What A Feeling!
By James Greene
2:41 PM on 5/14/2002


Compared to many who frequent FWrestling.com, I’m a novice. I’m inexperienced. I’m still relatively green. But for the last three and a half months, I have had an absolute blast overseeing the birth and infancy of a fantasy wrestling organization that I helped build with a handful of other smart and dedicated people.

At the end of January I found myself in a pot of controversy in another wrestling organization. The president of said organization had a few ideas for the future of his game, and I like many other people, staff members and managers alike, were curious as to what these ideas were. But the president refused to budge on his self-imposed policy of secrecy. He shrouded his plans, never revealing them to anybody, raising suspicion amongst a portion of his customer base. Using an in-character alter-ego I’d created two and a half years beforehand, I produced an editorial that questioned the president’s logic. Perhaps deep down I was personally offended that I was not let in on the president’s ideas. After all, I felt I had a right to know. I was one of four league presidents who served under the uber-president, and it was clear that his ideas of the future were going to greatly affect not only the league I was running, but each of the other three. So perhaps I blurred the lines between fantasy and reality and let that get the better of me. But what’s done is done.

My editorial struck a nerve with the second-in-command, and within a few hours I found myself having to fend off personal attacks in a debate that was started in-character. I decided my best course of action would be to leave, but I let each and every manager know that perhaps in the future I would build my own game. My own organization. Perhaps it would be competition for the league from which I was departing. That sealed my fate.

The next day all of my access to the organization had been cut off. No e-mail. No access to the message boards. I had been in effect removed from the organization. Any money owed to me (it was a pay-to-play
operation) was in the mail via check. I was out with no chance to get back in.

I was disappointed, but at the same time I was relieved. I was burning out from the workload of promoting three cards a week and monthly pay-per-views while also producing the organization’s weekly online newsletter. At the same time my personal life was spent searching for a full-time job. Money was a little tight, but through it all I was still having fun. Despite the quick and terse severing of relations with the fantasy wrestling operation, I wasn’t all that sad to leave.

What transpired after my dismissal still shocks me to this day. Without going into details, a group of outspoken managers went to bat for me. They explained their reasoning to the president, but he wasn’t budging. I was accused of playing “political cards,” somehow using my influence as a league president to dictate the future of the game. I admit, I was overzealous in my declaration to possibly create a new game in the future. It very well could have been just the result of a night’s worth of frustration and anger directed at somebody who couldn’t have a logical, truth-based debate. But I’d felt I’d been wronged in the situation. Others appeared to feel the same way. Managers began to protest, and by the end of the night the wrestling organization had closed because of the windstorm that my removal had created.

The next day I was flooded with instant messages asking me about building a new league. What would be needed? What could people do to help? How soon could we be up and operational? My head was spinning with everything that was going on. In 36 hours, I went from dissident to outcast to de facto leader of a fantasy wrestling revolution. What the hell was going on?

Damned if I knew, but I got a huge rush out of it. During the next seven days, many of the same managers who supported me during the controversy were lining up to help with the new venture. How was this going to be done? Meetings were held once or twice a week to determine the overall structure of the organization. It was to be set up very similarly to the previous operation, though with a few minor distinctions. Admittedly the similarities between where we all used to be and what we were building were striking, raising the ire of our former boss. But we pressed on.

Many of us had limited web building experience. Sure, most of us had edited pages, but building them from scratch was an entirely different animal. FrontPage turned out to be a Godsend (thank you Bill Gates) and made the process that much simpler. We pooled our ideas and eventually came up with a web design, certainly not perfect, but it definitely suited our needs and is open to improvement.

Initially my goal was to open by March 24th. That gave us about 42 days to put everything together and make it operational. While we built, managers kept in touch with us about our progress. It was great to know despite the downtime, people were interested in what kind of product we might produce.

Winter turned to spring on the calendar and we were just about ready to open. After all of the hard work and the effort, the late nights building pages and settling on concepts, the three hour meetings in a chat room plotting the course of the league’s future, it all came together, but at a price. Initially we intended to open with four wrestling leagues under our banner, three pay-to-play and one free and open to the public. Unfortunately due to smaller than anticipated manager participation, we knocked it down to two pay-to-plays. The 40-plus day downtime may have been too long of a wait for some. Others lost their zest for the genre and decided to take a longer break, intending to re-evaluate their desire for the genre in the future.

We missed my goal by a day. Shows officially began running on March 25, conveniently a Monday. The business was a-go. We were up and running.

What a feeling!

The sense of accomplishment that I felt that day was amazing, almost indescribable. There were times when I had my doubts about the viability of the organization. Manager sentiment had soured towards fantasy wrestling because of the controversy on February 1st. Some people vowed to quit playing the game altogether, citing concerns about politics and whatnot. I couldn’t blame them. I, of all people, should have been the most cynical after my dismissal. But maybe it was my naïveté that drove me to continue the work until the deal was done.

Looking back, the undertaking has been nothing short of astonishing. Three months ago I never would have thought in my wildest dreams that I could have played a hand in putting together such an operation. As it is, my overall experience in fantasy wrestling will begin its fourth year in July 2002, still making me an infant compared to those who have been involved in the genre since the 80s.

People whose experience dates back to the Reagan administration undoubtedly have a better handle on the genre than I do. But the one thing I’ve grown to appreciate about fantasy wrestling is that there is always an opening for a newbie. Whether it is a small e-fed operating on a free server, or a conglomeration of leagues using revenue from subscriptions to generate prizes for the handlers, fantasy wrestling will always be an ever-growing and endless part of the internet. There are no boundaries. The genre is as limited as the imaginations of its participants.

It makes for a hell of an experience.