From Stephen Platinum: Matt Cardona, the Indy God, the Deathmatch King, he who successfully removed the stink of being Future Endeavored, h...
Matt Cardona, the Indy God, the Deathmatch King, he who successfully removed the stink of being Future Endeavored, he who was one of the first of dozens of AEW fumbles, he who turned down likely dozens of seminar appearance offers to be at the House of Champions in Longwood, Florida for his first.
The seminar that killed pro wrestling seminars.
It was an unexpectedly auspicious location for a dismantling of a con so prevalent in professional wrestling that the victims of this particular confidence game have bought into the prevailing wisdom perpetrated and perpetuated by those in relative power in wrestling who state the following:
You should attend seminars and happily pay for them if you care about improving and pro wrestling.
You will make more money in wrestling.
You are lucky to be able to attend the seminar, and the money it costs you is preferable to going to attend WWE or anything other pro wrestling events because that's for marks or using that money to enjoy your life. Don't you take your wrestling career seriously?
If this particular person we are having run this seminar could look at you wrestle and give you notes, you would very suddenly get the knowledge you’ve been lacking to gain access to your dream.
This person is a ticket to a steady, paying, regular gig in pro wrestling.
Both TNA and Ring of Honor (and others, but these two in years past have been the most brazen and charged the most) have pulled the “try out” seminar in the past. You pay hundreds of dollars to have someone evaluate you. In reality, you paid for a shot at getting in. You paid to be seen. And just like anything where you pay for access to things that are normally a true transaction and working relationship between parties (being seen by supposed entertainment gurus or modeling “agents” or writing contests offering to get your script seen or pornographers masking as photographers) the person with the dream is being asked to pay someone with their often limited resources (money, time, intellectual property or their dignity and virginity, etc.) and you probably won't get anything you want out of it. Are there ever positive outcomes?
Sure there are. For those that were truly exceptional and would have made it in a more conventional way. But that guy who “got signed” will be touted by the conman forever. The Guns and Roses that emerged from the dying Sunset Strip scene that kept the cycle of suffering and feckless dreams alive for bands another 20 years. Or maybe to this day.
The “pay to be seen” pro wrestling seminar for places like TNA and ROH ran for years, giving those places much needed cash flow and access to guys they could use as free labor (ring crew, “security,” being sexually harassed by trainers who implied their road in wrestling would match the color of the stoplight they were displaying to the advance. Do you want a red light to go back to you shitty life, or a green light to Wrestlemania?) and like pro wrestling itself, people in the business seemed to know or at least understand on some level that it was a game heavily weighted against the aspiring wrestler, yet people continued to chirp about how important it was, and throw the prevailing wisdom list above reflexively. Another form of this is the “come to work the indy shows around Wrestlemania at your own expense because you have to be seen if you are serious” work. “Work” in the Pro Wrestling sense, of course.
The seminar form more commonly seen on the independent scene is that a wrestler or wrestlong person of note is running a seminar. He will…actually Matt Cardona spoke on this at the beginning of his seminar and said it well. The typical seminar, he said, consisted of the person running the seminar speaking for a little while, then people pairing off and having matches and then getting a critique of those matches. And possibly having some drills run. Matt expressed that seemed pointless to him, since they were sitting in a gorgeous facility where there were very capable trainers and people to help a wrestler's career there. It must be said at this point that he was absolutely correct. That is the structure of a typical seminar. House of Champions is the nicest, most impressive training facility I have seen for professional wrestling that wasn't attached to a major wrestling organization. Everyone I dealt with and talked with in regards to the Matt Cardona seminar at House of Champions were and are stellar. I am often asked what wrestling school I would recommend, and I've never given a direct answer. I would have no problem now recommending House of Champions. Everything Matt Cardona had said about why he wasn't going to run a typical seminar was validated immediately.
I have been the host location for two different seminars in the past. And I realized that it was really an unspoken thing that what the wrestlers who were ones that I had trained for the most part were being given access to was just that: access. A wrestler who was at the height of his own career and another who was going to get signed to the WWE. But Matt Cardona wasn't implying or offering that at all. At least not access to a big league, or the implied promise that the wrestlers attending would get a shot at anything. He was very simply offering access to himself. He fielded 3 hours of questions. If you wanted to know something, this was your chance to simply ask and he would answer.
No hundreds of dollars for a bullshit tryout. No money to have someone kill time by having a bunch of matches happen under the most unnatural of conditions (pro wrestling without a true crowd reacting is people fake fighting in their underwear. The audience is the point. Proof of this can be found in the unwatchable no-crowd shows of the COVID era) and no empty resumes or promises. Cardona was there. He was honest. At times painfully, self-reflectingly honest. He didn't pretend he suffered more than he did (he basically was signed very quickly out of training) and he didn't hide the cost of his incredible hustle. And hustle. He was honest about money and his failures. He paused and his eyes often looked away in a searching way before responding to the litany of questions, another indication that he was accessing memories, trying to give the purest and most accurate answer.
There were at least 50 people at this seminar. That is a gargantuan number. There are seminars I know of that have had three people. Perhaps less. House of Champions had their trainees there, of course, but that wasn't the majority of the audience. I recognized a number of the wrestlers in the Florida area that I see at shows, but that wasn't the majority of the audience either. This was a group of people that weren't being sold a promise of their dreams becoming real, this wasn't a “how to make more money” in person infomercial (although Cardona was certainly very open about how he makes his money, and how the wrestlers could go about putting themselves on a similar path). This was about a guy who had found a way to make money being every bit himself. Who overcame, sometimes shortcutted, developed some fantastic general rules for himself that had served him well and that he shared openly and with examples from his life to validate them.
For a guy so adept at making money in wrestling, who was effusive about sharing his knowledge about what had worked, what had failed, and was every bit the consummate salesman and entertainer even when he spoke casually to us, this really was the anti-carnie. The anti-con. This seminar was more expensive than your average indy seminar. (It was somewhere between the $20-$50 of the usual hosted-by-an-indy-promotion deal and the $200, $300, upwards of $750 try out and be seen gimmick). It is safe to say that every attendee felt that they got their money's worth. And moreover would say the same now, weeks later. And for those that are wise and use the information to the utmost, they will see it as an undercharging. I doubt anybody who has attended most any other seminar could say the same if they were honest with themselves.
Gary Hart wrote arguably the greatest pro wrestling book ever written. In the beginning of that book he was unfailingly honest and accurate when assessing most wrestling autobiographies. He said that most wrestling books were filled with stories and chapters filled with the subject's life before wrestling, and with their need to make themselves look good and exaggerate the triumphs and their greatness. By saying that right off the bat, and assuring the reader that he would try not to perpetuate those fallacies, Gary Hart set the stage for a book that was different, honest, better. But it was his unique and brilliant career in multiple aspects of professional wrestling that lived up to that promise that he set up in the beginning. Correspondingly, Matt Cardona said what a typical seminar was. And he set about to do something different. But it was his unique and brilliant career in different organizations and facets of professional wrestling that lived up to that promise that he set up in his introduction.
It reminded me about what had inherently bothered me about wrestling seminars, especially the tryout variety. They are a relatively modern rendition and perhaps the last true form of wrestling’s carnie roots, this sinister con that lies at the heart inside a flamboyant and almost boringly cleaned up exterior. When wrestling people get mad at the word “fake” they often state that the injuries suffered are real, which somehow invalidates the fact that pro wrestling made money fooling people at its core. While that is no longer the case that the audience by and large are being fooled into believing that pro wrestling matches are competitive events with uncertain outcomes, the irony still remains that the people being fooled now are wrestling people themselves through perpetuating, participating in, and validating the existence of the seminar that does nobody any good except for the people taking the money. Pro wrestling's genesis now a Revelation against it's own.
Matt Cardona's legacy has yet to be determined, but whether he realizes it or not he is etching himself a very unique place in professional wrestling. I was most surprised by the number of people who contacted me who I had either done pro wrestling with, or wrote about pro wrestling along side me, who told me that Matt Cardona was the only thing that interested them about pro wrestling anymore.
If he can be the catalyst to ending the seminar con, then that is just another jewel in his crown. And long live the king.
