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If you have read part one of my Guide to Pro Wrestling you should now have a good grasp of the key areas in wrestling such as move sets, match structure and selecting a finishing move. Now I’d like to move forward into the next area of our collective learning by discussing what I call in my seminars, the finer principles of pro wrestling. These are the areas that help to give you the extra edge that you need in order to ad realism to your matches, increase drama and also, in most cases, avoid serious injury in the process by using your brain over just body alone. I know I have covered a lot in my last book about the mental side of wrestling but I would like to now explain to you how this awakening in me actually came about in the first place. Listening to me write or talk now you could be fooled into thinking that I was just born with a natural talent for the psychology of professional wrestling. In truth, nothing could actually be further from the truth. I had so little conscious understanding of wrestling in my first 5 years in the business that it was a miracle I even made it on to a live event. I say conscious understanding because as I look back now there were certainly many signs that a part of my brain “got it” but to look at me “work” you’d never have thought it. The funny thing is that when you meditate, you tap into your subconscious and it almost tells you what to do from your higher self. This makes a lot of sense to me as when I was constantly thinking about what to do I’d come up with terrible ideas but when I actually just had ideas come to me or when I’d given up trying to think, I would have little master strokes. I really feel now that this was my subconscious brain saying “finally you’ve shut up for a minute so that I can talk” and all of a sudden a kid who had no clue about anything would, for a short time at least, evolve into someone that had half a clue. However, it wasn’t until one fated meeting where my conscious brain would shut up for long enough to let someone else advance my understanding of the business beyond anything I could have ever imagined. That person was Jake “The Snake” Roberts.
Now before I explain a little about what happened with Jake to change my thinking forever I want to explain that I already had a mentor that was trying to help me evolve as a wrestler in Dino Scarlo. Unfortunately for him, I was so obsessed with American wrestling and he had made himself so approachable and open to me that, being the ungrateful young man I was at the time, I really did not let much of what he was trying to teach me in until a lot later. Yet when I did it was like a cascade of Dino’s previous concepts, views and ideas coming back to me sometimes up to five years after he had first said them to me. The great thing with Dino is that he has always said to me “Whatever I teach you, I know that you will add your own thing to it and evolve it somehow”. Even a lot of my current world views came from an out of the blue phone call by him some time back suggesting I have a look into a few subjects that he correctly predicted would effect me and in many ways inspire me to add my own spin to. How right he was. I believe that this is how we should all be. Open our minds, take in new ideas but always being unique enough to make it our own in some way. A few people have accused me of brain washing with my articles and books. Let me tell you something, I believe. Firstly, a healthy, questioning human brain would not be so easy to brain wash that I could do it from afar with nothing but my words printed on a page in a book or magazine. Brain washing is an art and one that takes a lot of work, just look up the MK Ultra program that the US Government admitted to if you’re interested. However if the people reading this had already had their brain manipulated to make it easy to brain wash then maybe these words could do that but if that is the case then it surely proves my point, Right? Secondly, your reality is your own and I am not asking for it to be the same as mine. I want you to investigate, evolve ideas and decide on your own truths and concepts about everything I discuss. There is no universal truth that cannot change in a heartbeat with just one person’s unique insight and personal discovery. Not one! All I offer are other options and personal opinions. It is down to the reader to decide if they agree with them or not. Anyway, my point here is that Dino’s views on wrestling were really accurate in hindsight but because I was just not ready to hear them, they only affected me the way they should have years later when my own dated belief systems had started to crack. Yet it was one meeting with Jake Roberts that opened my mind up to the deeper art of wrestling from a psychological stand point and that is what Volume two of my guide to pro wrestling is going to be about. What did Jakes say to open my previously closed mind so much? It was and still is such an amazingly mind opening experience that I want to share it with you now. With similar words, I am hoping to do the same for you as Jake did for me. As this book develops you are going to learn some extremely complex principles but by the time you are done reading, they will have been so clearly broken down that you will never look at Professional Wrestling the same way again.
I want to take you back to South Hampton in the early part of the decade. It was a weekday evening and I was making my first TWA Heavyweight title defence against the man who I had just beaten for the belt the previous evening, James Mason. I had known James well. In fact he was a bit of a prick to me when I first broke into the wrestling business. He had started young to and just like me, it had gone to his head. By the time he was in his late teens he was just as cocky as me. Of course I was too young to realise that he was a reflection of me. Remember that you hate most in others what you identify with in yourself. Just have a look at the people who really get on your nerves and see what attributes of yours they share. I seem to piss off very opinionated people. In fact I know a few of them that read my articles just to get wound up by me and my strong opinions. Guess what? That’s likely because they’re an overly opinionated big mouth themselves. It’s just easier to point out other peoples “flaws” than your own. Thinking like this enables me to not hate anyone because whoever pisses me off, I just ask what it is about me that they must represent. It makes my own personal evolution a lot quicker whilst slowly calming me down in times of anger in the process. Funny thing was that James Mason was a great technical wrestler which was something that I was not. However as great as he was at that, it was totally compensation for how bad he was as a talker and character. Me on the other hand, as good as I was as a talker and character for my age, I balanced it out by being an atrocious technical wrestler. We were reflections and we clashed. In fact the first good live match I ever saw on my first All Star show the night I asked Brian Dixon how to become a wrestler featured a 15 year old Mason teaming with Steve Grey against the Super Flies. I can safely say that he is clearly one of the most under rated wrestlers in the World regardless of us being “buddies” or not. Anyway back to Southampton. Years had passed since my early run ins with James and I had just wrestled him for the first time ever one night earlier. Despite the previous animosity between us, James was really good to work with and I picked up a few useful things from him which to be fair at that point in my career I needed badly. I was now the TWA Champion which meant a lot as at the time it was second only to All Star as the UK’s biggest promotion with regards to live events and attendance. The idea that night in Southampton was that I would beat James again and then set up for a title defence against his former tag team partner Jake Roberts on the next show. Now, let me tell you something pretty weird. As I have mentioned in the past, my father and I had a very shakey relationship when I was growing up. I wont bore you with details but let’s just say that in 17 years of being a wrestler he has never come to see me wrestle. I forgive him for everything now and love him no matter how hard that has been for me to do. Anger like I had towards him just messes you up unless you deal with it and move on. Forgiveness has to be done by you alone even if the other person doesn’t help you to achieve that forgiveness. In many ways it is only real forgiveness when they don’t help you. I believe that if you forgive someone it has to be because YOU forgive them and not because things are all rosey and happy now so it’s just the easy thing to do. Anyway Dad hated wrestling yet I still have a really vivid memory of the only time we ever watched a match on TV together when I was eleven. Guess what it was? Jake Roberts against Ted Debiase from WrestleMania six. I can recall it clear as day as it would be the one and only time me and my father would ever watch a match together. I remember telling him that this is what I wanted to do one day as I looked at the screen. Funny thing was that I didn’t even mean it then, I was just saying that stuff that kids do. Lucky it wasn’t the Ninja Turtles in hindsight. It might not seem at all weird for you but to me, exactly eleven years later like some sort of age mirror, I was now about to set up an angle with the very man that we were both cheering for along with the 60,000 plus fans that were watching WrestleMania 6 live. It just seemed so surreal. At 22 I really thought I knew it all. Ok maybe not all but certainly far more than I did. In fact if I had actually known how little I knew I certainly would never have had the confidence to ever walk through the curtain. I often think that your brain works to protect you like that. I have seen so many times where people’s brain just will not let them accept that they are wrong. It makes us get so angry at them as we think “why can’t they see how messed up their logic is”. I have an old friend that really doesn’t see a lot of the shit he has done wrong but still wants us to be close like we once were. I am not angry with him even though I have a right to be according to others. However I am aware that his brain is protecting him from the truth suddenly hitting him because if it did, it would really mess him up and destroy his perception of who he thinks he is. This is why there is no way I want to point out what I think he has done wrong as for him to accept it there will have to be a big argument. I am pretty good at arguing my case if I believe in it and if I forcibly drilled my view point into him before his brain was fully ready to accept it, the results might be disastrous. This is why it’s better for me to just allow time to do its job and when he is ready to understand fully his brain will switch that particular light on and I’ll likely receive a phone call. I speak from experience as I have done exactly the same thing to people when I have been wrong in the past. So why did I feel the need to go off on another tangent there to explain it and is this relevant to wrestling? Because a similar thing happens to many if not all of us in the wrestling business. Allow me to explain. I often use the analogy of wrestling being like a big house. The house has many different rooms. Each room represents a certain aspect of the business. One room might be technical wrestling, one room might be match structure, one room might be promo. Each of theses rooms has a light switch that when flicked will illuminate that room alone. When you first break into the business none of the lights are turned on. You may have a sight bit of illumination in one particular room compared to your training mates. Maybe you are naturally a little more agile than them so the high flying room is already a little lit for you. Perhaps you are a good talker so the promo room seems a more appealing area to start your adventure in the huge house. Most people stick to the room that they are good at and feel more content being great at one thing than being competent at several. This works for some but for many students, who are not GREAT (by that I mean compared to the entire industry not just the other students at their school) at any one area to begin with, it hinders them and eventually is the main reason they get no where. I’ve been to plenty of schools that had a big guy. Now when I turned up he became a not so big guy but he still towered over the other trainees, many of them teenagers. Because of this, he would just stick to being the big guy in that school and never learning to do anything else. Of course that meant that he had limited himself to only being good at one thing in that environment and because in the outside world of wrestling there were so many people that are much bigger than him, he was actually not even average at the one thing he thought he was good at. This is not an isolated case and it is certainly not just restricted to lazy or insecure big men. I’ve seen the class high flyer snub everything I have tried to teach him because in his little bubble he is the best at one thing. I’ve seen the class talker laugh and joke his way through the physical part of my class because he could cut a promo better than the other kids there. However unless you are A) exceptional at that one thing or B) Get a very lucky break, then the chances are that this type of attitude will be your downfall. You see if wrestling is a house then what good is it to spend all of your time in one room. You might never go into the second bedroom, the attic, the broom cupboard or the cellar but there will be places that you eventually must venture into. Imagine if I told you now that you could pick just one room in your house to stay in until I said otherwise. Apart from those of you in studio flats, you would very rapidly find that you are going to need to change rooms be it for food, the toilet, a bath or bed. Wrestling is exactly the same and when I met Jake Roberts, a combination of the previous two little tangents took place. Firstly, I realised that my brain had allowed me to think I knew far more than I really did to save me the breakdown of realising I was a big fish in a very little pound and secondly Jake did something to the lights in my house. However, what Jake did was not turn on one light at a time. What he did was by simply explaining the logic behind something that I had taken for granted, he suddenly helped me find the main power switch that begun to turn all the lights in the house on one after another. With a simple breakdown of what I had done wrong, which I shall share with you shortly, Jake broke me out of the wrestling Matrix with amazing force. I want to do the same for you now being explaining what happened in detail and I am certain that for many of you, the affect will be exactly the same. As we move into the second part of my guide to pro wrestling we will cover far more advanced topics, which is why I feel it is so relevant that I start with the thing that allowed me to understand these principles in the first place and how they changed the way that I watched, performed and taught wrestling forever.
Now what happened to me here took place in two parts. However as one part deals directly with the area of promo I wish to leave that for chapter two of this book to allow me to really give it the attention it deserves but also because it will tie this story together nicely. What I want to do is, as backwards as it sounds, tell you the second part of my Jake encounter first as I think that will be far more beneficial to you. Myself and Jake had just got backstage from a really hot angle that we had just done to set up our upcoming title match (the one we will cover in chapter two). As Jake had been watching my match with James Mason (see he was relevant to the story after all) from backstage he begun picking apart the finishing sequence that we had just done. Jake looked at me and said “you have it here (pointing to my frame) but you don’t have it here yet (pointing to my brain)”. I was taken aback. I responded “Really? I thought that that was one of the only places I did have it?”. I mean seriously, I was considered a really good talker at the time by UK standards and always thought that I “got it” from a mental perspective with the way I had booked FWA until that point. Boy how wrong I was. Jake smiled and said to me “Let me explain something to you. What was wrong with your finish?”. I looked at him in utter confusion. “What do you mean, I thought the finish went pretty well”. He completely no sold my response and said “Where was your heat?”. As I am writing this, it is shocking me how I actually remember it almost word for word. “There was tons of heat, did you not hear that?” I replied. He just repeated the question “No, but where was your heat?”. I actually thought that he was out of his mind and responded blankly “I don’t understand what you mean?”. I was really, really lost by this point. Now before we go forward let me tell you what the finish of my match with James Mason was which Jake was referring to. It was a clichéd as they come. I was the heel champion, James was the face challenger. Towards the end of the match the ref took a bump in the corner. James then hits me with a DDT (with Jake watching and all, don’t ask me why?). He covers me but the ref is down as James slaps the mat with his own hand, one, two, three, one, two, three. With the crowd pissed because there’s no ref to count the pin, he gets up to wake him up. As he has his back turned I grab the heavyweight belt from my valet, James turns around and I smack him right between the eyes with it. I get him on my shoulders and hit him with my “One Night Stand” finisher as the ref “wakes up” just in time to count the three. Hardly ground breaking stuff but it certainly evoked a ton of heat from the packed crowd that night. Or so I thought. So back to Jakes verbal break down of the finish. “The heat! At what point in that sequence was the heat?” he bellows. I responded “When I hit him with the belt?” Jake just said “Wrong!”. “OK when I actually won?” I replied, now feeling like I was answering one of those riddles about a man from St Ives with 7 wives. Jake just repeated “Wrong!”. “I give up then, where was the heat”. And then it happened! The most simple and obvious explanation possible but the one that would hit my like a sack of bricks in the face as the REAL truth often does. Jake went back to the point in the match where James had turned his back to wake the ref. “Now this where you’re valet, should slide under the ropes, hand you the belt and be desperately trying to wake you up. Your f***** up and you just cling to the belt and are huddled in a foetal position just like a little baby, totally helpless. The baby face slowly turns around and at that point everyone in the building other than him knows that you have the belt ready to hit him. With each slow step he takes the audience tries to tell him and shout louder and louder until he is just about to pick you up and they can’t scream any louder and before he knows what’s happened you turn around and smack him with the belt. That’s where you’re heat is!”. It was so simple yet so clever. It was completely obvious but I had never thought about it all. I was stunned. He then explained that doing it this way would suck the wind out of them when they were screaming the most. “Then when you won, you stayed out there forever. This is what you should have done. Once you’ve won, before the crowd even have a chance to take in what has happened, you quickly get out of there. This way they are so angry but they can’t shout out you and say what they want to. This means that they save their heat until the next time you come back. Because you won your match with such a fluke they will think ‘That piece of s*** is going to lose for sure this time’ and you’ll draw money”.
It was such a revelation. Now to a lot of you who are this far into reading my work, it may not seem so revolutionary but let me tell you something. For a 22 year old who thought he knew everything and clearly didn’t, this just made wrestling so much more interesting, simple and engaging all at once. The thought and the detail that went into what Jake said compared to not only what I was doing but also what I was seeing so many others do, just snapped me out of my wrestling coma in seconds. I realised that when it is done the right way, the really clever stuff is the stuff you never really see. This is the stuff that makes a good worker a great worker and allows a simple sequence to become something so much more. They are the finer principles as I like to call them. The things that can turn your wrestling house from a dimly lit shell into a walking, talking episode of cribs. Jake Roberts had ignited a new awareness in me, a new found respect and appreciation of the simple things. One that to this day has remained and inspired me to teach it to others for in this back flip happy, chair shot craving industry that wrestling is becoming it is this little things that can ensure that you can achieve just as much “heat” from your crowd as the guy who risks breaking his neck without you breaking a sweat. And for those people who would prefer to break a sweat and still work physically hard, the addition of this type of thinking will make you one of the greatest workers the business has ever seen. Just look at Kurt Angle and Shawn Michaels if you need proof.
Jake went on to be a rather bizarre character in my life. I once got national newspaper press for legitimately slapping him in the face after he insulted me and everyone else at my level by being drunk, obnoxious and everything that a veteran should not be if he wants to build a better industry, particularly one that had given him so much even if he hadn’t been wise with it. My domestic industry had become his retirement slush fund and he disrespected it daily however for months I had heard “the respected vets” saying they would do something about it but that day never came. So when he had gone to far his karma lay in the form of a young man in his early twenties who was doing all he physically and mentally could to put the UK scene back on the world wide map. I am not proud of striking a hero of mine but I do not regret standing up for the industry and I have done so to several other bullies since. Another time I had to eject him from a show I’d booked him on (to try and build bridges) when he was in no state to perform and threatening to jump the ring with a knife on one of my crew he didn’t like. I’ll never forget the look on his face when I told him I was sending him home and told him to keep the deposit as my lesson for trusting the snake once again. I doubt that I am one of the only people with a Jake story or two like these but as I have aged I never think about the negative stuff and instead recall how much his words reshaped the way I view wrestling. He was milking the business like a cow when he was here and that is something that we will cover next issue however that is not important right now. There are very few geniuses in the wrestling business. However I would say that Jake Roberts is certainly one of them. On multiple occasions after this he would tell me things that really made so much sense. He even told me his idea for a lepracorn that would hide under the ring back in 2003, several years before Fit Finlay proved the critics wrong using the same concept with great success. The guy would just spout out stuff that I saw others sneering at but I just knew he was really something else. I wish I’d have listened more to him however it could be hard at times. Geniuses are difficult people. Back to one of the pieces I wrote in the first book about balance and why Michael Jackson is so messed up. Most people go from one to ten with regards to their talents and good traits. This means that their negative traits also do the same almost like a pendulum. When someone goes from one to, say twenty, in a certain area (such as being a wrestling genius) it means that they must balance out by reaching such high marks on the negative end of that scale too. Jake was one of those rare people who suffered from this. As I have fallen victim to myself, deep thinkers can sometimes tunnel a little too far into their own brains and get lost in there. You can also become so full of your own “sense of knowing” that everyone else becomes “not on your level” and life starts to lose its adhesiveness. Things start to slip and before you know it you end up on the slippery slope to nowhere. I think that this is what happened to Jake and I hope that one day our paths cross again so that I can help him. The problem is that in wrestling he is the great Jake Roberts and everybody treated him as such. Yet once he sheds that snake skin, he is an old man that needs to fit somewhere like the rest of us and I hope he finds that somewhere one day. His karma for treating people and himself the way he was is that the greatest wrestling story ever told (The Wrestler) will be his lasting legacy, however he will never profit from it and that will destroy him no matter what he wants others to believe, despite saying that Beyond the Mat (the films obvious inspiration) was a pack of lies. Maybe that’s his punishment for denying the truth, who knows? Whatever the case, Jake has had his comeuppance and I really hope that he one day finds the peace that he deserves for what he helped me with, if nothing else. That is why I want to dedicate the second volume of this to Jake Roberts just like my first book was dedicated to Dino Scarlo. He has many flaws but thanks to his choice words I begun to see things differently and really get on the road to understanding the business in a way I never had before. It is thanks that that understanding that I can write this book now and help other grasp the more complex aspects of the business in a simpler way. I hope you enjoy them as we begin to move into the finer principles of pro wrestling. |
