Reality Hits

The crowd eagerly awaited with cameras and banners. They saw the plane land and everyone went silent with anticipation of what was about to happen. The excitement in the air was electric. A father put his arm around his son to acknowledge they were both there for this key moment. A tear of joy rolled down the left cheek of a woman who had thought this day may never happen. The doors opened and out he came. The crowd erupted! Finally, the return of……

……nobody cares JC!! Nobody cares about my crazy dreams as I walk along at a snails pace, whilst my sleepless body is crumbling under the weight of my rather large and heavy bags containing all my worldly possessions. I would have at least thought they would have made a suitcase trolley more readily available for me, but there are none to be seen. In fact I must admit London did not look pleased to see me at all. As I waited for my friends in Heathrow airport everyone and everything looked a bit grey and miserable. A far cry from the beautiful turquoise waters and white sands of the British Virgin Islands.

However, despite my grey surroundings I am incredibly happy to be back. I have had a great week catching up with friends, both wrestling and non-wrestling. I have had a chance to think further about what I’m doing, I’ve managed to attend my first wrestling training session back and attend a live UK show to see what the current state of affairs is. However, a few realities have set in and reality does bite somewhat!

Skinny Man

One of the first comments people have made to me is how much weight I have lost. Whilst this is usually meant as a compliment, for a professional wrestler it is devastating. Wrestlers don’t all have to be bulging meatheads, but it definitely helps to have a good muscular body and more importantly they need to stand out from the crowd. My current look is an office bod who does long distance running and triathlons on the weekends, because that is what I have been doing for the last 2 years!

If I’m going to make any impact at all, one of the first things I need to be doing is hitting the gym hard. I don’t need to be huge, but I need to be in shape and to put it bluntly – look like I can kick someone’s ass! 

JC Thunder wasn’t built in a day

After admiring my new gazelle like frame the next question is - so why are you back? What are you doing now? Rather than stand on my soap box and shout 'I am JC Thunder again and I am going to take the world by storm' (pun intended!), these conversations have led me to question myself and be more realistic about this whole thing. Sitting on the beach dreaming of spandex and folding chairs is all well and good, but the reality is this is going to take a while. It will probably be a while before I am good enough to be on shows again and a bit longer before I am consistently working. That said my drive and commitment is still as high as it was.

Training Day

I woke up Saturday morning body aching and very immobile after lifting weights for the first time in an eternity (great workouts James and Daniel Dewhirst) and if I’m honest I was a more than a little hungover too (will need to be a bit stricter on that one!). Great start to my first wrestling training session in about 4 years! Epp!

So does JC Thunder still cut the mustard with these young wippersnappers? The answer is whilst I do have a lot ring rust, I do at least remember how to wrestle! Phew that’s a relief! My training did feel sloppy at times and I’m clearly not ready for shows yet, but I did have an awesome time and it felt great to be back in a wrestling ring. Big thank you to Tom Chamberlain for inviting me down to his training session at Wrestle Force, it feels good to be back in action! 

Show Time

After training I visited some familiar faces at a Revolution Pro Wrestling show in Bethnal Green. The show was absolutely phenomenal and even featured wrestling legend Bret ‘the Hitman’ Hart! The production and the wrestlers themselves all looked very professional. It is fantastic to see British wrestling looking so promising and hats off to the promoter, Andy Quildan, for all the hard work he clearly put into it! It was also great to catch up with people I haven’t seen in years and to see everyone is so welcoming even after all this time.

One thing was also very apparent after watching the show, I have a lot of work to do! I want to be on shows like the one I saw on Saturday, but at this time I would be embarrassed to be seen on them. It would be worse than when Rocky Balboa got destroyed by Mr T after he didn’t train properly in Rocky III. Unfortunately for me I am not Rocky and my training to get to a level I am happy with will most likely have to consist of more than a 3 minute montage! 

Final Thoughts

Despite these reality checks, I’m still very positive about the decision I have made and happy to be back. Thank you to everyone who read my blog and sent me messages last week. Very encouraging feedback from people and cool to see people actually read this thing. Also a final thank you to everyone at BVI for making my last few weeks so enjoyable and Todd Vansickle for giving me a full page spread in the BVI Beacon last week, which if you're interested in seeing can be viewed below.

Right, time to get on with training! I will update you soon to let you know how it’s all going.

Thanks for reading!

JCT

The Decision

For the last two years I have been living and working a well-paid finance job in the British Virgin Islands, Caribbean. I spend my weekends out on boats or on beaches having fun in paradise. However, recently I made the decision to quit my job and leave these beautiful islands to return to England. At this time I have no job, no home and I’m returning just in time for it to soon become bitterly cold. The first question most people ask is why. The answer usually confuses them even more; I want to be a professional wrestler!

By way of background, I have been a professional wrestler before. I wrestled for about 7 years in Great Britain, primarily by the name of JC Thunder. I’m probably best known for my loser to champion story in IPW:UK, which is where the above picture was taken from. I also wrestled for countless other promotions in the UK, along with a few shows in Holland, one tour in Italy where I spent most of my time getting squashed by former WWE stars and I have had a couple of months training in the US too. There are many stories to be told from these experiences, but I will save them for future blog posts.

I wrestled throughout University and spent a brief time afterwards making that my primary focus. However, I soon piled on a lot of debt on top of my already high student loan. Depressed and in massive deficit, I ironically got a job in Insolvency. I continued to wrestle whilst I worked, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to juggle everything at once. In 2009, I took a long break from wrestling to take my Joint Board Insolvency Exams. After I passed them I did the odd show here and there, but for all sense and purposes I was no longer a pro wrestler. In 2011, I then got a supposed dream job in the Caribbean. I have been here ever since. Why then do I want to come back?

Anyone reading this who is a wrestler or a wrestling fan should be able to relate to my love for wrestling. However, it’s very hard to explain to a non-wrestling person the attachment people get to this bizarre form of entertainment, so for now I’m asking you to just accept the attachment is strong! Essentially I love wrestling and that’s it. However, that doesn’t make for a very interesting blog post, so the least I can do for you is share some of the considerations that were very important to me in making this decision.

Turning 30

In June, I turned 30 – this was a biggy for me! Suddenly I wasn’t young anymore, at least from the point of view of someone who is still thinking of pursuing an athletic endeavor as a career choice. There are a lot of famous wrestlers out there that are my junior. I became obsessed with how old pro wrestlers are. I spent far too much of my previous employer’s time googling professional wrestlers’ ages. Diamond Dallas Page (a former WCW champion and huge star that didn’t even start wrestling until 35) soon became my new hero. I realised that if I left it any longer I would become even more far removed from the wrestling circle and soon it would be too late to do anything about it!

Money Money Money

I was once told it doesn’t matter if you’re eating baked beans out of the can every night, it’s more important to be doing what makes you happy. In reality I should probably be paying more attention to my diet now I want to be a wrestler again, but the sentiment is there - money does not buy you happiness!

Money is obviously still very important in life and I am very aware that I am going from a very high paid job to a very low paying one. However, I’ve seen the sort of life I could be living if I carry on with my current career path. I don’t begrudge anyone else on that path, but for me I don’t want it. For whatever reason, wrestling is my thing and that’s what I want to do. Hopefully that will make me money too. The chances are slim, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take.

I’ve changed, honest!

You might be asking why I’ve suddenly got it in my head that I’m going to be a successful wrestler when essentially I failed at it before. Good question! And one that has been on my mind for the past few months. Ultimately I can’t prove that I will be successful, but for various reasons I do think my work ethic and self-belief have increased dramatically in the past few years and I’m hoping this will carry through into my wrestling. I have also had time to review what went wrong last time and the reasons why (although that is a post in itself!). I think I am now far more focused on what I need to do.

This is a very do or die attitude, but my thoughts are by throwing myself back and completely immersing myself into wrestling I don’t give myself any choice but to work my arse off. Either that or I will be spending a lot of time crying into my baked bean can!

The Boyhood Dream

We’re hitting cliché city now I know, but here goes! I want to be a wrestler because I’ve always wanted to be a wrestler and it feels wrong not to be one.  Ever since I was 8 years old and I watched WrestleMania 7 at my friend Adam Sutherland’s house I was completely captivated by wrestling and wanted to do nothing else. I fell in love with the over the top characters and storylines. It was a fantasy world that I was completely obsessed by and I never grew out of that. Even though I left wrestling I justified it by saying ok, I’m going to sort out my finances and other areas of my life and then get back involved with wrestling. Well I’ve done that now. It’s time to put up or shut up. You have to one day wake up and actually live out your dream or you will have just spent your whole life sleeping!

Final Thoughts

I hope you enjoyed my first blog post. I will try to do one of these each week. This weekend I will be flying back to the UK and next week I will be starting my wrestling training. I am painfully aware that this road will not be an easy one, but it’s what I want to do and I will be annoyed at myself if I don’t at least try.

I welcome your comments below and also encourage anyone to contact me at jc12345@hotmail.com if you are involved in wrestling. I am currently interested in visiting as many training schools as possible to get back into wrestling shape and get back into the scene as quickly as possible.

Thanks for reading!

JCT