Posted in: The Northern Star The Northern Star--The Road to Wrestlemania
By XanMan
Apr 2, 2009 - 9:02:18 AM
{Argument: This column is a sequel in spirit, if not completely in content, to my autobiographical column, Drugs or Jesus. If you haven't read it yet, or want to read it again, you can click on the name of the column above and it'll direct you to it. Otherwise...}
"This is where you see the truth of entertainment, because it is not edited You see it on stage as it's happening. Even if we fall down and forget our words, it's a part of live entertainment."--Martin Kippenberger
There are times when I've felt extremely guilty about being a wrestling fan, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the public's perception of wrestling as being nothing but cheap entertainment. People that say stupid shit like "How can you watch that fake stuff?" and "Don't you know it's all fake?" and "That's nothing but a male soap opera" are all missing the point. Does attending a movie, a play, a magic show, an opera, a circus, or a concert instead of a wrestling card make one superior to another? Why? Do you think recording artists are really singing during every song about things that have happened in their lives? Movies which are “based on a true story” are nearly always sensationalized in order to draw audiences and entertain. Documentaries which present to us “the truth” can be tilted to prove a certain position. A magic show, like professional wrestling, is based on illusion and misdirection. But since professional wrestling consists of acts, parts, and intermissions just like plays and operas, isn't professional wrestling just a little bit better? It includes pieces of all, and thus seems to me a greater sum.
Even if you don't go to the wrestling shows, and only watch them on television, are you really going to tell me that they are less of an art form than some of the other shows that are out there? Of course not. And since wrestling is on every week with new episodes (other than, perhaps, during the holidays) you get more character involvement and development than you would with any other show out there. Wrestling may be "fake," and "predetermined," but that doesn't make it obviously lesser than any other form of entertainment one chooses to watch. Now, if you talk about it compared to legitimate sports, there's definitely an argument to be made, but I'll still take the characters, athleticism, and amazement of watching professional wrestling over just about anything out there, even when it's not quite as entertaining right now as I'd like it to be. Brock Lesnar recently said during an interview with ESPN's E60 news magazine show that professional wrestling is about 100 times harder than MMA, because you're on the road 250 to 300 days a year, wrestling 5 or 6 days a week, whereas in MMA you fight somewhere around two times per year, with six months to train between bouts.
If anyone would know, I'd think he would, so when people decry pro wrestling as being less than legitimate sports, I scoff and disagree. I love baseball, but some of the players are completely out of shape. You can't be that in pro wrestling. Football players play one game a week and get paid ridiculous sums for it. I am a huge fan of basketball, but those guys only play 2 or 3 days a week, and with an exception every 4 years, over half the teams have about 5 months to recover from the grind of the season before the next one starts. Professional wrestlers have the hardest entertainment job of them all, both physically and mentally. Not only are they on the road pretty much all the time, but they have to be very mindful of what their opponent(s) is doing and where they are at all times. To not do so would risk serious injury to every person involved in the match, whether it be an actual participant or a referee. And, of course, they have to deal with ignorant people who would rather decry them as participating in a fake sport than appreciate them for the athletes and actors they are. It's got to be pretty frustrating, don't you think?
So how do they deal with all of this? Well, probably one way is for them to just put everything aside mentally and think, "This is what I've always wanted to do, ever since I was a child. You take the good with the bad, and there are worse things in the world I could be doing and worse livings." As we now know (and as could easily be speculated), often this isn't enough and many of them turn to drugs and alcohol as a means of dealing with the hardness of the road, the separation from their families, and the stress involved with having the wellbeing of themselves and others literally in their own hands. But these recreational substances aren't the only materials used by professional wrestlers to get by, are they? If they were, there'd hardly be a need for the Wellness Policy instituted by the WWE. Sure, marijuana is illegal, but not really a harmful substance—far less so than alcohol. No, these men who put their bodies on the line for our entertainment have also been known to put steroids into their bodies in order to have the physique that has been desired ever since Vince McMahon became the king of the industry, and painkillers on top of them to try and recover from...well...pain.
{Interlude 1: I don't even remember what the fight was about. I just remember my younger brother (Trav) and I getting into a fight in our apartment in South Korea and me following him down to the sandy playground area that was at the back of the complex. I left him with a bloody lip and nose leaning against the cement wall of this little pit area, but I still managed to hurt myself worse, as I had to go to the hospital to have a small pebble removed from my elbow. I hate the blind, red rage that I used to be so quick to fly into.}
"All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation."--W.H. Auden
I am not, and never have been, one to decry those who use steroids to succeed in their chosen athletic endeavor. Are there risks to taking steroids? Of course there are, but the people taking them know the risks and if they choose to inject in order to earn themselves a larger reward, who am I to say they're wrong? Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa lit the baseball world on fire and brought the MLB back into popularity in 1998 after it had almost put itself out of business following the strike that started midway through the 1994 season and threatened to erase the '95 season, as well, by engaging in a race for the homerun record that electrified not only true fans of baseball, but the casual fans, as well. If you don't know what I'm talking about and would like a comparison, see pre-Stone Cold WWF vs. Stone Cold WWF/WWE. While McGwire and Sosa were hitting those long balls at a record pace, baseball executives, the media, and even fellow players were lauding what they were doing; knowing all the while that the likelihood that both of them were juiced up was incredibly high; and yet when Congress started investigating a few years ago, and Big Mac refused to speak about whether he'd used steroids or not and Slammin' Sammy pretended he didn't speak English, MLB washed their hands of them.
It didn't come as a shock, of course, but it certainly was a disgraceful way for a huge company to behave; Major League Baseball basically owed these two men their livelihood, or at least their continued success. By hitting a combined 176 balls out of the yard, the duo helped turn the public's distrust of our national pastime back into love. Is it ironic that they did it by using illegal substances to give themselves artificially enhanced strength and physique? Some would say so, but I ain't never seen a drug that could help a fella hit a baseball. It's still true that the hardest thing to do in sports is to swing at a round ball, with a round bat, and hit it square. As much as I was rooting for McGwire to break Roger Maris' thirty-seven year old record, I was rooting against Barry Bonds breaking McGwire's—but break it he did, and when last year (in the 2007 season) he broke Hank Aaron's career record for homers, not only did it appear to be a time of national mourning, but both Aaron and Commissioner Bud Selig refused to really acknowledge the accomplishment. That disgusted me just as much as wrestling fans turning on Chris Benoit for an act he did at the end of his life that may have had as much to do with things that happened to him in his career as the baseball players' use of drugs had on their record-shattering seasons.
While I don't hold anything against the athletes that use drugs, there have been times when I've had to really take a look at myself as a wrestling fan because of it. I didn't really think about it when I flipped on the news to find out that Brian Pillman was found dead of a heart attack in his hotel room, just about 3 hours south of where I was living at the time, but Pillman is kind of an exception to young wrestling deaths in the sense that he was in pain his entire life because of all the throat problems he had. Being on the road as a professional wrestler certainly didn't help any, but one has to believe he would have been in constant pain no matter what his chosen profession. But when Jerry Tuite—who was wrestling as Malice at the time, and who you might know better as The Wall from WCW if you know who he is at all—passed away, I went into such a deep thought about how my addiction to wrestling might be leading toward the deaths of pro wrestlers that I recruited former Main Pager Pt2 to discuss the situation during an edition of The X-Change. I wish I still had a copy of that around to link this to, but that's been lost in the ether with one of the many LOPForum resets.
While the USA Today article in which Scott Levy was interviewed and untimely deaths of professional wrestlers also made me stop and think, "What the hell's going on around here?" the bottom line is that I was still addicted to professional wrestling; to the spectacle that was the WWE and the amazing stuff that TNA was putting out at the time on a weekly pay per view basis. Wrestling may not be an actual drug, but there is a huge psychological aspect to it; to wanting to keep following not only the characters one has grown up with, but those who have eventually been put over by them and who--eventually--supplanted them. That addiction kept its firm hold on me until the morning of November 13, 2005. When Eddy died less than twenty-four hours before he was set to become World Heavyweight Champion, a little bit of the wrestling fan in me died and I no longer really cared about watching wrestling. I watched the tribute shows in a kind of stunned silence, as these people I had once known, but who were now strangers, wrestled for and spoke about the man who had made me into a believer by standing in the middle of the ring mashing down a mask with his foot. Nothing about the sport would ever be the same for me again.
{Interlude 2: Like I'm sure a lot of young boys do, my brothers and I started wrestling around the house after we started watching the WWF; and while Nic was the smallest, and thus easiest to pick up and slam onto couches, chairs, beds, or whatever, that didn't mean Trav and I didn't do suplexes and backbreakers and figure fours to each other—often in our parents' room. Given the number of times I landed on it from a vertical suplex position, it's a wonder their bed didn't break. Ah...good times.}
"At issue was the question whether this man's faith could prevail against a man whose equal faith it was that this society is sick beyond saving, and that mercy itself pleads for its swift extinction and replacement by another."--Whittaker Chambers
When I first read the news, I really wanted to write a tribute column, but since I felt like somebody had punched me in the gut I couldn't. Instead, I wrote a quick note mourning his death and reposted a column I had written after Wrestlemania XXI called Eddie's Song. I honestly didn't know at that time if I'd ever be able to write about wrestling again; I certainly didn't feel the same way about it. From what I remember I did keep writing, but not at the weekly pace I'd fully intended on maintaining throughout my main page run. Shit happens, though, and plans change. I did resume writing shortly after his death—probably the next week, though it could have been two. I'm not certain. When I did write again, though, it was a column suggesting ways that the WWF could use Eddie's death in their angles to try to make the best out of a bad situation. I don't regret doing so (and I still think it was a good idea) but I did get quite a few emails of reproachment for me even thinking along those lines. That's fine; each to their own. After that, I came close to quitting, even putting in my notice with Calvin before being convinced by Random that it was a bad idea and nobody in the Forums was ready for a spot anyway. I withdrew my resignation and Calvin accepted.
But I was no longer the writer I once was. I don't mean that my quality dipped, because I don't think it did, but even if I'm wrong, it certainly wasn't a drop that was easily noticeable. The fun of writing, though, had gone, just as the fun of watching wrestling had left me. It wasn't the same without Eddie; still isn't, really, and I didn't write as often, because it just wasn't as enjoyable as it was before he died. I wasn't even sure what the point of being a wrestling fan was anymore, much less what the point of being a wrestling columnist was. Instead of writing weekly, I wrote an average of around once a month, and when a time came that I hadn't written a column for over 6 weeks, the administrator of the site let me know about it and said that if I wasn't going to start writing regularly like I had agreed to that he'd like me to step down. That gave me a kick in the pants, and I finally wrote the Guerrero tribute column and continued to write every two weeks or so until the new year turned and I got busy with work and life and didn't. When I finally went to write a new column, I found that the posting site had changed and I no longer had access. I have to admit it was a little bit of a relief, because I was only writing out of a sense of obligation at that time.
Before Guerrero's death, though I still loved pro wrestling and still loved writing about it, I found more and more of my time being diverted to another pursuit. After about a year of watching The World Poker Tour on television and enjoying the hell out of watching the players play Texas Hold 'Em, I was invited to participate in a tournament at a friend's house. There turned out to be only four players, and we ended up playing two. The first one, I was the first out, but in the second one, I managed to win. A few months after that, the same friend mentioned to me that there were weekly tournaments being played at a local bowling alley with a $10 buy-in and cash pay outs for first and second places, and also for high hand. The first one of those I entered I also won, with my biggest hand coming on a semi-bluff with 7-2 of diamonds and two diamonds on the flop. I went all-in and had two callers. One guy had flopped a set of 8's, the other a set of 10's, and I hit the nine of diamonds on the turn to make my flush, triple up, knock one person out, and leave the other with $125 in chips. He was gone on the next hand; I finished off the last guy a few hands later; and I was hooked.
So, when a month or so after that a new bar league that allowed free play started, with prizes for 1st through 5th, points for 1st through 10th, and the opportunity for the best players to play at a final tournament each session for a chance to go to The World Series of Poker or a World Poker Tour event, it was pretty much automatic that I would go for it. I'd convinced Trav to start playing after I won that first tournament, and my wife, who was afraid to play at first—not wanting to waste the $10 because she felt that she wouldn't be very good—eventually consented to play, and the first time we all played in the same tournament we made the final table. After that it was almost automatic for them to join this new league as well, and soon it spread like wildfire in the area. At one point, there were 7 tournaments per week (at different bars) that one could play at. Normally we played 3: Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays; occasionally on Saturdays and Sundays. It's safe to say that poker was taking over professional wrestling as my favorite activity, despite the gas, alcohol, long nights, and meals out it was costing.
{Interlude 3: As we transitioned from adolescence to adulthood, Trav and I would try to get together for every major WWF pay per view, especially making a point to watch The Royal Rumble and Wrestlemania together. So it was with the great anticipation of tradition, fellowship, and Bret kicking The Undertaker's ass that I showed up at his house in order to watch SummerSlam '97. He had a circular driveway at the time, and always parked right in front of the house, while I would park perpendicularly about 10 feet back. I noticed his headlights were on when I arrived, and went to shut them off and make sure his truck would still start. I didn't know you had to push the clutch down, because I never learned to drive a stick shift. Well, the truck started rolling backwards, and I was fricking scared for my life, thinking I was going to hit the trees, since I couldn't get the fricking power brakes to work without any freaking power. Instead, I hit my car, accordioning up the hood and wrecking the grill.}
"Love can be magic, but magic can sometimes just be an illusion."--Javan
It wouldn't be unfair to say that poker took over our lives for a couple of years. I would tell people at work that I had four jobs, two of them being writing here at LOP and playing poker. I truly saw it that way, though my wife hated it because I viewed the bar leagues as my ticket out. Out of poverty, out of debt, out of anonymity, out of the daily grind. Just out. My brother and I both felt that way, and we were both very good players. I believe—and always will—that we were the best players around here when we were on our game. The thing about poker, though, is that the best player doesn't always win. All you can do in Texas Hold'em in the end is try and make the best decisions and get your money in with the best hand. Once you've done that, it's really all up to the cards. So we had our share of defeats, but we also had our share of triumphs, and if we could just catch a break on the right day, maybe we'd get our shot at trying to make a living playing this fickle game we loved. Earlier I mentioned poverty and though I was being a little harsh, neither of us had ever been well off, so while we were trying to play our way into a shot at the big time, we obviously weren't going to be able to afford to buy our way into a World Poker Tour or World Series of Poker event.
Honestly, while we both really wanted a career in poker, and wanted to do well enough to make a living in it comfortably, we knew it was a long shot to make it through the leagues because it was basically a one-shot deal each six month session and there were thousands of players each session. The odds were against us...but so what. We were believers, and not just my brother and I; my wife was, too. As much as she hated me referring to poker as a job, it wasn't because she didn't think I could succeed in it or that she doubted my abilities, it was simply that she didn't want me to think of it that way. To her, at the point it stopped being fun, it was no longer something worth doing; it would feel like a chore to me. That's certainly an understandable belief and way of thinking, but it wasn't the poker itself that was going to get me thinking that way, it was the aforementioned grind. To make ends meet and be able to enjoy the toys that we want, my wife and I both work two jobs, and to go from a midnight job to the day job, to poker and then back to a midnight job (sometimes with one of us covering for the other until that person was done playing when the one was knocked out early) got to be tiresome.
But I never tired of the game itself, just what I was doing to my body to play it. I had found a new addiction, and this time instead of going it alone I had brought along my brother and my wife. My wife came along at first because she wanted to spend time with me. Then she saw how people were enjoying it, how I played, and how it made me feel and decided that she wanted to give it a shot. Then, as I think I mentioned above, I pestered Trav until he finally came out and gave it a try and he got hooked, too. He got hooked the worst, actually. While Mellisa and I would play 4 or so times a week, Trav would usually tack on Sunday and maybe a pick-up game with friends on a weekend night. You see, he had pulled himself out of the wrestling thing a while back. He still watched the pay per view shows with me when I asked him, and we still tended to get together for the big ones, but he wasn't as passionate about it anymore as I was. Trav never became a member of the IWC, because he wasn't addicted to it like I was, so he wasn't replacing a habit, he was just forming a new one. Soon poker would become one of our primary sources of conversation.
We'd talk each other through hands that had happened, analyzing the moves that were made by both us and our opponents (who we usually referred to as idiots or jackasses—or at least I did) to see whether we had played the hand perfectly or where we had gone wrong. This happened both with the heartwrenching defeats and the heartswelling triumphs. Just like two wrestling fans analyzing the highs and lows of a match or the career of a wrestler, we reveled in recounting the wins and mourned the destruction on the river as our opponent had hit a two-outer to take all (or nearly all) of our chips. If you think about it, while it isn't scripted, poker has a lot in common with professional wrestling. Most hands end up being one on one contests; there's money, pride, and championships on the line; and the person who makes the most mistakes is usually the one left beaten, wounded, and staring up at the lights—this last isn't an exaggeration as I will get to it a little later. What they don't have in common is that—despite Phil Ivey and Eric Lindgren—you don't have to be in great physical shape to be a successful poker player. There are occasions now that I wish that weren't the case.
{Interlude 4: Years later...I can't remember how many, but I'm thinking it was something like 5, I was married and had inherited two beautiful children through said wedlock. My wife and I were on the way up to watch the Royal Rumble with Trav, but we got behind a damned snow plow on a two lane road and ended up having to drive about 30 miles an hour for about 60 miles. The time we'd been planning to have for fellowship and videogames was gone, and he even ended up pausing the show (DVR can be a wonderful thing) until we got up there to watch it. When we arrived, he had pizza, pop, and one of his wonderful smiles waiting for us and a good time was had by all. Mostly at the expense of my wife, if I recall correctly. God, he loved to tease her.}
"If you run, you might lose. If you don't run, you're guaranteed to lose."--Jesse Jackson
The two of us had planned on doing a lot of things, and you always think you have time to do them. After all, we were both young, right? I encourage you that if you have a family member you're close to that you want to plan a trip with or do something with, do it now because you never know when your time window to do so will be over. As I said before, finances were never something Trav and I had much of, and we let that get in the way of what we wanted to do. Well, that and a quick sellout. We planned to go to Wrestlemania XXII in Chicago. We figured it's fairly close to us—within driving distance, in fact—was something we'd both always wanted to see, and were going to give it a shot. The problem was that the tickets sold out within two minutes the morning that they went on sale and we weren't able to get any. So, we decided, we'll do something else. Maybe go to New York to see the sights; go see a show on Broadway, go see David Letterman filmed live; take in a game at Yankee Stadium and try to plan it for the spring so that we would be able to catch both a Yankees game and Knicks game, since both those home venues were holy ground for sports fans.
So, that was one idea. Another was for us to go to Vegas. Seems obvious, right? Two young men just learning how to play poker but finding themselves very good at it; what could be better than to go to a town that's known for its high class casinos, right? Right. Of course, Atlantic City is also known for its casinos and is actually the city on which one of the great board games of all time (Monopoly) is based, but I don't think it ever crossed our minds to go there. You see, Atlantic City may be one of the few cities where you can legally gamble in the U.S., but it's not the gambling capital of the world the way Las Vegas is and it's not the one amateur poker players with stars in their eyes think of because that's not where Bininon's is, it's not where the World Series of Poker is, and it's not where the movie that portrays a poker player/hustler's life makes out to be the be-all, end-all for a professional poker player. I'm speaking, of course, of Rounders, which—along with the tremendous success of a 27 year old accountant named Chris Moneymaker, who got into the WSOP on a $40 Internet satellite and ended up winning the whole thing—was partly responsible for the poker explosion in America.
In any case, those were the things we thought about doing and we started making tentative plans to do one or the other, which, since we were undecided, meant trying to save up some of our frugal earnings so that we could go somewhere together and have some fun. Then I happened across the televised final table of a regionalized World Poker Tour style organization called "The Heartland Poker Tour," which has an interesting format that gives players the opportunity to play for a decent amount of money without having to put out a huge amount because they have four qualifying tournaments, in which the top 25% get into the main event to play for the cash. In addition to that, they have super satellites that allow you to buy in for about a 10th of the qualifying tournament and play against 9 others to win a seat into the qualifier. It's really a brilliant set-up and is run very high class, and I decided I wanted to be a part of it. I mentioned it to Trav and looked to see when there'd be one in our area.
Luckily, around the same time as Wrestlemania, we had a tournament near our area and it happened to be at the hotel that had the largest indoor waterpark in the United States or the World or the known galaxy or some such, so we decided that all five of us would go (me, Trav, Mellisa, Cody, and Michele) for a half family vacation, half career opportunity—but just as always seemed to, something came up. The transmission went out on Trav's truck and he could no longer afford to go. I told him I'd pay for the hotel room and gas and stuff and give him money toward playing one of the satellite tournaments, but he refused. He didn't want to go there on my dime; that's just the kind of guy he was. It saddened me at the time, because it meant that once again we'd have to postpone a trip together, but now it kind of enrages me, because while I made a bad decision and called for all my chips pre-flop with Ace-Queen of diamonds and walked into pocket kings, maybe he could have done better. Maybe he wouldn't have felt an emotional stab in the heart that felt like his dreams were pouring out like blood the way I did. And now he'll never get the chance.
{Interlude 5: One of the nicest things about changing careers and moving back up to the Iron Range from Duluth was that we were closer to my family by more than 2/3 of the distance, so shows that Trav and I had enjoyed independently, such as The Shield and The Wire we began to watch together and afterwards we would play Madden or Blitz or Smackdown on the PS2. We were both really competitive, so it wasn't uncommon for the occasional "Fuck you" to be said, but it was always with love and affection. I really miss those times, and the last time we were together outside the hospital I told him that and we had made plans to start doing that kind of stuff together again.}
"We can't imagine time running out, and God punishes us for what we can't imagine."--Stephen King
So we weren't able to go to Thief River Falls together, and since we planned to in lieu of going to New York, Atlantic City, Las Vegas, Australia, the moon, or wherever else in the known universe we could have chosen, we never did really get to take a trip outside of Minnesota together, though we did have a couple of fun sojourns. We both qualified for the state tournament for the Minnesota Poker League that was held in February of 2007 at Shooting Star in Mahnomen, MN and so we drove up there together and stayed in a hotel and gambled and stuff there. We even got knocked out of the tournament at around the same time—pretty much back to back hands at different tables, as I recall. He went out holding big slick (Ace/King) against pocket 8's, while I went out holding pocket 6's, hitting a set on the turn, with my opponent rivering a set of K's on the river when we'd both just called an all-in by another member. Despite the brutal—and consecutive—ways the two of us were knocked out, we still had a blast playing both in the tournament and the table games, and, of course, conversing on the drive together.
Preceding that by about 4 months was the first of what has now become an annual event called After Dark Horrorfest, and we decided about 4 days before it started that we were going to go to it. That first year, it was set up to be a sort of Horror film festival (as the name, of course, implies) that took place over three days and showed "8 Films To Die For." They really weren't. Some of the movies were out and out terrible, such as The Abandoned, Unearthered, and Reincarnation, some were mediocre, such as Dark Ride and Wicked Little Things, but there were some truly good movies there (The Hamiltons and Gravedancers), and one (Penny Dreadful) was to me an instant classic that I couldn't wait to be released on DVD. If you've seen it, you know what I'm talking about; if you haven't, go out and get it. It's a great idea for a horror film and executed nearly flawlessly. The films themselves aren't the point, though. It's the time we were able to spend together doing something that we both enjoy. When it comes right down to it, after all, life is all about the little moments, so one might as well spend the time they can enjoying those moments doing what they love with the people they love.
Sadly, I'm out of those moments, and when I had my last few of those with Trav, I had no idea they would be our last. I've spent a lot of time feeling guilty lately, as one does. I know there's nothing I can do about it now and no way I could have known it then, but logic doesn't affect emotion. One thing that Trav hated, yet tolerated, was mine and my parents' desire to play pinochle from time to time. We were planning on playing New Year's Day 2008, but I didn't know I needed to get there early because Trav had to work midnights that night. I woke my wife up from her nap after her own midnight shift and she told me she was too tired, so I went just by myself, and found out he was leaving right after dinner, so wouldn't be sticking around to play cards with us. When I mentioned that this New Year's, my wife said it was her fault, but how can I assign her that blame? She was tired; she needed rest. I wish I had that one more memory of playing the game with Trav, how more often than not we teamed up so as to not lose a competitive game to our Mom and Dad, but there's no blame to be had; we couldn't have known.
Sometimes things fall apart so quickly that there's no way to catch up; no way to compensate; no way to even full understand exactly what's going on. I was shopping with my daughter in Barnes and Noble and texting with my brother about what then seemed like little things. He asked me how the roads were, and I told him they were fine except there was poor visibility, but that there were idiot drivers driving too fast for the conditions, while he replied that there always are. He asked me how I was, because I'd been quite sick with diarrhea for a couple of weeks, but it was clearing up and I told him that my stomach was feeling quite a bit better. I asked how he was and he said that he was sick. I didn't think a lot of it, though, of course, I hoped that he would feel better. I had no way of knowing that 3 days later I'd receive an email from Mom telling me that Trav was on his way to the hospital in Duluth—60 miles away—for emergency surgery for a bowel obstruction. I got a hold of my wife and let her know we needed to get down to Duluth to be there for him; unfortunately we'd be making two similar trips a little over a week later.
{Interlude 6: There were a lot of things that Trav and I enjoyed together. I've already told you that one was wrestling, and that he's the one that got me hooked on it. Poker was another; certain television shows and horror movies were still more. The day after New Year's 2008, we spent our final fun time together going out to dinner and then seeing Alien vs. Predator Requiem. It was a piece of everyday life, in a way, but in another way it was pretty near perfect, and if that's the last memory I have of Trav as the vibrant, awesome person he always was, I could do worse.}
"If I could walk on water, if I could tell you what's next, I'd make you believe...I'd make you forget. So come on, get higher, loosen my lips; faith and desire in the swing of your hips. Just pull me down hard and drown me in love."--Matt Nathanson
I've done enough foreshadowing in the foregoing sections for you to know what came next, but still it might be cathartic for me to tell you anyway. My brother, Travis Wade Sebunia, never got out of the hospital. He went in on January 15, 2008 to have his impacted bowel corrected, along with a fix of the hernia that was the direct cause of it. He died January 28, 2008, meaning that the last two weeks of his life were spent in a medical care facility. I don't think it's necessary for me to tell you that he had multiple surgeries afterward; I'm sure you can guess that they had to to try and save his life. Nor is it necessary for you to know that I was racked with guilt for months over unknowingly leaving the hospital one night while doctors were fighting to save his life. But, again, it's necessary for me to tell. What could I have done for Trav? Nothing, really. But I could have stayed; I could have been there for him; I could have called our parents to let them know that they should get there as soon as possible. And I could have saved myself some guilty feelings and at least a few sleepless nights. I know it's unchangeable, but it's still something that caused me a lot of heartache needlessly.
I know this isn't uncommon. Guilt is often something that accompanies grief, and no matter how much my family told me I "shouldn't beat myself up" about it, I still did. I've come to understand that's natural, and I guess I'd say that would describe everything else that happened around the same time. My wife and I and my parents got hotel rooms in Duluth to be close to Trav, and we spent as much time as we could with each other and in his Intensive Care Unit room with him. We prayed for him, we spoke to him, we loved him. Unfortunately, none of that or the doctors' efforts were enough, and despite the fact that all four of us were there the better part of the five days before and that my surviving brother, Nic, was with us the night before, his death occurred with only Mom at the hospital. I arrived there before anyone else, after my Dad had come by my work to tell me what happened. I'll never forget the first things my parents said to me on the day my brother died—Dad: "He didn't make it." Mom: "I'm so glad you're here."—or my responses to them: punching Dad in the chest, saying, "No, he's not gone!" and giving Mom a silent, tearful hug, knowing he was and that nothing would ever be the same.
I'm not going to describe the funeral or the days after, because what would be the point? If I had to use one word to describe all of our feelings about his ordeal and the result of it, it would be "devastation." But mostly what I felt for months afterward was black and empty. The best person I ever knew, probably the best person I'll ever know, was gone and I honestly couldn't see a way to keep going on, nor did I really want to. My wife did her best to support me, I suppose, but I didn't want to be supported. I wanted my brother back and nothing else would do. In those black days, I have to say that I didn't care about much. I can't really remember anything that happened during them. What kept me going? The love of my wife, kids, parents, and brothers, mostly. Trav may have been gone, but I knew he'd want me to continue, even if I didn't exactly profess to care what he'd want at the time. What else? I distracted myself by things that are unimportant except when you've lost someone essential. I did what I could to take my mind off my loss by reading comics, playing videogames, and making love. There was a lot of sex during those trying days, which I've also come to understand is very common.
Apparently sex can be a great comfort in times of grief and is a natural reaction; something about it being life-affirming or something. I don't know about that, I'm not a psychiatrist, but I do know that it felt good at a time when nothing much did. It wasn't until I saw a news item on Lords of Pain that something actually started to make me feel emotionally better. Not surviving, not distracted, but actually better. See, Trav had two insurance policies, and though I was the sole beneficiary, I made the decision to split what was left over from the funeral expenses between my parents, my brother, and myself. That still left a decent chunk of money for my wife and I that I didn't really know what we were going to do with, except put it away for a rainy day...or maybe down the road use it as a down payment for a house or something. Instead, we ended up using most of it on life—but before we did, we bought a package for myself, my wife, and our two children to go to Wrestlemania, because that's something Trav and I wanted to do, and it's something I want to share with my children in his honor. I want them to have that opportunity I never had. The opportunity he never had.
{Final Interlude: Two years after the incident of the truck and the grille, we actually attended SummerSlam live in Minneapolis, MN, one of several WWF shows that we went to but the only Pay Per View (and it was a great one, as every championship in the WWE changed hands on this night; there was a great promo by Chris Jericho on top the Lion's Den; and a great Triple Threat WWF Title match between Steve Austin, Mick Foley, and Triple H. We had Randy Moss sitting right above us and Edge and Christian go right by us as they entered the arena). The excitement at the arena was palpable, and I even held up a sign asking Mellisa to marry me, but what I'll hold in my heart is that Trav and I were able to go there and experience a WWF PPV together.}
"When you get just a complete sense of blackness or void ahead of you, that somehow the future looks an impossible place to be, and the direction you are going seems to have no purpose, there is this word despair which is a very awful thing to feel.--Stephen Fry
Until then, I guess I'm just biding my time. What do I expect to happen at this event, other than fun and enjoying some time with my family and the biggest wrestling event of all time? I don't know. Maybe nothing; maybe some type of catharsis. All I know for sure is that making the decision to go lightened my heart in a way nothing else had to that point. It was like instead of trying to stop a flood of negative emotions from drowning me, I was able to divert at least some of that flood by opening up a new channel by which I could feel close to my brother. I don't know what I feel about the afterlife. If you've read Drugs or Jesus, you know that I don't even know that I believe in God anymore, but I'd like to think that there's another level of life somewhere out there and that the best person I've ever know has sort of graduated to it. My biggest fear of what happens when you die has always been that you become nothing, but with knowledge of what you used to be. If that's the case, I suppose all the times I seem to feel him or the weird happenings I attribute to his sense of humor are moot, and really don't mean nothing at all.
I really hope that isn't the case, though, and sometimes the way things happen doesn't really leave any room for doubt in my mind, but there are other times that I wonder, and those are the times that it hurts the worst that he's gone; the times that I doubt that there's anything out there for us once we've left the mortal plane. I hurt the worst then, because that means that he's really gone forever and I'll never see him, hear him, joke with him again, talk to him, or give him a hug again. I'm hoping that when we're in Houston, cheering on his favorite wrestler, Shawn Michaels, in his attempt to break The Streak, or even just being there in honor of what we always wanted to do, and what he allowed me and my family to do, that I'll feel his presence in my heart. That kind of emotional high, and connection, may not happen, but it's something I'm hoping for. Until then, like I said, I'm biding my time. There are other things we're going to do while we're in Houston, not the least of which is going to the White Tiger Exhibit at the aquarium downtown there, but the centerpoint for me is going to be trying to connect with my brother at the 25th edition of the granddaddy of them all.
Is that going to be a watershed moment for me? I don't know; there's no way for me to predict the future or what kind of emotions are actually going to pour into me—or out of me—at the event. It may be the end of my journey as a wrestling fan, though it's more likely that it's simply the end of my journey as a fan of the WWE. I know that, and I've said it several times since my return to the main page, but I've also kind of had a change of heart lately. I hate spoilers; to me they are the very worst thing about the Internet Wrestling Community. How much more exciting would it have been if I didn't know that Christian had likely resigned with the WWE, and would we have gotten a different story if that was the case? What if I didn't know that Triple H was married to Stephanie McMahon in real life? Would that change the way I feel about the product at all? The only guy I can remember being helped by the Internet is Edge, and I think all of us have been hurt by it. Pulling away from the IWC would be extremely hard for me, I think. But I'm going to try, at least somewhat, because I think that the only alternative to me not watching anymore is to try to watch as my kids do; through a child's eyes.
And I really believe now that I must keep watching to keep myself sane, because once the hole in my heart could no longer be filled by anything else I was trying to use, it was returning to this place that helped me heal a little. I was trying to suppress my feelings by focusing on other things in life, and trying to find a way to keep surviving. The dream I once had is dead; there's no way I'll ever be a professional poker player. I tried to keep playing for a few months, and I did rather well, but it wasn't the same; the passion I had for it was gone, because so is the person who drove me. Writing, though? It's hard, but it's rewarding, and it helps you get your feelings on paper, out in the open, and out of your heart where all they can really do is burn it like acid. I need to go to Wrestlemania. Need to, I say, because this isn't just for my kids, my family, my brother, or my connection to all of them. This is for my very survival—not just as a wrestling fan, but as a person. I started writing again because I had an idea that wouldn't get out of my head, but I kept writing because it soothes my soul. Without finding my fanhood again, there is nothing to write about, and nothing to keep the voices in my head from hurting me so bad that I want to join my brother. I'm on The Road To Wrestlemania because every other way lies despair.
R.I.P. Travis Wade Sebunia
1976-2008
You can send any comments by email to me at XanManX@hotmail.com with the words "Northern Star" or "feedback" in the subject line; or, if you're a member of the LoP Forums you can click here to leave feedback, as well. I will, of course, be in Houston for the next few days, so I won't be able to respond right away, but everything will be read and responded to eventually.
The Northern Star will rise again, until then I wish you...
