Getting into the business...



Ernie Ballz, 2002, my first year in...

 So I have been wrestling as "the Rockshow" Ernie Ballz for 10 years as of this year.  I figured that I would start telling some of my stories from over the years and giving some opinions on the business, and whatnot.  I guess the first thing to do is to give you the story of how I got to where I am today.  There's a lot to talk about in this first blog, so I hope everyone enjoys it.

Pro wrestling is something that has always interested me.  I used to watch wrestling when I was REALLY young with my dad, but only got to watch about 30 minutes of RAW, because my bedtime was 9:30.  Being a big fan of Ninja Turtles and Power Rangers as kid, wrestling kind of went to the wayside,  but once the NWO and ECW came around, I was hooked again.

I was totally a WCW and ECW kid through and through, without a doubt.  WWF was always just too hokey and whatnot at the time for me.  Screw Papa Shango & Marc Mero, I wanted to see Dean Malenko, Chris Jericho, and all of the other cruiserweights on WCW, plus all 5,000 members of the NWO, especially Scott Norton and Vincent.  Ha ha.

My friends JJ, Shane, and myself actually got so into wrestling that we started our own trampoline wrestling league, which was obviously called TCW - Trampoline Championship Wrestling.  We would meet up on a Friday nights after school and basically just bounce around and hit moves on one another or smash pizza boxes over our heads.  There was no structure to it or any actual wrestling taking place, but we thought we were the shit, and that's all that mattered.  Eventually all of our bouncey-bounce fun came to a crashing hault when my friend JJ did a swanton bomb onto the trampoline and completely busted it.  It was fun while it lasted and is something that I will always remember like it was yesterday.

I played in punk bands all through junior high and high school though, so actually becoming a pro wrestler was just kind of one of those "that would be cool" type of things.  Up until the age of 17 I thought that my band was going to get a record deal and "make it big."  What I did not know at the time was that we fucking sucked ass and could hold a tune in a bucket.  Finally, I just flat-out got sick and tired of being in bands and dealing with other people's shit, so I quit playing altogether.

It was the Spring of my senior year of high school and I needed something new to do.  I had already started looking at different pro wrestling schools that I could go train at and actually found one in Toledo, which was only like 40 minutes aways from me.  This was perfect!!! 

At the time I was working at the recreation center in my hometown of Fremont, OH as an ice guard, which is basically a life guard on ice.  I came in one day to pick up my whopping $20 paycheck so that I could pay for gas and saw a flyer on the front desk that said "PRO WRESTLING" with todays date on it.  WTF?!!?  Wrestling?  Here?  No way!!!  I asked the girl at the front desk what it was all about and she told me that the "wrestling people" (love that term, BTW) were in the gym setting up if I wanted to go talk to them.

I walked into the gym and just about shit my pants as I got my first look at an actual wrestling ring sitting in front of me.  Holy shit.  My manager at the time was out there talking to this big-ass guy and called me over to him.  I walked up to them and introduced myself.  The guy I was talking to was Geoff Scott (not the drumboy from Canada, a different one), and he owned the Millennium Wrestling Federation, which was the same place that I had been checking into training at!!!  Great Scott!!!  They are here, in my hometown!!!

So I hung around the entire day talking to all of the wrestlers and continuing to talk to Geoff about training.  He told me to hang out and check the show out to see what I thought.  I did, and at the time, it was amazing.  Looking back, there were like 20 people in the crowd and most of the "talent" had no f'n clue what they were doing.  There was also a really annoying dude sitting next to me the entire time (we will get to that later though).  After the show, Geoff Scott told me to come up the following week to do a "tryout."  Without even thinking I said "hell yeah!" 

Now, I don't totally remember the actual reaction that my parents gave me when I told them that I wanted to be a pro wrestler, but it was probably something like "are you f'n kidding me?"  Ha ha.  They were not fans at first, to say the least, and even continue to tell me to quit to this day.  It know that they are just looking out for my best interest and safety though, so it's cool.

At the time, I drove a 1989 Chevy Celebrity and had never driven any farther than across town.  My mom decided that if I was going to make a trip to Toledo by myself, that I should take her phone with me, just in case.  I packed some shorts and a cutoff t-shirt and made my way up to Toledo right after school for my "big tryout."

MWF ran out of a mall in Northern Toledo called the Northtowne Mall, which we properly dubbed the "Ghost Towne Mall," because no one ever came there.  The "school" was in an old Leather Unlimited store or some shit like that also, which gave us that much more "street-cred" (as they say on the streets nowadays).  We had a floor ring in front of the building which was used for our "house shows" and it felt like you were falling on a giant picnic table, and then we had a big ring that was used for "traveling shows" in the back part which used to be Leather Unlimited's store room.

I am not going to outright trash talk anyone at the MWF school, so let's just say that some people were okay, and most were not.  Walking in, I looked around and saw that most of the guys in there were either fat, old, or partially retarded.  Considering the fact that I played football in high school, was in pretty good shape, and younger than anyone else there, I felt that I had a pretty good chance overall.  There really were a few gems in that bunch of guys that I started with who actually had some really good potential though.

When I got to the school, there was another guy there who I believe was in his mid to late 20's and looked like a chubbier version of One Man Gang, so we will call him 1.5 Man Gang.  I followed the 1.5 Man Gan into the "office" at the school and talked to Geoff Scott for awhile.  I don't remember the entire conversation, but it had something to do with us becoming stars and whatnot.  Sounded good to me.

My actual "tryout" consisted of learning to bump (fall down), running the ropes, and taking one body slam from Geoff, which hurt like hell and was the only time he ever stepped into the ring with me at all.  Geoff basically gave us the breakdown of how tuition works and said that if we showed up for the next practice, then he would know we were serious.  Hell yeah, I was a fucking pro wrestler, you better believe that I was coming to the next practice.

I don't want to go into too much detail about the MWF right now, mainly because there are so many stories from there that I plan on telling over time.  Let's just put it this way, it was a way for me to get a foot in the door of pro wrestling.  That's about it.

What I do want to say about the MWF is that my total tuition to train was like $2,500.00 and I only paid about $1,500.00 total.  Main reason for that is because I eventually realized that I was not actually being "trained" at all, which is what I was supposed to be paying for in the first place.  I'm pretty sure that I got a lot of heat for that and that people took it as me being egotistical or whatever, but I don't really care.  I was paying for a service, and that service was not being provided.  End of story.

MWF basically drove itself into the ground because of bad management.  Geoff Scott ended up selling the "company" to 2 of the wrestlers for an outlandish amount of money and things just went downhill from there.  I started looking for work elsewhere and stopped by every now and then to see some of the guys for awhile until the MWF finally just shit down.

So at this time, I was getting booked here and there in Michigan and starting to pay my dues and whatnot.  It was like the end of my 2nd year in the business and I realized that I still had no idea what the hell I was doing.  One person that I was still talking to on a regular basis at this time from MWF was a guy by the name of Brian Bender, and we decided to start riding together to a lot of these shows to try to get booked.

Remember the annoying guy that was sitting next to me at that first MWF show?  Well, funny enough, that guy ended up being Brian Bender.  Bender and I apparently worked together at the rec. center in Fremont, but we don't really remember it that well.  Anways, it is funny that the two of us would be sitting right next to each other during that MWF show, given the history that the two of us would create together.

Bender and I went up to a place called Price of Glory Wrestling, which was run by former WWF Superstar and UFC Original, Dan "the Beast" Severn.  Honestly, the only reason that we even got a spot on the show was because of Johnny Dynamo and Jack Thriller, who were two of Dan Severn's trainees that we wrestled with at MWF.  They basically told us to show up to the show and enter the battle royal that they were having, and more than likely we would be able to get a spot on their next show.  Long story short, we worked the show, got booked for a few more of their shows, and then were asked if we wanted to be a tag team.

The idea of being a tag team had never even crossed my mind.  I had wrestled in a tag team while in the MWF with a guy named Zaden Storm and we called ourselves XTC (have absolutely no idea why).  Bender and I talked it over and realized that being a tag team would probably get us more bookings overall, so we figured that we would give it a shot.  The more that we started thinking about things and talking, we realized that a lot of our favorite people to watch were tag teams.  The Brainbusters and the Hart Foundation are the two that come to mind off the top of my head.

Mark Pennington, who ran POG (Price of Glory), asked us to come up with some sort of tag team name so that he could announce us for the next show as an actual team.  I told Bender about an idea that I had of taking 2 guys with completely different wrestling styles, sticking them together as a team, and calling them the Clash.  Bender liked the idea, considering he had more of a basic style and I had more of a flashy style.

Bender and I ended up tagging as the Clash for about 6 years total, and in my opinion, become one of the best teams in the midwest.  But when we started tagging, it was only my 3rd year in the business and Bender's 2nd, and we realized that we still really didn't know what the hell we were doing.  I had a decent idea of how to wrestle and put on a good match, but we felt like we needed to brush up on some things.

At this time, a guy by the name of Mr. Main Event told me that he was opening his own wrestling school and asked if Bender and I would like to be his guinea pigs so that he could brush up on training guys.  Mr. Main Event did not train at MWF or anything, he just wrestled for them every now and then, so that is how we met him.  In fact, he was actually trained by Al Snow at the famous Bodyslammers Gym in Lima, OH.  Obviously, I had no problem telling him that I would be at the school as many days a week as he wanted me to be.

Starting with Mr. Main Event at his "Wrestling Room", as he called it, was not as easy as I thought it would be.  Maybe I had a big head at the time and thought that I knew more than what I did, but it was pretty tough picking up on what he was laying down.  He took me back to the absolute basics of the business and literally gave me a step-by-step (not the Patrick Duffy version) education in the business of professional wrestling.  Whenever Main Event could not make it to the school, I would work out with his brother Gary Dawson or another wrestler in the area, CK3, Conrad Kennedy III. (We will talk about CK3....ALOT)  After awhile, everything just clicked for me and I finally realized what pro wrestling was all about and felt comfortable in the ring with pretty much anyone.



Ernie Ballz, 2011 in W.A.R. Wrestling



I can go into detail about things since that time, but I am sure we will talk about all of that stuff eventually.  This has been a pretty descriptive account of how I got into the business anyways.  So I will just say that 10 years later, I continue to learn everyday and evolve in different ways.  I have had a major injury to my ankle that required a metal plate and 2 pins to fix in 2009 and am still here.  In 2011, I began learning about the booking and promoting end of things while helping out at W.A.R. Wrestling in Lima, OH and becoming their Representative to the Board of Directors.  Recently, I have begun to rejuvinate my wrestling career by taking steps to get back into shape and re-invent myself all over again.  Love for the wrestling business is kind of like a boomerang for me, I lose it every now and again, but it always comes back to me in the long run.  2012 is going to be a re-building year for me and I plan on making it one of the best for me overall.