The RWL Story

A Borrowed Camera and a Bigger World

Corey and Jayyy borrowed a MiniDV camera for the weekend and arranged a show. On 16 September 2006, Entertainmania took place on the Bolton Road Grasslands in Ewood, across from Blackburn Rovers' stadium. The ring was cardboard collected from the Aldi across the road, taped together on the grass. A local resident even came over from his garden to help assemble it, a moment that somehow survives on camera.

Jayyy defended the RWL Championship against Hyogo Kantai, while Corey Carver and Nixy Nix contested the RWL International Championship. Other familiar faces included Cyanide Danny Cooper, The Sentinel, Watson, Shawn O' Mercy and the masked comedy characters. It wasn't RWL's first show in any meaningful sense. It was the first one we'd managed to keep.

There was no shortage of ideas, even when there weren't enough wrestlers to play them. Death By Diamond Cutter, filmed the same day as Entertainmania but presented as another show, made heavy use of masks and double duty. Corey could be Hyogo Kantai or Teh Gr8 Schitzu, while Jayyy could become Teh Gr8 Phuka-U. Watson's Lounge and the wonderfully named Shoeless Aggression Match appeared early on. We were already trying to create the impression of a much bigger wrestling world than the roster could support.

A week later, Leaping Spoonkick From Hell brought Corey's new name, CorZ, the formation of [lfp], RWL's first recorded use of a lighttube as a weapon, and a dive from a staircase that suggested the camera was encouraging some increasingly questionable ambitions. The matches weren't always good, but filming them meant we could watch them back, edit highlights and share them. RWL was no longer something that existed entirely in the memories of the people taking part.

By December we wanted to do more than wrestle on cardboard in Blackburn. Best of the North West on 9 December 2006 brought RWL together with XWA from Warrington and HGWA from Hazel Grove at the GPW Training School in Manchester. For the first time, an RWL show took place inside a proper wrestling ring. It also introduced people who would remain friends and collaborators long after the event was over.

There was, however, a slight administrative oversight. CorZ had arranged the show without asking GPW promoter Johnnie Brannigan for permission to use the building. We got away with it that afternoon. We'd be less fortunate the next time.

Learning Where We Could Wrestle

Overdose: The Interfed on 20 January 2007 took the interfed idea further, with seven promotions represented at the GPW Training School. For many of us, UKBYW had previously been usernames and conversations on forums. Now we were meeting people in person, sharing a ring and making connections outside our own group. Among those attending were wrestlers who would become much better known later, including Natrix, later Wild Boar Mike Hitchman, and Napalm, later Flash Morgan Webster.

The show also brought the business with GPW to a head. We still hadn't obtained permission, and when the building's owner told Johnnie Brannigan what had been happening, he was understandably furious. Nixy Nix remained at the school and bore much of the fallout, while Corey moved his training to 21CW in Preston. It wasn't an amusing misunderstanding from GPW's point of view. We'd used somebody else's facilities and put their position at risk. Those shows may have opened doors in the wider backyard scene, but they closed one rather important door behind us.

So we went back to finding our own places to wrestle. On 10 March, Turning Medieval took RWL to a field in Ewood that would become one of its most recognisable homes. The entrance consisted of spray-painted plasterboard and a metal ramp, shopping trolleys stood in for ropes, and a Hardcore Rules round robin established the RWL Hardcore Championship. The show was even interrupted when Corey's mum arrived to remind him about his paper round. Booking a wrestling tournament was apparently no excuse for neglecting the local newspapers.

Other experiments followed. RWL at Fusion brought a one-match demonstration to a Christian youth group, using gym mats in a primary-school library. RWL at the XCW Arena provided the first surviving appearance of the blue tarpaulin that would become synonymous with the backyard years. Mum, The Cat's Dead took a tiny crew to St Anne's Beach, where wind, sand and dreadful audio made the location seem considerably better in theory than in practice. It also preserved the first recorded singles meeting between CorZ and Cyanide, a pairing that would take on much more importance as the year unfolded.

The spring recordings weren't particularly tidy. Some events were never filmed, others survive only in reduced quality, and the people involved sometimes remember more than the tapes can prove. But there was experimentation everywhere: new venues, new characters, different ways to present matches and a willingness to try almost anything at least once.

One of the lasting changes came at Remedy III in May, when CorZ became Valo. The name survived where so many earlier identities hadn't, and his character took a heel turn alongside it. Soon afterwards, Shawn O' Mercy booked RWL:ACW Hardcore Debut, establishing ACW as an occasional variation on RWL run by Shawn rather than a separate promotion. Somebody else could handle the card for a change, while Valo could concentrate on wrestling and the opportunities that were developing elsewhere.

Friends, Gym Mats and Growing Pains

Those opportunities were beginning to reshape RWL. Valo and Jayyy were travelling to shows run by National Alliance Wrestling, and the experience made the difference between our setup and a more organised wrestling environment rather obvious. We were meeting people, learning how other promotions worked and bringing ideas back to Blackburn. Relationships with HGWA continued, while visiting wrestlers from Scotland's Impact Wrestling broadened the roster further.

On 7 July, Valo became the inaugural NAW Cruiserweight Champion. Two days later, Sporadic Movement took place at St Wilfrid's High School Sports Hall, which RWL had deliberately hired through a council scheme. Proper gym mats, a roof and a vaulting box stood in for our usual outdoor collection of cardboard and rocks. We'd seen something workable elsewhere and tried it ourselves. It was a step forward, even if the booking remained as improvised as ever. Valo's recent heel turn was quietly dropped because the card needed somebody for the audience to cheer.

Inhuman Creation Station followed at Darwen Vale High School, with the RWL website increasingly used to carry stories between events. Characters such as Teh Gr8 Schitzu could apparently die and return from the dead, while Chris Goodwin's increasingly elaborate Chris System developed a life of its own. Beneath the silliness, though, a real personal situation involving Valo and Cyanide came to a head. Valo has since been open about handling it badly. The two were close friends, and the consequences weren't confined to a wrestling storyline.

At Smack!YerBitchUp a week later, visiting Scottish talent shared the card with new RWL faces, including Kris 'Overkill' Kage. Valo and Cyanide also agreed to bring elements of the real tension into a worked-shoot story. At the time there wasn't a carefully mapped-out ending. We were trying to make wrestling out of something personal while we were still dealing with it ourselves, which is part of what makes that footage uncomfortable to revisit.

August showed both sides of RWL at once. Condoms & Cigarette Packets brought NAW and HGWA friends to a field with no tarp and a small number of genuine spectators. The friendships and outside experience were improving what we did, but the facilities could still disappear between shows. At Misery Business, Valo was presenting himself as an on-screen authority figure, Cyanide was suspended as part of the story, and the RWL Cruiserweight Championship emerged from a remarkably casual piece of booking. Its first champion was KillSwitch, a wrestler weighing roughly 28 stone. RWL had never been especially strict about the finer points of weight divisions.

By Maybe Memories later that month, the storytelling was becoming more connected, with the authority figures, the reinstatement of Cyanide and the proposed Entertainmania II Deathmatch all feeding into what came next. We were learning from the people around us, but still working with the limits of a backyard promotion: whoever was free, wherever we could film and whatever equipment we could manage to get hold of.

Monday Night RaGE and Entertainmania II

In September RWL attempted something more regular: Monday Night RaGE, a series of weekly shows designed to carry the storylines from one Monday to the next. There were new entrance setups, a white wire marking out the wrestling area, improvised rules and increasingly ambitious attempts at promos and production. Valo, Spyke and Overkill came together as The Omen, while newer names such as Teddie H began finding their place on the shows.

It was an exciting idea, but the reality of producing a show every week soon showed. People were tired, plans changed at short notice, matches were announced and forgotten, and the weather could ruin whatever we'd hoped to film. RaGE 3 felt particularly exhausted, while RaGE 4 was battered by rain. The footage was mainly being recorded to make short music videos, not to preserve complete shows for future historians, which explains some of the gaps and rough edits we're dealing with today.

All of it was heading towards Entertainmania II on 30 September, exactly the sort of anniversary event we hadn't been equipped to imagine when we first borrowed a camera a year earlier. The show was hardly perfect. Much of the undercard was improvised comedy, and some of the material hasn't aged well. There were meaningful beginnings, including Switchblade Corp, the first pairing of the future YOBz and Ref James's early appearances. But there was really one match at the centre of it.

Valo vs Cyanide had been building for months, drawing on both fictional rivalry and real hurt between two friends. They met in an Ewood Deathmatch for the vacant RWL World Championship, using rocks, glass, wood and even fire in a match that was far more dangerous than it needed to be. Cyanide won, becoming champion and giving the show the conclusion it had been built around.

The bonus footage afterwards captured something rather different: Valo and Cyanide embracing while the people around them chanted 'RWL'. It didn't erase the personal difficulties that had fed into the storyline, but it remains one of the most human moments in the archive. A year after the cardboard at Ewood, RWL had managed to tell a story that people involved in the promotion genuinely cared about. It had also demonstrated how much we still had to learn about separating drama, friendship and unnecessary risk.

The Shows That Nearly Disappeared

The story carried on immediately. RaGE 5 was filmed the day after Entertainmania II and introduced a new opening logo and theme made by Valo using audio-loop software. Adam Watson joined The Omen, expanding the group alongside Valo, Spyke and Overkill, and the newly crowned Cyanide successfully defended the World Championship against Overkill before Valo attacked him. The anniversary match had settled the title for a night, not the rivalry.

By late October, the archive becomes harder to follow. Halloween Hell, placed on 27 October, is a confirmed event with no known surviving footage; the exact date is reconstructed from a reference two days later. Memories from the people involved have established three matches. KillSwitch retained the Cruiserweight Championship against Overkill by referee stoppage. Shawn O' Mercy retained the Hardcore Championship against Valo after Cyanide interfered, in a match remembered for a door and a plank of wood that stubbornly refused to break. Watson defeated Kazuki Lyger and attacked Lyger afterwards, with the match stemming from a serious real-life incident at an RWL house party in which a drunken prank with superglue left Watson needing hospital treatment. These memories are enough to establish that Halloween Hell happened, but not enough to claim we know the whole show.

Two days later came RaGE 6, another show that had never been released and whose recordings survived scattered under misleading filenames. The earlier sunset footage contains Valo defeating Teddie H in RWL's first recorded countout finish. Later, after the original filming had ended, a group of people associated with Church Street in Blackburn turned up. We decided to wrestle some more in the hope of winning over a few new fans, and suddenly found ourselves performing for RWL's biggest audience to date.

The makeshift lighting was a car's headlights. They worked until the battery died. The camera kept cutting out, but Valo and Cyanide pressed on with an RWL World Championship match that ended in one of the year's most ridiculous twists. Valo pinned Cyanide to win his first RWL World Championship, only for Cyanide to invoke his own rematch clause immediately, hit Crystal Clear and win it straight back. There were two championship changes and barely time to celebrate the first. It might have been one of the more consequential matches of 2007, and nobody at the time ever saw an edited release of it.

The final surviving event was RaGE 7 on 5 November. Its opening footage is missing, although we know Valo defeated Tom Omega and promised to win the World Championship again. Cyanide defended against Hyogo Kantai in the rain, Watson wrestled Phuka-U in a match referencing the Halloween Hell fallout, and the last surviving contest put Watson against fellow Omen member Spyke. They were given three minutes, not because of some elaborate booking decision but because the camera was almost out of recording time.

The tape ends just after Spyke's rather poor attempt at a Valo Boom Senton. No big closing angle or end-of-year send-off. The camera simply stops. It's an oddly appropriate place for the 2007 record to finish: a promotion that had come from borrowed school equipment and taped-together cardboard was now juggling regular shows, championships, visiting wrestlers and genuine audiences, yet still couldn't guarantee enough tape to finish the last match.

RWL wasn't suddenly polished or professional by the end of those two years. There were mistakes we'd later regret, friendships that mattered more than any result, and footage we still haven't found. But it had become something worth documenting beyond the people who'd been there. All because we'd started pointing a camera at what we were doing.