went to in Boston a few months back. But then I realized the alternative was real life!

And then Andy “The Butcher” Williams died last week, and I found out they were going to do a tribute to him at this show and I was like, man, I go to wrestling so I don’t have to think about grief! But I went anyway.

Springfield is an hour and a half from Boston, so my attendance at this show was contingent upon finding a place to stay. Hotels in downtown Springfield are exorbitantly expensive (go figure! They’re charging like 250 bucks a night!), so this was looking dicey until I found that in the year 2026, Howard Johnson still exists, and you can stay there for 89 bucks a night! Sure, the reviews mentioned bugs and filth, but those were old reviews! Maybe things have changed!

They have! I am happy to report that Howard Johnson once again has his hojo workin’, and the motel—one of these old-school motels where you park right in front of your door—is clean, comfortable, and cheap, the almost unobtainable three C’s of the hospitality industry!

Anyway, after checking in and putting my bag in the room, I headed to downtown Springfield for “Before the Bell on the Landing,” the pre-show event the venue was having across the street. Because they promised food trucks, and I thought, cool, I’ll get a real meal this time! Sadly, it was not to be, as I arrived at 6 for an event that was supposed to go till 6:30 and there was one truck there selling cookies (and I’m not quite that far gone yet), a DJ, and some folks milling around.

So I went for a walk. And guess what? Downtown Springfield is nice, actually! The reputation Springfield has in Massachusetts had me expecting something like I experienced in the Tenderloin in San Francisco—people smoking crack on the street, the persistent reek of urine in the air—but this was not the case! I mean, look, a lot of the downtown restaurants are shut down for the weekend, so it’s clearly not much of a weekend fun destination, but there are a lot of beautiful old buildings, buses running regularly, and ample parking. A couple blocks down from the Mass Mutual Center (home of the Springfield Thunderbirds hockey team!) there was a Puerto Rican festival going on, and I found that Springfield is actually a place I’d return to! Voluntarily! Probably to go to the Dr. Seuss museum!

Or maybe to attend another show at the Mass Mutal Center, which is a delightful venue. A woman in line behind me said to her son, “I haven’t been here in years. They remodeled this motherfucker,” and, indeed, the motherfucker was in really good shape, and, what’s more, there was literally not a bad seat in the house.

I dined on a soft pretzel, which at least was a slight improvement over popcorn, and which brings me to my one quibble about this joint, which was that you can’t bring in a water bottle, and water is like 7 bucks. If this is not illegal given the amount of alcohol for sale, it’s certainly irresponsible.

But on to the show, which was great! The first match, between Jon Moxley and Mike “Speedball” Bailey, was probably the wrestling highlight of the night for me, as Moxley is deliberate and brutal and Bailey is quick and acrobatic.

Also—no pyro! There was a possibly excessive amount of smoke being poured into the audience, presumably so the light beams would be visible on TV, but given the huge video screens and the lights, we certainly didn’t need pyro to feel like this was a big, professional show.

There was a ten-bell salute at the beginning of the evening—they rang the bell tent times as the crowd sat in reverent silence. It was pretty moving. There were tributes to The Butcher throughout the evening—the screens would fill with pictures of him, and one screen would fill with an interview of another person from AEW talking about what a wonderful man he was. I am a relative noob to AEW and so had only a passing familiarity with The Butcher, but he was clearly universally beloved, and I felt bad for everyone who was grieving. For some people there, working probably helped, but for others it was probably very hard to work through an absolutely brutal week.

I was grateful to everyone for doing it because we all got a night of great entertainment, and if it was more peppered by sorrow than the usual wrestling event, well, sometimes it be like that, as the kids used to say. They held a 12-man battle royal in honor of The Butcher, and when The Butcher’s friend Daniel Garcia won, they handed him The Butcher’s guitar (he was also apparently an accomplished metal guitarist in the band Every Time I die). He placed it on a stand in the ring and grabbed a fan-made “Rest In Peace, Andy” sign and put that in front of it, and it sat there under the spotlight, and it was a powerful image and a really nice tribute.

Once the show went off the air, Tony Khan came out, and I feel that I may have been a little hard on him after the Dynamite show. Because a) the guy came to Springfield Massachusetts. He’s the boss, and he clearly doesn’t have to go to every show, but here he was and b) his voice broke with emotion as he thanked us for coming out to help pay tribute to Andy Williams. Sure, he’s a rich guy, but he does seem to be an actual human being who really loves wrestling. And I was listening to the audiobook of The Nerd Reich on the way to Springfield, and wow, are there a lot worse ways people can and do spend their undeserved riches than building a fun wrestling company from scratch.

Back to the hojo for a good night’s sleep, and then I got a bagel at Tandem Bagel in Ludlow, MA, and it was...pretty decent! Not as good as Pio Bagel near my elder daughter’s place in Brooklyn, but certainly better than most of the bagels you can get in Massachusetts. And here I am, facing down a rainy Sunday and another week of work, where almost no one will get bodyslammed this week.