The Best Wrestling Match I Never Saw: The Rise and Fall of the RPWA

It was the summer of 1987. Daytime television was dominated by Lt. Col. Oliver North, Caspar Weinberger, and Ronald Reagan either impugning one another or blankly staring their way through the Iran-Contra hearings. Ninety-three-year-old Nazi war criminal Rudolph Hess, Spandau Prison’s lone inmate, committed suicide. Closer to home, Northwest Airlines Flight 255 crashed on takeoff from Detroit Metropolitan Airport, killing all but one of the one hundred and fifty-six people on board – a four-year-old girl named Cecelia Cichan. For a thirteen-year-old boy, these international dramas and local tragedies were a serious buzzkill. What I cared about was my daily game of strikeout with my cousin Andrew. I cared about Stephen King novels. I cared about the Smiths, Black Flag, and the Clash, and I cared, at the forsaking of nearly everything else, that Hulk Hogan was the WWF Heavyweight Champion; that Jesse “The Body” Ventura refused to call Tito Santana anything but “Chico”; that Wayne “The Honkey Tonk Man” Farris somehow still held the WWF (which became today’s WWE in 2003) Intercontinental belt; that over in the NWA (National Wrestling Alliance), Ric Flair was surviving a series of title defenses against “Hands of Stone” Ronnie Garvin; and that one hot August afternoon, while sitting with my friend Ben Cattaneo at his parents’ kitchen table on Sunset Avenue in Windsor, Ontario, Thrasher, a facepaint-wearing brute from Detroit, became the first RPWA Heavyweight Champion by pinning the Canadian Giant to cap a grueling elimination tournament at the Emperor’s Gardens in Tokyo.

Don’t remember that last one? Don’t beat yourself up. Even the most astute students and historians of professional wrestling probably don’t remember any of the RPWA’s remarkable stable of athletes, its uniquely international flavour, its well-crafted and sometimes outright bonkers storylines: the emotional rise and fall of everyone’s favourite bayou brawler, Rex Raden; the long-standing and increasingly bizarre tag-team feud between the Nightmare Express and the Satan Worshippers; the breakdance and beatboxing antics of sibling tag team Buzz and Billy Funky; the proto-slacker ethos of wrestling manager and wannabe pundit Gino Hash, whose news and interview segments were shot live in his residence, The Hash Den; the eventual canonization of Jean Pillette, part of Quebec’s rich legacy in the squared circle; the seemingly effortless ascendancy of the sassy and debonair Terry Darling …

The reason you don’t remember any of it is because the RPWA existed nowhere outside of a stack of file folders and the imaginations of two boys, ages thirteen and fourteen. I was the younger of the two; Ben Cattaneo, the older.

Maybe it was because there was nothing on TV in the middle of a weekday afternoon in those early days of cable, save for the aforementioned Iran-Contra hearings. Maybe we just couldn’t fathom yet another VHS viewing of our favourite SCTV episodes. Or maybe we’d simply fallen so deeply into the dually damning worlds of role-playing games and pro wrestling that we just couldn’t bear to go on in one where those two things had yet to be conjoined. Whatever the reason, we sat down and plotted out what was probably the world’s first pro-wrestling role-playing game: the Role-Playing Wrestling Alliance, or RPWA.

Our elaborate wrestling events (or “cards” as they’re called in the biz) took place over countless Jolt Cola (All the Sugar and Twice the Caffeine!)-fuelled sleepovers. Matches were negotiated over the phone and via mail correspondence (on official RPWA stationery) well in advance, leaving time for adequate hype and trash-talking between the wrestlers we designed, right down to what they wore in the ring, with the help of multi-sided die rolls and various charts and indices of our own devising. Fanciful arenas and stadiums with baroque floorplans were envisioned in far-flung locations and drawn up on graph paper: places like the aforementioned Emperor’s Gardens in Tokyo; the Commons Arena in Ottawa, our nation’s capital; the sprawling Praça Jorge Ribeiro in Rio de Janeiro; and the Kistler Coliseum in Cleveland, named after Cleveland native Karuna Kistler, the youth leader at the church Ben and I attended at the time. There were various championship belts, feuds, stunning upsets, well-deserved ass-kickings, tales of comeuppance, and, in a particularly dark hour, one near-homicide.

Ben Cattaneo and I met in 1986 as young members of the congregation at the Unitarian Universalist Church in the agrarian ghost town of Olinda, about forty-five kilometres southeast of Windsor. Billed as a “church of religious freedom,” our families each had their own reasons for attending the little white church deep in Essex County’s rich fields and orchards, and Ben and I (and our younger sisters) were largely just along for the Sunday morning ride. Church, even if it was the UU’s non-dogmatic, social-justice-oriented variety, was still church. But it was made much more palatable when Ben and I found in each other not kindred spirits in matters ecumenical (although that was probably the case in some less important way), but soulmates in the squared circle. After services, while the adults stood dissecting that day’s message over coffee and cookies in the century-old church’s cramped, homey library, Ben and I, charter members of Olinda’s UU youth group (lead by Karuna, a 1970s hippie throwback in corduroy bellbottoms, turtleneck, and amulets who was just the right side of laughable to earn immortality as the namesake for the RPWA-endorsed arena in his hometown) would circulate amongst the elders leaning against the aged farmhouse furnishings, Styrofoam cup of juice in hand, to discuss the merits of Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat’s high-flying aerial tactics, as opposed to the classic stylings of “Cowboy” Bob Orton; or to unpack the clownish, yet somehow alluring glitz and glamour of the WWF compared to the NWA’s unsettling, old-school rawness. And if that Sunday’s sermon mentioned the martyrdom of Jan Hus? Well, would that be anything like André the Giant surrendering the WWF championship to the “Million Dollar Man” Ted DiBiase out of a sense of unwavering loyalty and self-sacrifice? Or was it sheer blind faith? Ben and I were at least willing to pursue these ideas, and our conversations often took us across the fields, or up in the mulberry tree at the edge of the church parking lot. One day, when our parents, done with coffee hour, called us to the cars for the long drive home, it was clear that our conversation wasn’t finished. Always eager to broaden our network of friends, our parents suggested we hang out for the afternoon, and I ended up going over to Ben’s house. It was there, in his parents’ professorial bungalow on Sunset Ave., directly across from the University of Windsor campus, that Ben introduced me to something I had never been exposed to before. There, in his bedroom, on a bookcase beside his bed, was a shallow red cardboard box. I remember him removing the box, whose lid featured a fire-breathing dragon, from the shelf with great ceremony, and placing it in my hands.

Dungeons & Dragons was my gateway to the world of role-playing games and all that was to come. I think Ben helped me design a thief character that afternoon – some cunning little smart aleck that promptly got killed with a few enthusiastic, but ill-informed, rolls of the multi-sided dice, those candy-coloured jewels capable of guiding the imagination with frightening – and liberating! – randomness. Everything hung in the balance of their facets.

From there, it was on to Recon, the Vietnam-War-based role-playing game; Top Secret, the international spying and espionage game; Call of Cthulhu, the H.P. Lovecraft-inspired parapsychological horror game; Villains and Vigilantes, in which I created a superhero character named Virus whose signature move was to shrink down to microscopic size, find his way into people’s bodies, and then return to normal, human dimensions, leaving a cracked pile of gore where his host used to be (and Virus was a good guy!); and Star Wars: The Role-Playing Game, where the most cunning and reliable gambit was stealing a storm trooper’s armour and poncing about in disguise. A year or so went by. Ben and I started hanging around the role-playing game club that met on Saturdays in the Katzman Lounge on the ground floor of the University of Windsor’s Vanier Hall residence tower. Though ten years the junior of most of the sweaty, acerbic, jogging-pants-wearing know-it-all undergrads who comprised the club, we were welcomed and/or tolerated.

And then one day that same summer, I went over to Ben’s and he presented me with a yellow manila file folder. Inside was a sheaf of photocopied pages: there were charts indicating various physical attributes and their associated die rolls, blank templates with spaces for Name, Height, Weight, Hometown – the folder contained the prototype of the rules and character-design process which, minus a little tweaking over time, remained virtually unchanged from the RPWA’s inception through to its end. In fact, with the exception of multi-sided dice and a modicum of knowledge about professional wrestling, the folder contained all that was required to launch your career in the Role-Playing Wrestling Alliance, whose logo was emblazoned on the front of the folder in Ben’s shaky, blue ballpoint script.

Basically, each wrestler was a set of numerical values tempered and fleshed-out by some die-roll-generated personality traits, and our pro-wrestling acumen. The template, or The RPWA Wrestler Scoresheet, allowed us to name our wrestlers, assign them various physical attributes, and an alignment somewhere along the pro-wrestler spectrum of good guy/babyface to bad guy/heel. I took inordinate pleasure in designing my wrestlers’ ring attire, and labouring over whether or not Sven Ericson, the high-flying Danish phenom, went barefoot with no knee pads, or barefoot with white, bandage-like knee pads… It was an immersive world. When they were later codified, revised, and typed up there was, however, a disclaimer at the top of The Role-Playing Wrestling Alliance Official Game Rules:

Note: In no way is the purpose of this game to make professional wrestling seem real. Professional wrestling is not real. It is dramatized. This game is simply for human leisure and to simulate what professional wrestling would be like if it were real. These rules may be written in a way that makes professional wrestling seem real but once again, we must stress to you that it is not.

It goes on in this earnest, authoritative tone for nearly twenty pages.

The wrestlers’ actual Wrestling Knowledge was broken down into five categories: Aerial (airborne prowess); Brutality (affinity for violence and mayhem); Power (general strength); Rulebreaking (willingness to cheat); and Science (technical wrestling proficiency). Each one of these was given a score between 1 and 20, rolled out on two ten-sided die, and the resulting numbers added together. A wrestler’s Knowledge was augmented by bonuses derived from four innate qualities: Agility, Desire, Intimidation, and Speed, also given values between one and twenty. Each wrestler’s complement of moves was selected via die roll from extensive lists generated from our expansive, nuanced knowledge of the wrestling we watched on TV and on countless VHS tapes. There were seven categories of moves, most of them dominated by some combination of the wrestler’s bonus attributes: Brutal Moves, which included simple head stomps or elbow smashes, were driven by a wrestler’s Intimidation and Desire bonuses; Aerial Moves, such as a flying-leg drop or flying dropkick, were governed by a wrestler’s Agility and Speed bonuses; fancy Science Moves, like the step-over toe hold, inverted sunset flip, or the small package, depended on Desire, Agility, and Speed; Power Moves, like the various body slams, suplexes, and backbreakers called on a wrestler’s Intimidation and Desire; Miscellaneous Moves, functionary stuff like Irish whip, turnbuckle whip, pin, lockup, toss-from-ring, and test of strength, required no special, innate qualities other than “You are a professional wrestler,” and were included for the sake of verisimilitude; Rulebreaking moves were keyed to a wrestler’s Rulebreaking Knowledge score and included, but certainly not limited to, scratching, using rope leverage, eye raking, knocking out the referee, throwing ringside objects, and liquid spewing; Finishing Moves were also free of attendant bonus scores since every wrestler, regardless of how bush league, needs a finisher. For example, my wrestler, Spectre, one half of the formidable tag-team combo Nightmare Express, tended to use the face-first piledriver, but was not averse to laying on a camel clutch, a belly-to-belly suplex, or neckbreaker.

Knowledge, desire, agility, and a willingness to break the sacred rules of the squared circle were one thing, but they had to be housed in a physical specimen of some sort. Each wrestler score sheet listed five body parts, Upper Body, Head, Legs, Arms, Back, which was given a score between zero and one hundred, determined by rolling percentile dice (two ten-sided die of different colours). If, say, one die turned up seven and the other turned up 2, you’d combine them, in that order, to get a 72. Pulling off a move against an opponent depended on a successful dice roll against the body part that would bear the primary brunt of the move. If, for example, Ben’s vainglorious Soviet strongman Boris Buchev (it being the late eighties, every wrestling promotion needed a Hammer- and-Sickle-waving heel) wanted to strap a figure-four leg lock on “Psychedelic” Phil Dantley (my senior-statesman-type wrestler from the Hollywood Hills, who wore tie-dyed tights and who, though definitely a rule breaker was not unpopular with the RPWA’s legion (imaginary) fans, and promoted a vegetarian lifestyle – a trait he acquired when I rolled 32–33 on the RPWA Psychological Stats Index), Ben would have to roll against Phil Dantley’s formidable leg score of 91. Part of the game’s strategy was using your wrestler’s strengths against your opponent’s weaknesses. A strong set of legs like Phil Dantley’s could be chipped away at over time, but your wrestler might spend a lot of time trying, and failing, to do any significant damage. And every time a wrestler failed to land a move, the momentum shifted to the other man, who could then put together a sequence of moves of his own, rolling for the various allowable damages, as per the Damage Charts, using virtually the entire collection of multi-sided dice. In this way, the action went back and forth, mirroring the ebb and flow of momentum and tactical advantage in “real” flesh-and-blood pro wrestling. Damage was subtracted from each wrestler in a running tally, and when it came time to attempt to pin your opponent, the calculator was used to add up what they had left in the tank (the remaining totals across their five body parts). For example, a wrestler who’d sustained significant damage to the head and back, despite being in relatively good condition in other areas, might exhibit scores like this: Upper Body: 65 + Head: 10 + Legs: 85 + Arms: 80 + Back: 10 = 250. That total was divided by five (the number of body areas) to get the wrestler’s overall remaining health. In this case, the score is 50. The wrestler attempting to make the pin would then have to roll the per- centile dice three times, scoring better than 50 each time, to earn the pinfall.

The flow of the game, its constant need for calculation and numerical adjustment, might seem like a lot of trouble, but we got so good at it over the years it became seamless. Some of the best wrestling matches I ever saw never happened anywhere outside of our heads. That Ben and I both “envisioned” individually nuanced versions of the same events, yet lived them and talked about them and were affected by them as if they were real, is testament to the power of gaming, and the RPWA’s reliance, much like real professional wrestling, on a powerful, all-encompassing narrative structure.

The pro-wrestling codeword for that narrative structure, and for the portrayal of staged events as if they are real, is kayfabe. But it’s never mentioned within the wrestling environment and pro wrestlers almost never talk about it, even long after their careers are finished. The tenets of kayfabe border on the sacred: 1) act as if all of this is real, and 2) don’t talk about how we’re all in agreement that we’re pretending this is real.

One of the keys to the RPWA’s realism, though we may not have realized it at the time, was the aforementioned Psychological Stats Index, which we put in for fun so we could laugh hysterically when someone’s wrestler ended up being addicted to marijuana (18–19 for Addiction on the Psych Stat Index, with additional rolls on Table iii to determine what they were addicted to). But looking back, I can see how rolling a 04–05 (Perverted); 28–29 (Sloppy, Lazy); 34–35 (Belongs to a Destructive Cult); 42–43 (Doesn’t Like to Administer Pain); 78-99 (Your Choice); and 00 (Totally Insane), allowed us to flesh out our characters by the truest definition of role playing: we imbued them with a persona. We came to know our wrestlers. They had tics, quirks, accents, loves, and foibles, just like, well, real wrestlers. It was all part of the pantomime.

One of the people who I’m pretty sure rolled 00-Totally Insane on the Psych Stat Index, was “The Sandinista” Jose Arquez. Essentially a terrorist, the bloodthirsty Nicaraguan was not amongst the first wave of RPWA wrestlers, but Ben created him within the first few months of the game’s existence, and his impact was immediate. No physical specimen, Jose Arquez was just sadistic and crazy. Clad in his characteristic Sandinista garb – part park ranger, part heavily armed guerilla – Arquez was known for carrying his shotgun to the ring and leaving it leaning against the ring post behind the turnbuckles while he wrestled. He plowed through a few custom-built RWPA scrubs (more on this special breed of RPWA punching bag later), as all wrestlers must while coming up through the ranks, and earned himself a spot in a prominently placed undercard match against Jake Vicious at The Convention of Champions, held at Cleveland’s Kistler Coliseum on March 17, 1988. In our hubris, and in our ever-evolving need to up the ante with each successive card, Ben and I billed this one as a “Live or Die Match.” I’m not sure what we expected, but I remember that Jose Arquez entered the ring, spewed a poisonous acid into Jake Vicious’s face, then, while the pride of Philadelphia, PA, rolled around on the canvas, clutching his hideously disfigured visage, shot him point blank in the chest with his shotgun. Now, some would assume Ben and I were merely enacting Anton Chekhov’s famous maxim, If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there. But I’m pretty sure Chekhov was the last thing on our minds when it happened; Ben actually had no idea if it would work until a die roll set the bloodshed in motion. Listening to him shouting the play-by-play, as our stalwart ringside announcer, I, along with the thousands packed into the Kistler Coliseum, could only sit in stunned silence.

Ohio State Law stopped the match. The whole thing lasted seventeen seconds.

With Jake Vicious enroute to the hospital in grave condition – Ben and I rolled the dice periodically to see if he was dead in the ambulance, or bleeding to death on an operating table, or stubbornly clinging to life post-surgery – the show went on: a World Television Title Match that saw the challenger, Sven Ericson, pin champion Rick Torpedo. I had a new belt in my stable, but it hardly seemed to matter. The Official Rules aren’t silent on the wrestling business’ grim side; here’s a note on “Special Damage Situations”: “When a wrestler gets very badly beaten up, his hit scores can dive into the negatives. This part of The Wrestling Match deals with those special moments that make certain matches worth remembering ” This wistfully worded statement, making clear our commitment to not shy away from the gratuitous, was penned months after the Jose Arquez- Jake Vicious contretemps, underscoring that a “special moment” had indeed occurred. The bloom was definitely off the rose.

Despite this black eye, the RPWA forged ahead with countless cards and ever more daring flights of fancy, though we were never again faced with a near homicide. Yes, Jake Vicious survived, his lengthy and complication-plagued convalescence becoming something of a running joke during pre-card interviews and pre-taped bits. He never did make it back into the ring, however.

Looking back, I still count that first RPWA elimination tournament at the Emperor’s Gardens in Tokyo – when Thrasher, the mercurial, Byronic stud of my yellow manila stable, defeated The Canadian Giant, Ben’s even larger, fan-favourite feral lumberjack, to become the RPWA’s first heavyweight champion – as a highlight of my formative years. Thrasher was the longest-reigning RPWA Heavyweight Champion, but that reign came to an end at some point in the spring of 1988, when he lost the title to Ben’s highly skilled, Jean Pillette, favourite son of Trois-Rivières, QC. It was our first major title change, and being on the losing end, it stung more than I cared to admit at the time.

The end of Pillette’s reign represented an interesting wrinkle in standard RPWA procedure, and was the source of some controversy outside of the ring. The source of the controversy was our monthly RPWA rankings, which were distributed with great ceremony on official RPWA stationery. Rankings all but demanded that the Canadian Giant be given a title shot, even though such a match meant that both champion and challenger would be from Ben’s stable. It finally happened at the RPWA’s First Anniversary Celebration on August 19, 1988 – the only time an RPWA event was ever held at an actual, existing sports stadium: Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor, MI, home of Ben’s beloved Wolverines, in front of an estimated 117,000 delirious wrestling fans. I ran Pillette, the champion, the man who beat my beloved Thrasher. Ben ran the Canadian Giant. In the context of the RPWA’s history it was highly unorthodox, but it resulted in a classic, sixty-minute tilt (match times were estimated, though a sixty-minute match may have taken ninety minutes or more to play out), and a new champion when the Canadian Giant scored a pinfall in the wee hours of the morning during a sleepover at my parents’ house on Iroquois Street.

From there, the belt passed to my up-and-coming jack-of-all-trades, Terry Darling: a rakish ladies’ man in flowing robes who could brawl just as keenly as he could catch you in an abdominal stretch, or apply a textbook arm-bar, and who also happened to be the RPWA’s reigning National Champion. Darling defeated the Giant on December 30, 1988, to become our only champion to hold two belts concurrently. But Darling’s reign as Heavyweight Champ was short-lived: on March 17, 1989, Jean Pillette became the Alliance’s first two-time champion, and its last.

The yellow manila folder Ben handed me that first day, which I still have, has been indispensable in the writing of this piece. But to fill the remaining gaps in the RPWA record I reached out to Ben – who now lives with his wife in London, England, where he works as a risk manager for an international telecoms firm. Over Facebook Chat, Ben helped clarify the RPWA rules and flows of play that had become indistinct in my memory over time. “Basically, it’s all percentages,” he said, summing up the crux of everything that translated into RPWA wrestling action. Waxing nostalgic about our creation, he offered this thought about the effect it had had on his chosen line of work: “Throughout my career I have always been good at assigning scores and values to esoteric but important business things (e.g. political risk), and I think that started with the RPWA.” We had some good laughs about the story arcs and diabolical matches we came up with: the Burning Turnbuckle tag-team championship matches between the Satan Worshippers and the Nightmare Express, or the Tower of Terror Match, which featured steel cages stacked on top of each other (our monstrous idea predating the advent of the WWE’s Hell in a Cell match by some nine years). Between us we conjured a pretty comprehensive archive of every card and wrestler (though Ben’s folders are buried in a storage locker and not readily accessible). We coloured the rest in with nostalgia, which is a pretty powerful storytelling tool but doesn’t lend itself to completism, or accuracy. We can guess at the succession of the various championship belts – the National Championship (our equivalent to the WWF/WWE’s Intercontinental belt), the TV Title, the Tag-Team Championship, the Three-Man Tag- Team Championship – but it was more than a succession of titles. There were things, insignificant things during insignificant undercard matches that made us roll on the floor in laughter; or the time Ben’s sister, Jessica, a year my junior, sat and watched us go through the pre-match interviews, rolling her eyes in dismay. Those things stick out more than any facts from a storage locker. That, and the intensity of the action. As we consulted damage indices, crunched numbers on calculators, rolled the dice against those probabilities we were often just as sweaty and exhausted as we imagined the wrestlers tumbling around in our heads to be. Which is a reminder of one of the most surreal and detached things about the RPWA and, indeed, all role-playing games: the actual action amounts, largely, to watching people sit and talk. Watching the game as Ben and I played it, with all play-by-play voiceover (almost always supplied by Ben) removed, would have been like watching two accountants make crucial budget cuts on a tight deadline. In short, it was nothing to watch, as some of Ben’s friends soon learned. The few attempts we made to introduce others to the RPWA always ended in perplexed ennui and desperate requests that we “do something else,” which usually translated into going to the store to buy junk food. Ben and I always acquiesced to this, because we didn’t want any RPWA initiate to walk away from the experience wholly turned off. Truth be told, though, I was never really comfortable with letting other people interact inside the RPWA, and was always a bit relieved when one of these rare initiates didn’t cotton on to our cerebral brand of brute physicality. One such newcomer was Ben’s friend Reg Hart who, when introduced to the game’s reams of paperwork, glazed over, though he stoically tried to maintain his interest as we had entrusted him with “running” one of the RPWA’s laughable scrubs (that class of wrestler created to be part of the Association’s robust comedic sideshow; wrestlers with purpose- fully unsexy names like Jack Tober, Tony Shivialli and Tom Perkins) in a throwaway exhibition match that didn’t count for the monthly rankings. It was an attempt to be inclusive and friendly, but it was doomed to fail. Reg didn’t get it. He and other outsiders ruined the flow of the action. They were burdens. There was something private and intimate about the game that I didn’t like outsiders messing with. They couldn’t handle being on the other side of the RPWA’s Möbius-strip kayfabe curtain.

Being observed by others while under the game’s intoxicating spell played a pivotal role in the RPWA’s history. Ben’s father, Dr. Julian Cattaneo, who is now retired, was at the time of the game’s founding a business professor at the University of Windsor. One day, while Ben and I were holding a relatively insignificant undercard at the kitchen table on Sunset Ave., Dr. Cattaneo brought one of his colleagues, Dr. Andrew Templer, home for lunch. They stood in the kitchen conversing as Ben and I went about our business barking out wrestling moves, annotating the action with play-by-play and analysis, hammering calculator keys, and crying out as a match went through its inevitable near misses and table-turnings. The lunch guest became increasingly interested in what we were doing. Soon, he was asking questions, and the match became a real-time RPWA demonstration. He was, in a word, flabbergasted. “And you came up with all this yourselves?” he asked us three or four times. Each time we assured him that the RPWA was solely of our own creation, he would nod thoughtfully. Speaking as a business professor who knew something about intellectual property, he sternly recommended we get everything related to the game copyrighted as soon as possible, before anyone else saw it. As he stepped out the side door for the return walk down the street to the Faculty of Business, I recall hearing Dr. Templer saying something like “I’m serious – make sure they do that. That game is really something,” to Dr. Cattaneo.

On August 11, 1988, a year after its initial creation, the RPWA was registered in the Canadian Copyright Office in Hull, Quebec, under Registration No. 371825. My copy of the document came with this handwritten letter, on official RPWA stationery:

Mr. Vice President,

Enclosed is a photocopy of our copyright certificate. We should see about framing it. Our next step should be buying or borrowing the book Game Design: Theory & Practice. It will give us advice on how to get games professionally published. Let’s do lunch some time soon as a strategy marketing session-celebration session. Once again, congratulations.

Sincerely,

Benjamin Cattaneo

President of the RPWA

The next time we were seen with the RPWA spread out on a table before us was in the summer of 1989, in the Vanier Lounge at the University of Windsor – the student dining hall had been set up as a venue for the University of Windsor’s annual gaming convention. It was a lightly attended affair, and Ben and I had pulled up some chairs at a table away from the main action and were running through some matches when a man wearing a red golf shirt, with dark, unkempt hair and a sparse beard, who appeared to be in his thirties, sidled up. He asked what game we were playing. We explained. He gave us his card and told us he was interested in buying the game from us, but seeing that we were clearly minors, we would have to confer with our parents.

I remember our parents, after we showed them the man’s business card, discussing it amongst themselves one day after church, out in Olinda. After some further discussion and communications back and forth, Ben and I were offered three thousand dollars US for the publishing rights to the RPWA from a gaming company out of Michigan that may, or may not, have been the still extant Palladium Games. We took the offer.

It became clear in my conversations with Ben during the writing of this piece, however, that we remember this part of the RPWA’s history very differently. My recollection was that the agreement with the gaming company allowed us, as the creators, to continue to play the game at our leisure. I remember the conversation in which we decided, jaded veterans of the gaming industry that we were, that we would never see the RPWA produced as a salable game; that the guy who bought the rights probably bought them to snuff out competition with any wrestling game he might have had in the development pipeline. I remember my friends, who thought my interest in role-playing games and professional wrestling suspect at best, suddenly taking a slightly less antagonistic line about my interests. And I remember what I bought with my half of the money: records, books, my own copy of the Call of Cthulhu RPG, beer, and hash.

Ben’s recollections are a lot more vague; he is, in fact, uncertain that we ever sold the rights at all. There’s no paper trail – at least none that we’ve discovered yet (I’m holding out hope that there’s something in that London storage locker). What we both remember, though, is that after the summer of 1990, we never played the RPWA again. It all took place over three short years. What happened? We expanded our social circles. We hardly saw each other. Wrestling changed. Peer pressure drove us away from role-playing games. In short, we grew up. But the deep philosophical intensity with which Ben and I talked about the RPWA during those three short years made it feel like a fully lived decade. We analyzed the matches, debated the weekly rankings, issued them on official letterhead. We celebrated the triumphs, lamented the hard-luck stories, laughed at our creations’ foibles. (I’m not sure the running joke of Jake Vicious’s agonizing convalescence will ever get old.) But where real pro wrestling was obviously staged entertainment involving flesh-and-blood human beings, the RPWA, which existed solely in our imaginations, was real. There was no kayfabe in the RPWA. There was no self-conscious acknowledgement within the RPWA that these were dice rolling on a thirteen-year-old boy’s chart-scattered bedroom floor at two a.m. on a Sunday morning. When Ben and I discussed the many great matches, we didn’t discuss the significance of the die rolls or the indices showing that one wrestler had a weak back made evermore vulnerable by repeated rolls above twenty percent on percentile dice. We talked about it like it was something we had witnessed live from a sticky arena floor; like the wrestlers’ moves were completely divorced from the rolling of dice through the seamless exertions of the imagination. And just like Ben, who years later would attest that his seemingly preternatural ability to assign numbers to esoteric concepts had its roots in the development of the RPWA rule system, I found my own love of narrative invention and complexity bolstered by RPWA history and lore and the characters who populated the stories themselves. The wrestlers had consciousness. They had will. At times, it’s difficult to reconcile the fact that Ben and I were actually making it happen with the feeling that it was happening to us, around us, for us.