Oct. 17 2022

As a kid I struggled making friends my own age. All of the friends I had were a few years younger than me, I even got held back in second grade to remedy that. Halfway through my third grade year I met Breathtaking Mike Idol, the two of us stuck together from then on. One of our biggest passions was watching, playing, and discussing Dragonball Z. The thought of fighting on such a level fascinated us. Our freshman year of high school Mike had started watching wrestling and started pushing me to start up as well with the hopes of drawing on our love of DBZ to hook me. I caved one Monday night and was in awe at the theatrics and storytelling, it’s not what I thought pro wrestling was.

Sometimes the universe aligns just so and something really great comes out of it. For me it was my best friend and tag team partner Mike Idol.

The summer after Mike and I started watching wrestling we decided to start our own backyard wrestling organization with some other friends. It started off small but grew to about 12 people total on our roster, we would film with my parent’s digital camera and Mike and I would both dabble with the video editing and put it all to music.

Our senior year of high school we met up with someone in the pro wrestling world that allowed us to help as ring crew. Our entire last year of school was crazy as we both tried to get our feet in the door to professional wrestling. We would do a show on Saturday and sometimes go down south on Sunday, only to get home about three am Monday morning, nap and go to school. Once we graduated high school, the company that we worked for folded, we thought we were SOL so to speak. The promotor introduced Mike to his trainer, Eric Freedom and our real journey began.

The years have gone by, I still play YUGIOH, not as much as I would like to but it still brings me back to my childhood. The rules have changed and the flow has sped up but the game remains, and is constantly growing. I go to tournaments on occasion at Wargames North in Cadillac. I do pretty well making it to the top 4 fairly consistently. I do not see myself retiring from my game until the game itself ends.

Thanks for stopping by! Until next time.

- Jamie Race -