Post by Deep Figure Value on Aug 17, 2014 16:56:46 GMT -5
The first time I remember sitting down to really study an opponent was the day I was booked against Gabriel Black at Madison Square Garden.
That's something of a loaded statement right there. Where do you really start with a plate that full? If you're most people, you go right for the main course.
Madison. Square. Garden.
If you're at all inclined toward the professional wrestling industry, those three words should be enough to send shivers of excitement and splendor down your spine. You're not talking just another stop on the coast to coast tour that encompasses the other 364 days a year. There are guys in this business who will out their body through the wringer over the course of an entire career and not find themselves incomparably blessed to step through the curtain into that very epicenter of our industry, and there I was, all of 23 years old and a whole two matches into my career in the WFWF, and in a mere matter of days, I would be one of the first two men to step out before the masses and lay it all out in the ring that had been assembled in an arena that may as very well be the center of the professional wrestling universe.
Over the course of my career, I would happen across numerous bookings, increasingly greater in scope and importance, several along the way that I would earmark as defining moments in my career. At 23 years old and two matches in, I was good and ready to call this one the match of my very lifetime.
I arrived in New York City exceptionally early that week. I'd like to tell you that I flew in with this warrior mentality of evaluating the very lay of the land, immersing myself in the very aura of the city and its landmark arena so as to enter that ring the almost inevitable victor, but as we've touched on and I've quipped on already, that sort of statement would be entirely unbecoming of my very person.
The truth is, growing up on the sleepier side of the Lone Star State's capital, there aren't many opportunities, short of an overpriced flight upon an overpriced hotel upon a financially damaging week away from the daily grind to visit the Big Apple. Prior to my first WFWF pay-per-view event, my earliest and single memory of traveling out of state was a trip to the New England area, which I'd mostly pieced together from my own parents' recollections, as I was all of 4 or 5 at the time. Now, with a significantly more sizable chunk of expendable funds at my disposal, I wasn't about to turn down the opportunity to live out something that, up until that point, had been a mere pipe dream to a guy like me, and so, I picked a reasonably priced hotel a few blocks distance from the center of it all and booked myself a little personal time ahead of the big show.
My trip to New York City, while functional as a means of getting me from Point A, being my last match, to Point B, being my upcoming match, was something more to me than a mere business trip or sightseeing excursion. While it's true that I had every intention of seeing sights that until then had been diluted images on TV and making my mark in the center of Madison Square Garden, I began seeing this trip as more a pilgrimage of affirmation that would encompass not only who I was, but who I was meant to be and where this stop in the city of all cities would lead me next.
See, this industry, at it's very best, is something of a tamed freak show, in that if you're content to skip the theatrics in favor of your given name, the little nuances of your personality are going to be turned up to 11 to amp up your marketability. It's an accepted sort of norm - if your employer can't push you on the fans someway, somehow, then you get pushed to the wayside, another face and a name with no real winning draw - a regular Chris Avalon or Andrew Carter.
I may have been a whole two matches into my career with the WFWF, but that doesn't tell the longer prefix of my time bouncing between independent promotions. I heard it even then - I guess I'd already had it cranked up so high that it was just the obvious fall point. I was never going to be just 'Daniel Kirkbride'. The minute they get ahold of that little something that makes you YOU, well, that's when you become 'Daniel Kirkbride, the Christian wrestler'.
In spite how impactful it sounds to say, Phillip Schneider wasn't born violent. Jayson Garrett wasn't born arrogant. Gabriel Black wasn't born old, and as we've established, I wasn't born a man of God. That last one can by and large be a variable factor - every day new children are born into the light, but the resonating tone, especially in this industry where we're defined by our nuances and particulars, is that we are not born this way. Something happens along the way that directly or indirectly shapes us, sometimes immediately, in other cases over time, into who we really are. That's how the story of a young up an comer, fresh out of the deep heart of Texas who'd, to his own recollection, nary set foot outside the strong borders of the Lone Star State, really starts right there in the most famous city on Earth. If Daniel Kirkbride was born in Austin, Texas, then Daniel Kirkbride, the Christian wrestler was born in New York City.
I was ten when the towers fell. Most people would probably agree that that's resoundingly young for anything to have such a strong impact on one's psyche. I'd argue that most people still can recall what frightened them the most at the age of 10, and that so long as they were of sound mind and age to have a functioning memory, most people can recite the most intricate details of their day when they heard the news out of New York.
That day shaped a lot of people for years to come. Some developed a fear of flying. Some used it as a means to their radicalized ends on other side of the aisle. In Austin, I found myself questioning the very notion of existence. I couldn't fathom, could not wrap my head around the idea of a mother and father packing up their kids to school, facilitating the drop off, getting to the office, and perishing in flame for the very "crime" of where they happened to work. That was a long week - from Tuesday onward, I felt but a husk of my own self, not feeling, not seeing, not comprehending. Just being.
I've established earlier that I didn't grow up in a religious household of any kind - weddings and funerals, at best. Nevertheless, that Sunday, the 16th, mom woke us early and hauled us off to church. I remember asking her why - to the best of my small recollection, we'd never been before that day.
"You understand what's happened, Danny?"
I didn't. Not really. Who could? I accepted that as an answer and say silent for the remainder of the trip. I'd come to find upon our arrival that nobody - at least, not in Austin nor among the congregation of Saint Catherine's - really understood. Parking was at a choice premium, and mom had to opt for a half on sidewalk approach at risk of penalty, though I couldn't imagine, given the circumstances, anyone would be gnashing at that sort of opportunity.
If you've ever been to a Catholic mass, you know that interpretation is not really the forte of that particular branch of faith. Since my first days among the pews looking for reason and hope, I've tried my hand at a wealth of varied machinations of the Christian faith before settling on one that was right for me. Nevertheless, in that 90 or so minutes of sitting, standing, kneeling, and recitation, I didn't come out feeling much more comfortable about having my small little world knocked reeling the way it had been.
You know how sometimes they say that destiny is right around the corner?
Probably owing to the anticipated fact that there would be a wealth of wayward and first time parishioners, Saint Catherine's had organized something of an interfaith, counsel based youth group, which my mother was all too willing to suggest I poke my head into. Funny, the way people change over time. All the same, if I'd come before God that morning looking for answers or direction, it was there, amid the still summer like warmth that would blanket the state of Texas for some time to come before its brief excuse for "winter", that I first felt the guidance of his hands leading me to sit and discuss what I was feeling with a youth leader from a neighboring Baptist church named Henry Marshall.
"You shouldn't be ashamed of your fears. What we all saw this week was right out of the line of familiarity that any of us would be comfortable with, young or old. Take this - who brought you here today?"
"My mother..."
"And she's off with the adults, then?"
"I think so, I guess."
"I'll let you in on a little secret, Daniel. That other room? The grown ups? They're engaged in much of the very same that we're trying to do here - maybe with a pinch more coffee. Trying to create what we call an open dialogue. Nobody here, not even myself, is entirely sure of what to make of all this. That's sort of the mystery of God's plan. Sometimes it takes days, months...years, even, for it to sort of come into focus."
"But...well...I mean, why would God let all of this happen? If he's supposed to love all of us...I know everyone dies eventually, but...I just don't know...."
"We call that the mystery of faith, Daniel. For someone like you, who's never been brought up to believe, accepting that God has a plan for each and every one of us, considering the very scope of just how many of us there are walking this Earth, well, that's quite and undertaking."
"Do you like, understand...soon?"
"You're on the path Daniel. Just from today, being here, asking these questions. I'd like to speak with you some more. I run a youth group here in town over at the Trinity Baptist. Perhaps you'll join us sometime? Many of the kids there are just like you - unsure of what it is they believe. Unsure of how to process the things that have happened this week."
"What do you tell them? I mean, to help them?"
"I tell them to go out and be someone's light. Inspire someone. Help someone. Give someone hope where they might otherwise have none. Share the good news, not by preaching gospel or reciting verses, but by their actions. Just be the light to brighten someone's day. In a word? Shine."
If you've come this far, you sort of get the gist of how the rest of the story goes. Fill in the blanks with the story of a boy who finds his place amid the wonders of faith, and learns to accept and mourn for the dark times in the light of all that is good in the world. Pepper in a bit more soul searching in the pursuit of an atypical career that, on its surface, is at extreme odds with the basis of the boy's process of belief, and you'll sooner rather than later find yourself in the midst of the very tale I've begun to spin here of Daniel Kirkbride, the Christian wrestler.
In spite of all that came to pass between that fateful Sunday morning in 2001 and where we've come to find ourselves, I still carry those words that Father Marshall would reiterate to me seemingly a thousand times over over the course of our friendship. I didn't enter the world of professional wrestling to vanquish demons and to be a beacon among the dark. I didn't come to wrestling to become "the Christian wrestler". I liken myself still, in spite of it all, to a truly vested Christian Rock artist. There's a great deal of secular stigma that comes with rock music, and to use the medium as a way of professing one's faith and sharing in the word of God stands to level the playing field. I'm of the belief that nothing is inherently "evil", and as such, I always approached my career not as a means to vanquish the overwhelming dark that tends to come with the territory, but rather to serve as an alternative. Through that, maybe I'd inspire someone to pursue a dream that they maybe felt was at odds with their own beliefs or morals.
Still, as I stepped off the train to behold the newly constructed One World Trade Center looming into the sky before me, it was hard to not default to those feelings of insurmountable rage, fear, and sadness that 13 years prior had swelled within my still unready to comprehend mind. "Never forget" was so much more than a kitschy saying for t-shirts and bumper stickers amid this hallowed ground. The city had taken great lengths to ensure that the memory of that day - the faces, the names - would not be lost upon the minds of those who would walk these gardens. I've always had that tendency to let myself sort of fall out of the moment, and it must have caught up with me there below ground in the museum erected in the memory of those lost, as I'm fairly certain the stranger behind me had to repeat himself at least twice to break my gaze from a collage of faces of the deceased.
"You alright there?"
"Huh? Oh, geez, yeah I'm sorry...here. Someone you knew?"
"Fortunately for me, no. You?"
"Likewise. First time in the city, actually."
"That's a special thing there. This is all something else, isn't it?"
"It really is."
It really was. Unless you found yourself moved to the point of altering the very way you live your life by the events that ring out in every New Yorkers mind each and every September, it's hard to really convey what all this had led to - that first Sunday in church, the acceptance of Christ into my life, the choice to pursue wrestling as a profession - it had all led to me there, in the metro capital of the world, booked into the match of my comparatively short lifetime against an aging legend of the independent circuit.
That night I put the offer of free wireless access from my modest hotel to the absolute test, hosting a private viewing of the largely cell phone quality and tape trading sourced career of Gabriel Black. I'd done a lot of soul searching in those short few hours since arriving in the city, the sheer volume if being there on that most sacred of American soil still weighing heavily on my mind, to the point that at times I found myself as impressed with Black's in ring prowess as I was with the fact that so many of these matches of his took place before I'd even been born into this world.
If Enchanted had been a warm up, Nikki Dean a dress rehearsal, then Gabriel Black was poised to become the deciding point from there on out regarding the direction of my very career. The notion had not been lost on me that a loss to Black in the wrestling capital of the universe would, in spite of our relatively low card spot, be entirely detrimental to the forward momentum my career had enjoyed up until that very early point. A win could very well mean a meteoric rise in the attention I'd been receiving from both the booking and the fandom end of things thus far - the days of walking New York City from one end to the other all but unnoticed could be very quickly dwindling if all things saw fit for me to walk out with my arm raised in victory.
I wanted to know more about him - I'd had that advantage going into my first bout, as Slanted and Enchanted had already become a low established tandem by the time I'd come to sign, and Nikki Dean was, at the very least, a familiar name given her husband Josh's prosperous career during my adolescence, but this Gabriel Black, short of being in age more aligned with the legends of the WFWF yet in premier experience, more aligned with myself. All the same, for actual in ring experience, he had an entire lifetime over me, and I'd be lying if I told you that that didn't have me sitting up the entirety of my first night in the city a panicked, sweating mess (altogether similar to my journey out to first catch up with the company at all).
Gabriel Black was nearly everything I wasn't - large, imposing, tenured, and to a small subset of fans with more of a taste that what the major leagues can satisfy, well known. If we were to sit down and delegate advantages to either side of the match, the lone stack in my corner would be the upward momentum I'd developed thus far. Never mind the fact that Black might be the first to tell you that his career at that point was on the descending side of the mountain, but I had the slight edge going into the match 2 and 0 to his 0 and 1. A slight leg up, but certainly not enough to coax me to sleep that night.
Instead, I trudged through the hours of the night, the room illuminated by the looping playlist of Gabriel Black matches rotating onward from my laptop perched atop the desk in the corner, my mind half there, and half still roaming the halls of the exhibits and reading the names of all who'd perished there at the World Trade Center sight. I couldn't help but think that in the back of my mind I'd somehow failed them - though we'd never met, likely never even knew of one another's existence until that very day, it was their deaths that led me to a more prosperous and fulfilling life, and I couldn't help but feel an obligation to somehow honor their memory. The more I dwelled on it, the more I came to understand that perhaps God had a laundry list of intents in finally bringing me here to New York, where 13 years ago, in spite of the distance, we first really found the opportunity to connect. On the surface, I'd always held in my mind, when the word came down that I'd be wrestling in Madison Square Garden, that here was my most massive opportunity to reach out and inspire, through my work and my simple being all that I was and nothing more.
The truth is, I was terrified of the notion. All the factors stacking up didn't provide a very bright outlook in my mind, but if headed into this hallmark to the point match I lacked a certain confidence, then I had something monumentally bigger in my corner.
Everything happens for a reason. Even now, for all that's come to pass, I still firmly hold that notion to be true. God led me to church that Sunday after tragedy befell a nation. God put the future Father Marshall there to guide me toward the light. God saw fit that at 23, I'd become ready to travel to this sight of great sadness to face it firsthand, in conjunction with a great obstacle in my way, that of Gabriel Black, a man of stature and experience like none other that I'd faced to that point in time. God had led me to this great crossroads in not just my career, but my lifetime. God does not act idly. He does not act brashly, and he does not act without reason. I stared out the window - the darkness seeming barely so amid the light of the city, the upper some of the Garden giving off only a visible hue of lighting, the majority of the building obscured by the great skyline of the city. God had led me here with purpose, with intent, and with reason. Win, lose, or draw, he would lead me to see this through.
That's something of a loaded statement right there. Where do you really start with a plate that full? If you're most people, you go right for the main course.
Madison. Square. Garden.
If you're at all inclined toward the professional wrestling industry, those three words should be enough to send shivers of excitement and splendor down your spine. You're not talking just another stop on the coast to coast tour that encompasses the other 364 days a year. There are guys in this business who will out their body through the wringer over the course of an entire career and not find themselves incomparably blessed to step through the curtain into that very epicenter of our industry, and there I was, all of 23 years old and a whole two matches into my career in the WFWF, and in a mere matter of days, I would be one of the first two men to step out before the masses and lay it all out in the ring that had been assembled in an arena that may as very well be the center of the professional wrestling universe.
Over the course of my career, I would happen across numerous bookings, increasingly greater in scope and importance, several along the way that I would earmark as defining moments in my career. At 23 years old and two matches in, I was good and ready to call this one the match of my very lifetime.
I arrived in New York City exceptionally early that week. I'd like to tell you that I flew in with this warrior mentality of evaluating the very lay of the land, immersing myself in the very aura of the city and its landmark arena so as to enter that ring the almost inevitable victor, but as we've touched on and I've quipped on already, that sort of statement would be entirely unbecoming of my very person.
The truth is, growing up on the sleepier side of the Lone Star State's capital, there aren't many opportunities, short of an overpriced flight upon an overpriced hotel upon a financially damaging week away from the daily grind to visit the Big Apple. Prior to my first WFWF pay-per-view event, my earliest and single memory of traveling out of state was a trip to the New England area, which I'd mostly pieced together from my own parents' recollections, as I was all of 4 or 5 at the time. Now, with a significantly more sizable chunk of expendable funds at my disposal, I wasn't about to turn down the opportunity to live out something that, up until that point, had been a mere pipe dream to a guy like me, and so, I picked a reasonably priced hotel a few blocks distance from the center of it all and booked myself a little personal time ahead of the big show.
My trip to New York City, while functional as a means of getting me from Point A, being my last match, to Point B, being my upcoming match, was something more to me than a mere business trip or sightseeing excursion. While it's true that I had every intention of seeing sights that until then had been diluted images on TV and making my mark in the center of Madison Square Garden, I began seeing this trip as more a pilgrimage of affirmation that would encompass not only who I was, but who I was meant to be and where this stop in the city of all cities would lead me next.
See, this industry, at it's very best, is something of a tamed freak show, in that if you're content to skip the theatrics in favor of your given name, the little nuances of your personality are going to be turned up to 11 to amp up your marketability. It's an accepted sort of norm - if your employer can't push you on the fans someway, somehow, then you get pushed to the wayside, another face and a name with no real winning draw - a regular Chris Avalon or Andrew Carter.
I may have been a whole two matches into my career with the WFWF, but that doesn't tell the longer prefix of my time bouncing between independent promotions. I heard it even then - I guess I'd already had it cranked up so high that it was just the obvious fall point. I was never going to be just 'Daniel Kirkbride'. The minute they get ahold of that little something that makes you YOU, well, that's when you become 'Daniel Kirkbride, the Christian wrestler'.
In spite how impactful it sounds to say, Phillip Schneider wasn't born violent. Jayson Garrett wasn't born arrogant. Gabriel Black wasn't born old, and as we've established, I wasn't born a man of God. That last one can by and large be a variable factor - every day new children are born into the light, but the resonating tone, especially in this industry where we're defined by our nuances and particulars, is that we are not born this way. Something happens along the way that directly or indirectly shapes us, sometimes immediately, in other cases over time, into who we really are. That's how the story of a young up an comer, fresh out of the deep heart of Texas who'd, to his own recollection, nary set foot outside the strong borders of the Lone Star State, really starts right there in the most famous city on Earth. If Daniel Kirkbride was born in Austin, Texas, then Daniel Kirkbride, the Christian wrestler was born in New York City.
I was ten when the towers fell. Most people would probably agree that that's resoundingly young for anything to have such a strong impact on one's psyche. I'd argue that most people still can recall what frightened them the most at the age of 10, and that so long as they were of sound mind and age to have a functioning memory, most people can recite the most intricate details of their day when they heard the news out of New York.
That day shaped a lot of people for years to come. Some developed a fear of flying. Some used it as a means to their radicalized ends on other side of the aisle. In Austin, I found myself questioning the very notion of existence. I couldn't fathom, could not wrap my head around the idea of a mother and father packing up their kids to school, facilitating the drop off, getting to the office, and perishing in flame for the very "crime" of where they happened to work. That was a long week - from Tuesday onward, I felt but a husk of my own self, not feeling, not seeing, not comprehending. Just being.
I've established earlier that I didn't grow up in a religious household of any kind - weddings and funerals, at best. Nevertheless, that Sunday, the 16th, mom woke us early and hauled us off to church. I remember asking her why - to the best of my small recollection, we'd never been before that day.
"You understand what's happened, Danny?"
I didn't. Not really. Who could? I accepted that as an answer and say silent for the remainder of the trip. I'd come to find upon our arrival that nobody - at least, not in Austin nor among the congregation of Saint Catherine's - really understood. Parking was at a choice premium, and mom had to opt for a half on sidewalk approach at risk of penalty, though I couldn't imagine, given the circumstances, anyone would be gnashing at that sort of opportunity.
If you've ever been to a Catholic mass, you know that interpretation is not really the forte of that particular branch of faith. Since my first days among the pews looking for reason and hope, I've tried my hand at a wealth of varied machinations of the Christian faith before settling on one that was right for me. Nevertheless, in that 90 or so minutes of sitting, standing, kneeling, and recitation, I didn't come out feeling much more comfortable about having my small little world knocked reeling the way it had been.
You know how sometimes they say that destiny is right around the corner?
Probably owing to the anticipated fact that there would be a wealth of wayward and first time parishioners, Saint Catherine's had organized something of an interfaith, counsel based youth group, which my mother was all too willing to suggest I poke my head into. Funny, the way people change over time. All the same, if I'd come before God that morning looking for answers or direction, it was there, amid the still summer like warmth that would blanket the state of Texas for some time to come before its brief excuse for "winter", that I first felt the guidance of his hands leading me to sit and discuss what I was feeling with a youth leader from a neighboring Baptist church named Henry Marshall.
"You shouldn't be ashamed of your fears. What we all saw this week was right out of the line of familiarity that any of us would be comfortable with, young or old. Take this - who brought you here today?"
"My mother..."
"And she's off with the adults, then?"
"I think so, I guess."
"I'll let you in on a little secret, Daniel. That other room? The grown ups? They're engaged in much of the very same that we're trying to do here - maybe with a pinch more coffee. Trying to create what we call an open dialogue. Nobody here, not even myself, is entirely sure of what to make of all this. That's sort of the mystery of God's plan. Sometimes it takes days, months...years, even, for it to sort of come into focus."
"But...well...I mean, why would God let all of this happen? If he's supposed to love all of us...I know everyone dies eventually, but...I just don't know...."
"We call that the mystery of faith, Daniel. For someone like you, who's never been brought up to believe, accepting that God has a plan for each and every one of us, considering the very scope of just how many of us there are walking this Earth, well, that's quite and undertaking."
"Do you like, understand...soon?"
"You're on the path Daniel. Just from today, being here, asking these questions. I'd like to speak with you some more. I run a youth group here in town over at the Trinity Baptist. Perhaps you'll join us sometime? Many of the kids there are just like you - unsure of what it is they believe. Unsure of how to process the things that have happened this week."
"What do you tell them? I mean, to help them?"
"I tell them to go out and be someone's light. Inspire someone. Help someone. Give someone hope where they might otherwise have none. Share the good news, not by preaching gospel or reciting verses, but by their actions. Just be the light to brighten someone's day. In a word? Shine."
If you've come this far, you sort of get the gist of how the rest of the story goes. Fill in the blanks with the story of a boy who finds his place amid the wonders of faith, and learns to accept and mourn for the dark times in the light of all that is good in the world. Pepper in a bit more soul searching in the pursuit of an atypical career that, on its surface, is at extreme odds with the basis of the boy's process of belief, and you'll sooner rather than later find yourself in the midst of the very tale I've begun to spin here of Daniel Kirkbride, the Christian wrestler.
In spite of all that came to pass between that fateful Sunday morning in 2001 and where we've come to find ourselves, I still carry those words that Father Marshall would reiterate to me seemingly a thousand times over over the course of our friendship. I didn't enter the world of professional wrestling to vanquish demons and to be a beacon among the dark. I didn't come to wrestling to become "the Christian wrestler". I liken myself still, in spite of it all, to a truly vested Christian Rock artist. There's a great deal of secular stigma that comes with rock music, and to use the medium as a way of professing one's faith and sharing in the word of God stands to level the playing field. I'm of the belief that nothing is inherently "evil", and as such, I always approached my career not as a means to vanquish the overwhelming dark that tends to come with the territory, but rather to serve as an alternative. Through that, maybe I'd inspire someone to pursue a dream that they maybe felt was at odds with their own beliefs or morals.
Still, as I stepped off the train to behold the newly constructed One World Trade Center looming into the sky before me, it was hard to not default to those feelings of insurmountable rage, fear, and sadness that 13 years prior had swelled within my still unready to comprehend mind. "Never forget" was so much more than a kitschy saying for t-shirts and bumper stickers amid this hallowed ground. The city had taken great lengths to ensure that the memory of that day - the faces, the names - would not be lost upon the minds of those who would walk these gardens. I've always had that tendency to let myself sort of fall out of the moment, and it must have caught up with me there below ground in the museum erected in the memory of those lost, as I'm fairly certain the stranger behind me had to repeat himself at least twice to break my gaze from a collage of faces of the deceased.
"You alright there?"
"Huh? Oh, geez, yeah I'm sorry...here. Someone you knew?"
"Fortunately for me, no. You?"
"Likewise. First time in the city, actually."
"That's a special thing there. This is all something else, isn't it?"
"It really is."
It really was. Unless you found yourself moved to the point of altering the very way you live your life by the events that ring out in every New Yorkers mind each and every September, it's hard to really convey what all this had led to - that first Sunday in church, the acceptance of Christ into my life, the choice to pursue wrestling as a profession - it had all led to me there, in the metro capital of the world, booked into the match of my comparatively short lifetime against an aging legend of the independent circuit.
That night I put the offer of free wireless access from my modest hotel to the absolute test, hosting a private viewing of the largely cell phone quality and tape trading sourced career of Gabriel Black. I'd done a lot of soul searching in those short few hours since arriving in the city, the sheer volume if being there on that most sacred of American soil still weighing heavily on my mind, to the point that at times I found myself as impressed with Black's in ring prowess as I was with the fact that so many of these matches of his took place before I'd even been born into this world.
If Enchanted had been a warm up, Nikki Dean a dress rehearsal, then Gabriel Black was poised to become the deciding point from there on out regarding the direction of my very career. The notion had not been lost on me that a loss to Black in the wrestling capital of the universe would, in spite of our relatively low card spot, be entirely detrimental to the forward momentum my career had enjoyed up until that very early point. A win could very well mean a meteoric rise in the attention I'd been receiving from both the booking and the fandom end of things thus far - the days of walking New York City from one end to the other all but unnoticed could be very quickly dwindling if all things saw fit for me to walk out with my arm raised in victory.
I wanted to know more about him - I'd had that advantage going into my first bout, as Slanted and Enchanted had already become a low established tandem by the time I'd come to sign, and Nikki Dean was, at the very least, a familiar name given her husband Josh's prosperous career during my adolescence, but this Gabriel Black, short of being in age more aligned with the legends of the WFWF yet in premier experience, more aligned with myself. All the same, for actual in ring experience, he had an entire lifetime over me, and I'd be lying if I told you that that didn't have me sitting up the entirety of my first night in the city a panicked, sweating mess (altogether similar to my journey out to first catch up with the company at all).
Gabriel Black was nearly everything I wasn't - large, imposing, tenured, and to a small subset of fans with more of a taste that what the major leagues can satisfy, well known. If we were to sit down and delegate advantages to either side of the match, the lone stack in my corner would be the upward momentum I'd developed thus far. Never mind the fact that Black might be the first to tell you that his career at that point was on the descending side of the mountain, but I had the slight edge going into the match 2 and 0 to his 0 and 1. A slight leg up, but certainly not enough to coax me to sleep that night.
Instead, I trudged through the hours of the night, the room illuminated by the looping playlist of Gabriel Black matches rotating onward from my laptop perched atop the desk in the corner, my mind half there, and half still roaming the halls of the exhibits and reading the names of all who'd perished there at the World Trade Center sight. I couldn't help but think that in the back of my mind I'd somehow failed them - though we'd never met, likely never even knew of one another's existence until that very day, it was their deaths that led me to a more prosperous and fulfilling life, and I couldn't help but feel an obligation to somehow honor their memory. The more I dwelled on it, the more I came to understand that perhaps God had a laundry list of intents in finally bringing me here to New York, where 13 years ago, in spite of the distance, we first really found the opportunity to connect. On the surface, I'd always held in my mind, when the word came down that I'd be wrestling in Madison Square Garden, that here was my most massive opportunity to reach out and inspire, through my work and my simple being all that I was and nothing more.
The truth is, I was terrified of the notion. All the factors stacking up didn't provide a very bright outlook in my mind, but if headed into this hallmark to the point match I lacked a certain confidence, then I had something monumentally bigger in my corner.
Everything happens for a reason. Even now, for all that's come to pass, I still firmly hold that notion to be true. God led me to church that Sunday after tragedy befell a nation. God put the future Father Marshall there to guide me toward the light. God saw fit that at 23, I'd become ready to travel to this sight of great sadness to face it firsthand, in conjunction with a great obstacle in my way, that of Gabriel Black, a man of stature and experience like none other that I'd faced to that point in time. God had led me to this great crossroads in not just my career, but my lifetime. God does not act idly. He does not act brashly, and he does not act without reason. I stared out the window - the darkness seeming barely so amid the light of the city, the upper some of the Garden giving off only a visible hue of lighting, the majority of the building obscured by the great skyline of the city. God had led me here with purpose, with intent, and with reason. Win, lose, or draw, he would lead me to see this through.
I dont know good luck 
