IWC’s NORM CONNORS BLOGS ON RETIRING IN DECEMBER
Perception vs Reality. Let’s face it, it’s what the wrestling business is built on. The perception that guys are really killing each vs the reality that they are really protecting each other while looking like they are killing each other. The hope is that you will suspend disbelief, and buy into the male dominated soap opera in front of you. Great characters and storylines are the backbone of that drama, and the stronger the character the storyline, the easier is is to sell.
In my own life, perception and reality are two totally different things. Some website out there will tell you I am a decent guy, some will tell you that I basically spend all of my nights plotting the demise of every other wrestling company out there locally so I can feed my ego and have local indy wrestling domination!!
Let’s cut the BS here. To a large degree, while I have a very unique real life job, and some challenges that will be addressed another time, my personal home life is pretty straightforward.
I spend most of my time working as a Funeral Director and Certified Celebrant. I LOVE my job, more than I can ever express to people here. Its my calling to help people at the most difficult time in their lives, and I try to bring a kindness and gentle nature to a business that craves it. Over the years, through personal experience, I’ve developed a great deal of patience with people, and have nurtured the easy going nature that was given to me by my father and grandfather so many years ago. Most days I work 12 hours, although in the summer it gets cut down to 9 hour days on the average. I work 7 days a week, and have on Wednesday’s from 9 to 5. Other than that, I am on call, which means if someone passes away, I hop into my Phone Booth and into my suit and go, no matter what time it is day or night.
My wife grew up in the funeral business, so understands that this is the way it is.
I do most of the cooking at home, however, and love to try new things. The change in lifestyle (I’ve dropped 72 pounds since January 24th, although today was a bad eating day for reasons that shall be talked about later) has given me the opportunity to expand my culinary horizons, and it rocks!!
I run 7 1/2 miles everyday, usually from 8:30-10:30 p.m. depending on what time I get home from work.
Most of my other time is spent listening to Howard Stern with my Eve, solving the world’s problems with friends on Facebook, and being with our family, the crew of animals that make our home a very interesting place to live. We have two Pekingeses(Tobias and Phoebe a.k.a "The Peach"), a Cockapoo (Cosmo), a Golden Retriever (Maddie), a Mutt (Kira), a cat (Tiger), a chinchilla (Jack), two guinea pigs (Sabrina Bandina and Lisa), and our newest editions, 3 degus (look it up Wikipedia)(Eve has named them but has decided to potentially change their names again, so we are going to keep them unnamed.
So in between all of that, somehow I find time to plan the downfall of every other wrestling organization…
The reality is this: I don’t watch wrestling, and haven’t watched it in years. I still follow the business by going on www.wrestlingobserver.com, which is Dave and Bryan’s site, and those are the guys I always have trusted for my wrestling news. If I am switching through channels, and I see wrestling on, I might stop by it for a minute or so to check things out and if Punk is on I will stay for more than 5 seconds, but other than that, its done for me. Sometimes if I am doing work in another room, I might keep it on just to have a sense of comfort in my background noise as I am working, but that’s the extent of any wrestling viewing that I take part in.
I will also check out the IWC dvd’s when I receive them, and offer tips to the guys before I send them off to my contacts in the major organizations, in the hopes that someone will catch their eye.
So why don’t I watch the very business that I promote? Reason one why I am leaving… I can’t stand what wrestling has become. Once the Monday Night Wars ended, to me, a few months later, so did wrestling. There was something very special about that time, and will never be replaced. Not enough thought is given to building wrestling or wrestlers anymore, so unless you are someone like CM Punk or John Cena who will break through the glass ceiling no matter how much they push down on it, you aren’t going to make it to the top. Therefore, the top gets stale, boring, and the numbers start to fall off. And the less said about TNA the better. While I am so happy to see so many of my friends have jobs there, the booking baffles me. I have such a hard time reading it on paper where people are trying to make sense of it, so I could never watch it on t.v.
Wrestling today, to me, is like watching WCW during its final year. You see the train reaching the end of its tracks, and no one is doing anything to stop it. Nor do they care it seems. The idea of focusing on perception vs reality and suspension of disbelief is gone, and making strong characters and storylines seem secondary, so there in a nutshell is why the business is where it is, and why I don’t bother to watch it anymore.
I also don’t badmouth other people in the wrestling business. Its hard to believe as that is what so much of the behind of the scenes of this business is built on, but just ask my friends. While that may have been true in 1996, today its simply not the case. One of the reasons why IWC has been successful is our focus on the product and not the politics. Whether you agree with it or not, the numbers don’t lie. I take a lot of pride in what has taken me 16 years to build, but today we have a good organization with solid characters and simple storylines that help people suspend disbelief and enjoy a show. And yes, because I approached this as a business, many of my "friends" are now the very people that are badmouthing me. Their inability for people to see things for what they are leads to a situation where fingers are pointed everywhere else but where they should be pointed: squarely at ones own chest. Right or wrong, the decisions I have made for the last 16 years were mine, and I’ve lived with the consequences of those decisions everyday.
And I wouldn’t change a thing, not in a million years…
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