Making the Towns

Send us Fan Mail A fake WCW hiring letter. A masked gimmick built for double shots. A bar match so bad and so unsafe I walked out in the middle of it. Episode 12 of Making The Towns is one of those road-journal entries that starts as “here are the towns and the payoffs” and turns into a snapshot of how independent wrestling in the late 1990s actually worked. We bounce from Buchanan, West Virginia,...

Send us Fan Mail One bad line as a heel can get a laugh, or it can get a riot. We start the 1998 entries of my wrestling road journal and the memories hit fast: tiny payoffs, long drives, and the constant balancing act of trying to get over while still getting out of town in one piece. I walk through early stops in Georgia and Alabama, including the night in White, Georgia when cheap heat crossed...

Send us Fan Mail A local pollen strain in the Smoky Mountains can derail your whole week, and somehow that is still not the strangest part of my day. I’m Brian Logan, and this chapter of Making the Towns moves fast: a quick life update, a big wrestling booking announcement, and then a deep dive into the kind of behind-the-curtain territory history fans rarely get explained clearly.  I talk about g...

Send us Fan Mail Three tries. One TV match. Zero room for excuses. When we hit WCW TV in Gainesville, Georgia, the night turns into a crash course on what “getting it right for television” really means and why veterans get asked to call the match when the wheels come off. I’m flipping back through my wrestling match journal and laying out the receipts: the towns, the opponents, the paydays, and th...

Send us Fan Mail [A wrestling career isn’t just highlights and entrance music, it’s mileage, mistakes, weird bookings, and the kind of lessons you only learn by doing the work. We’re recording on the Friday before WrestleMania, talking Hall of Fame excitement and the legends we grew up on, then we dive straight into the real backbone of the show: a handwritten match journal that tracks towns, oppo...

Send us Fan Mail The wrestling business doesn’t happen in highlight reels. It happens in the miles between towns, the pay envelopes that barely cover gas, and the quiet lessons you get from veterans when you’re still green and trying to prove you belong. We’re back in my 1995 journal, bouncing from a Canadian debut in LaSalle, Ontario to Arkansas spot towns where my name shifts to Christian Devere...

Send us Fan Mail A promoter doesn’t pay the locker room, a legend tries to make it right, and suddenly you learn the hard way what “the business” actually means. That’s the energy we’re bringing today as I go from a bizarre sun poisoning tanning bed story to real road details for Rumble in the Dome 2 in Kenova, West Virginia. I’m stepping back in the ring with Onyx, and for the first time my buddy...

Send us Fan Mail I quit pro wrestling, went “normal,” and spent my days handling puppies while I tried to clear my head. Then my wife Ashley hit me with the truth: I still had the stories, I still had the itch, and maybe it was time to stop telling them only at home. So Making the Towns is back, and I’m back in motion at 51 with a fresh start and a lot of unfinished business. I walk you through re...

Send us Fan Mail He quits a wedding reception early to catch a wrestling show, walks down an armory stairwell, and accidentally runs into the person who opens the door to his entire career. That’s the moment I keep coming back to as I tell the real origin story of how I went from a diehard fan in Oak Hill, West Virginia to training and working for Smoky Mountain Wrestling.  I rewind to the 1980s w...

Send us Fan Mail He worked the same opponents night after night, got twisted into holds he couldn’t escape, and still went home thrilled because someone handed him fifty bucks and another chance to learn. That’s the early reality of Smoky Mountain Wrestling in 1994, and I’m opening my journals to show how “making the towns” really worked when you were young, green, and living on repetition. We sta...

Send us Fan Mail The first time a crowd goes quiet can be the loudest sign that wrestling is about to change. We’re back in Smoky Mountain Wrestling territory for March and April 1994, when I step into a fresh masked tag gimmick as one of the Infernos and end up across the ring from a brand-new team with something the South hasn’t really seen yet: Chris Jericho and Lance Storm as the Thrill Seeker...

Send us Fan Mail One loud moment can teach you more than a year of training, especially when it ends with “we no longer need your services.” We’re back in 1994 for a stretch of territory hopping that takes us from Smoky Mountain Wrestling TV to the USWA loop through Memphis, Louisville, Evansville, and Nashville, where every town has its own crowd, its own rules, and its own version of what “good...