RWL at the XCW Arena

Some RWL events were important because of what happened on them.

Others were important because of where they happened.

RWL at the XCW Arena was barely a show by any conventional definition. As far as anyone can remember, it consisted of exactly one match.

But the patch of grass underneath it had a history stretching back to before RWL even existed.

Welcome to the XCW Arena

The XCW Arena was, naturally, not an arena.

It was another patch of grass in Blackburn where CorZ had been “wrestling” with friends since he was young.

Long before RWL, this was part of the world in which the group had created their own imaginary wrestling federations, complete with names heavily influenced by the WWF and WCW era they had grown up watching.

One of those was WWCF: World Wrestling Championship Federation.

If that name sounds like something created by kids growing up during the Attitude Era, that’s because it absolutely was.

Eventually came XCW: Xtreme Championship Wrestling.

XCW would later briefly evolve into XWA: Xtreme Wrestling Association, and by the early high school years it was the name being used when CorZ, Jayyy and Shawn O’ Mercy were wrestling together.

And, strangely enough, XWA would eventually provide the basic formula for the name that replaced it.

Xtreme became Radical.

Wrestling remained Wrestling.

Association became League.

RWL.

So while the XCW Arena may have looked like nothing more than another patch of grass, it represented part of the prehistory of the promotion itself.

The Blue Tarp Arrives

The show also introduced something that would become considerably more recognisable.

For the first time on surviving RWL footage, the wrestling area was covered by the classic blue tarpaulin laid over the grass.

It wasn’t exactly a wrestling ring.

It wasn’t particularly sophisticated.

But it worked.

The blue tarp would become a staple of RWL’s presentation throughout the backyard years, remaining part of the promotion’s makeshift ring setup until RWL eventually moved away from the backyard scene altogether.

Like the cardboard, shopping trolleys and improvised entrance-ways that had come before it, another piece of RWL’s backyard identity had fallen into place.

Whatever We Could Find

The blue tarp wasn’t the only addition.

Watching the surviving footage back, RWL appears to have assembled its collection of hardcore equipment using the tried-and-tested method of finding whatever happened to be lying around.

There were bread crates acquired from behind Aldi, a sheet of wood found somewhere around the fields, a traffic cone and even a ladder.

Exactly where everything came from has not survived quite as clearly as the footage itself.

What mattered was that RWL had found it.

Therefore, it could probably be used in a wrestling match.

Three Wrestlers, One Championship

The one match known to survive from the event saw Jayyy defend the RWL Championship against CorZ and Kazuki “Lightning” Lyger in a Triple Threat Match.

It continued the increasingly familiar championship rivalry between Jayyy and CorZ while bringing Lyger into the RWL Championship picture.

Behind the mask, of course, Kazuki Lyger was Nixy Nixxx, continuing the character that had debuted at Turning Medieval.

With only three wrestlers competing, it was another extremely small RWL event.

The three didn’t have the tarp entirely to themselves, however.

Darren Holden and Project S20 were also there, and neither was content to simply watch. Both found their way into the Triple Threat, interfering in a match that already had more than enough going on.

A One-Match Show

With everyone present either wrestling in the Triple Threat or interfering in it, there was nobody left over for anything else.

As far as anyone can remember, that single match was the show.

The footage exists on RWL’s hard drive but has not yet been publicly released.

One match, three wrestlers, two uninvited guests and a blue tarp. By RWL standards, that counted as an event.

Back Where It Started

For such a tiny entry in RWL’s history, RWL at the XCW Arena manages to connect several different eras together.

The location belonged to the days before RWL, when wrestling meant friends on a patch of grass creating their own federations inspired by what they watched on television.

The names changed from WWCF, to XCW, briefly to XWA, and eventually to RWL.

Now the promotion that had grown out of those childhood federations had returned to the same ground with its own championship, its own growing history and, for the first time, the blue tarpaulin that would become synonymous with its backyard years.

It was still just wrestling on a patch of grass.

But by now, that wrestling had a history of its own.

Before the blue tarp became part of RWL, before RWL had a name, and long before anyone involved would have called it a promotion, there was XCW. Sometimes the history of RWL leads straight back to a patch of grass where a group of friends simply decided they were wrestlers.

RWL at the XCW Arena