Pro Wrestling: My Passion, My Love

I was born into a family that didn't like wrestling, but one person did love wrestling...my brother Jordan Robert Paul Staehle, who is a key part in my story about my love and passion for wrestling.

1994 was the year that I started watching wrestling and ultimately fell in love with it, specifically during the Ric Flair vs. Hulk Hogan match in July were Flair lost the WCW World Championship at Bash at the Beach.

It wasn't Hogan that I adopted as my hero, but rather it was Ric Flair. My brother was a Hogan fan, so we would fight all the time after they had just gone at it.

My brother would do all the poses as he would body-slam me and drop the leg, but I would always get in trouble, as I was dubbed the dirtiest player in the house, especially given my aptitude for eye gouging and low blows to cheat my way through everything.

I seldom won, but when I did, I flaunted it like it was the biggest thing in the world.

When Hogan turned, I thought it was weird because he was the good guy and the man with all the answers for all the Hulk-A-Maniacs. Once he turned, however, he was now was part of the group that ran WCW.

The legendary Heartbreak Kid Shawn Michaels was who I wanted to be because you had to be in the clique or you were nothing. In my neighborhood, I was the leader of the our version of the Four Horseman, and in the clique, it was cool to be Flair or HBK.

Wrestling in the mid '90s was the beginning of my love for the sport, and listening to all my friends' parents talk about Hogan and Andre, Steamboat and Savage, and Warrior made me want to hear more and more about the past and learn everything about wrestling.

The Attitude Era for me was my favorite, like all my friends running around school doing the crotch-chop and telling everyone to "suck it" thinking it was the coolest thing in the world until your parents found out and put you in the corner and grounded us for a month from watching wrestling.

My brother and I found a way to watch, however, by going over to our friends houses for "dinner".

In 1998, my brother called me because I was living in Los Angeles, Calif., as he was living in New Orleans for the past four years with my dad and my two sisters. We would talk every night about what happen the night before on Raw and Nitro.

When HBK left because of his back, I cried because i saw one of my heroes leave.

That, however, made me like Undertaker after that night, so I could fill that void that I know still couldn't be pieced completely back together.

We would do this for the next year, all the way into the summer of 1999.

My brother was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, a bone cancer in his leg that had spread beyond repair, even after his leg was amputated from the knee down.

We still watched wrestling, but it wasn't like it once was, as he was always coughing up blood and just kept breaking down week after week. On December 1, 1999, my brother passed away peacefully in his sleep around 4:32 a.m.

I didn't watch wrestling until his birthday that March, and the first time I watched it alone was the hardest thing because I had tears running down my face.

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