WWE’s Rhea Ripley on women’s tag teams at WrestleMania
With WrestleMania approaching, WWE’s Rhea Ripley talks to the “Under the Ring” podcast about the importance and future of women’s tag team wrestling.
Miguel Fernandez and Phil Strum, NorthJersey.com
It’s a WWE world. We just live in it.
Dave Bautista, John Cena and The Rock star in our biggest action movies. Donald Trump, who dabbled in pro wrestling as a casino entrepreneur, runs smackdown campaigns, full of WWE-style bluster. Can it be an accident that Hulk Hogan was the keynote speaker at this years Republican National Convention? “Whatcha gonna do when Donald Trump and all the Trumpamaniacs run wild on you, brother?” That, in 2024, is our politics.
In short, pro wrestling has made great cultural strides since 1947, when a flamboyant grappler named Gorgeous George made his first TV appearance. Pro wrestling has been in our lives, and living rooms, ever since.
But not the way it’s been in Tommy Fierro’s living room.
“When I was 17, Jimmy ‘Superfly’ Snuka was at my house, watching Wrestlemania XI on my couch,” Fierro said. “He was one of my favorites growing up as a kid. I had his action figure and t-shirt and poster. He was one of the biggest wrestlers from that generation, and one of the most influential. He was also at my graduation, and my birthday party.”
Did we mention that Fierro — at the time a teenager living in Woodland Park with his family — was even then a pro wrestling entrepreneur?
As he still is, today at the age of 47, as the owner of the state’s only pro-wrestling store, The Wrestling Collector.
“Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to open a wrestling merchandise store,” Fierro said.
A destination for all your wrestling needs
In his 1000-square foot emporium in Stockholm, Sussex County, you’ll find bins full of action figures, shelves full of VHS tapes and DVDs, some 3,000 wrestling magazines, replica title belts, posters, books, bubble gum cards, lucha libre masks, a 1980s wrestling arcade game, signed photos, and every other collectable you can imagine.
You’ll also find a wall full of signatures: among them Jake “The Snake” Roberts, Greg Valentine, Tito Santana, Bushwhacker Luke, Tony Atlas, Lex Luger, Brutus “The Barber” Beefcake, Doink the Clown. All of them, and many more, he’s promoted at one time or another during his 30-year career, at local matches throughout the Garden State, and as celebrity guests at the fan conventions he’s staged in places like Morristown and Rockaway.
His store is just his latest project. Many wrestling stars have come there to sign autographs and mingle with fans: Ken Patera, Larry Zbyszko, Demolition (a tag team), Jimmy Hart, Eric Bischoff, Ron Simmons. And fans come from as far away as Canada and Japan to rifle through his merchandise.
“I love collecting things, and this is awesome,” said Bob Kelly, who was thumbing through a box of magazines on a recent weekday. He’d driven up from Mount Laurel, Gloucester County, two hours away. He’s driven there four or five times over the past month. That’s the kind of wrestling fan he is.
“My first visit I was just amazed at all this inventory,” said Kelly, a high school coach. “I never knew there was an actual market for this.”
Fierro knew. He’s known since he was 8.
“When I was a little kid, I would always sleep at my grandparents’ house in Paterson,” Fierro said. “We would have pizza on Friday nights, and Saturday morning I’m sitting there playing with my toys on the living room floor, and my grandfather was watching WWF, and my head lifted up off the ground and it connected with the television. I was automatically hooked.”
Remembering the golden age of wrestling
This was the so-called Golden Era of Wrestling ‒ the 1980s. The age when Ivan Putski, “Macho Man” Randy Savage, “Ravishing” Rick Rude, André the Giant, Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat, “Hacksaw” Jim Duggan, Sgt. Slaughter, “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, Ric Flair, The Iron Sheik, Jesse “The Body” Ventura and — yes — Hulk Hogan, would dropkick, body-slam, Cobra Clutch, and occasionally bash their opponents over the head with folding chairs, while the crowds cried havoc, and announcers Vince McMahon and “Mean” Gene Okerlund kept track of every scripted move.
Pro wrestling — as fans knew even then — was “fake,” in the sense that it was all carefully choreographed. Winners and losers were all determined in advance. But fans also knew that the stars of McMahon’s entertainment empire — then known as WWF (“World Wrestling Federation”) rather than the later, more accurate WWE (“World Wrestling Entertainment”) — were actually doing the stunts. And sometimes, they were getting hurt.
“The guys who participate are definitely athletes,” Kelly said. “They’re highly trained and they do take care of themselves. It is entertainment. But I still enjoy what these guys — and ladies — do physically.”
Coming to grips with the wrestling business
Judging from that traffic Fierro gets, both at his three-year-old store, and through his accounts on Facebook, Instagram and X (he has 2 million followers on social media, he says), other people do, too. There’s something about the wrestlers of the ’80s and ’90s in particular — Fierro’s sweet spot — that seems to have struck a nerve with the kids who grew up then.
“They were larger than life,” he said. “They were all different shapes and sizes and personalities and characters. The storylines, the Hulkamania craze, definitely hooked me in the 80s. Back then, the WWF was running over 300 days a year. Pretty much monthly they were coming to the Brendan Byrne Arena. My parents would take me every single month as a kid to watch WWF. I had all the merchandise, the action figures, the magazines, the T-shirts, the posters. I was just a giant wrestling fan growing up.”
When he was 16, a freshman at Passaic Valley Regional High School (he graduated in 1995) he heard a wrestling show on William Paterson college radio, WPSC-FM 88.7. He won a guest-host spot on the show, as part of a contest, and it soon morphed into a regular gig. In short order, he was putting out his own wrestling fanzine, Ringside Wrestling Newsletter. Such things, then, were only real way fans could communicate, and learn about coming events. “Back then, there was really no social media,” he said.
One thing led to another, he says, and at age 16 he found himself promoting his first wrestling convention at the Wayne Holiday Inn. Another one soon followed in Totowa. He sponsored his first match in 1995, at Rutherford High School. And in short order he was hanging out with the biggest stars in the profession.
“Everyone was pretty much really cool, very business-like and respectable,” he recalled. “Jimmy ‘Superfly’ Snuka lived in New Jersey, in Springfield, and he took a liking to me. He was very gracious to me, for being someone who was just a teenager.” The Iron Sheik — now it can be told — used to sneak the 16-year-old Fierro into bars. By the end of his high school years, pro wrestling was consuming his life.
“I missed my high school prom and my graduation, because I was running wrestling shows on both of those days,” he said.
For years, through his company ISPW — Independent Superstars of Pro Wrestling — he staged matches throughout the state, sometimes as fundraisers, at high schools, elementary schools, churches. He still does his big wrestling conventions, geared to 80s and 90s wrestlers, twice a year. But he’d somewhat drifted away from the scene when he decided, three and a half years ago, that there was a market for a store that sold wrestling memorabilia. People tried to talk him out of it.
“First of all I opened the store during the pandemic,” said Fierro, who lives in Lincoln Park with his wife, Allison, and eight-year-old daughter, Emily. “Everyone thought I was out of my mind.”
But the store, he says, has helped him maintain his connection to the pro wrestling industry. So does his social media activity.
Ironically, the kid who in the 1980s breathlessly followed the pro-wrestling stars now has those same stars following him.
“Through me doing these social media accounts, all the big stars started following me, from Hulk Hogan to Stone Cold Steve Austin to The Rock,” he said. “They all follow me now.”
Go…
The Wrestling Collector, 2772 Route 23, Stockholm. thewrestlingcollector.com
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Publish date : 2024-08-12 22:12:00
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