Two and a half years later, a thirteen year old boy sat in a front room in Kent. At that time, Toronto seeming like an unbridgeable distance, but the time since the event meant nothing, I was mesmerised. A recent convert to wrestling, I hadn't seen 'Mania 6 before. To make it up to me that we hadn't managed to get tickets to Summerslam '92, I was taken to Woolworths and was bought 'Manias 6 and 7, and twenty years plus later, the purple lightning design on those cases brings a sense of excitement to me more than any remastered DVD, any Blu-ray, any watch when you like WWE Network can. The show on the whole was one of those old school Wrestlemanias with seemingly hundreds of matches. 14, in reality, but compared to today's 7 or 8 on a show an hour longer, it was loads. Of course, that meant the time of the matches suffered, but what drew me in was the spectacle, just how COOL everyone was. The Hart Foundation destroying the Bolsheviks in nineteen seconds! AMAZING! The guy who was so rich he had HIS OWN TITLE! BRILLIANT! The WWF I'd watched up until now was great, but it wasn't like this. The wrestling I'd watched up until now was good, but this was something else.
But all the matches that came before paled in comparison. When Hogan and Warrior stepped into the ring together, something magical happened. Now, with a lot more experience of being a wrestling fan behind me, I know these two were limited in the ring. But that didn't matter. The charisma didn't ooze out of them, it shone. It filled the arena, past it's walls, out of the city limits of Toronto, through not just space, but time as well, to England in the year 1992. The match was more than double the length of anything else on the card. They fought for over 20 minutes! They kicked out of each others finishers! NO-ONE KICKS OUT AFTER A LEG DROP! To me, this was the match that made me fall in love with the sport. No chain wrestling, no spring dives out of the ring, no bodies being put to ridiculous lengths to entertain. Even without the benefit of me seeing months and months of build up, the match in isolation told me a story, and when the victor, The Ultimate Warrior stood holding two titles at the end of the night, well, he out cooled everything else on that card, and pretty much everything I'd seen up to that point in my life.
In my opinion, that match is the template that every Wrestlemania great is now built on. The longest match on a Wrestlemania card to that point by over five minutes, the longest until the iron man match between Hart and Michaels at Wrestlemania 12. It's in that 20-30 minute bracket is where all the classics now sit. No need for a bad guy, this was for honour, paving the storyline path for the Undertaker vs Michaels matches from 'Manias 25 and 26. And for me, it showed me exactly what there was to love about wrestling. In 2014, I love a good pure wrestling match between two masters of the craft as much as the next fan, but that's not what draws me back time and again. What draws me back is the stories, the showmanship, the entertainment, and it was this match that really cemented to me how it should be done. The first 'Mania I ever saw, 8, saw the The Ultimate Warrior make his return. When I watched this, and 'Mania 7 afterwards, and I saw his retirement match with Randy Savage, I realised why it was such a big deal. This guy was the best. His work at Wrestlemanias 6, 7 and 8 made a lifelong fan of me. He made me believe that in wrestling you will never know what will happen next, who will turn up when, or where the classics will happen.
Without him, on Sunday night, I wouldn't have been sat up until the middle of the night with my head in my hands as the ref's hand hit the mat for the third time, the next step in the Undertaker's near 25 year streak storyline. I wouldn't have been jumping around the house, pointing my hands in the air, silently mouthing yes, trying to let off the emotion of Daniel Bryan's near-year long battle for the title, trying not to wake the rest of the house. And I wouldn't be sat in a pub right now, trying to explain in words what the Ultimate Warrior meant to me in the most positive way possible, without speculating about the events of the last forty eight hours, and how his health looked on Raw this week. It's the most shocking death in wrestling for a long time, overshadowing anything that happened on Wrestlemania 30, or could happen on any storylined programming WWE ever puts its logo on.
Many times The Ultimate Warrior made his return to the WWE, only to be gone again soon after, but no one expected this. No one expected him to be gone for good 24 hours after his final appearance in a Raw ring. The fact you weren't always there, like Hogan, the fact you weren't always having one more match like Flair made your legend grow, your mystique burn brighter, and it makes the small body of work you left us with all the more important. We may not have agreed with everything you ever said, heck, we didn't even always understand it, but the one last look we had at the man behind the facepaint this week will make us miss you even more and your humility in forgiving those who fought to tarnish your legacy is your last lesson to us all.
Rest In Peace. And Thank you.
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