March 13th was the 25th anniversary of SoCal Uncensored.
The world, and the wrestling business, looked completely different back then. Today you can find out about a wrestling show in seconds. Promotions post on social media, clips go viral, and within minutes fans all over the world know what happened.
Twenty-five years ago, if you somehow ended up at an independent wrestling show, a whole lot of things had to go right just for you to know it existed.
There was no social media. There were no viral clips. Not everyone was even online yet. And a lot of wrestling promotions didn’t care about the internet at all.
Most of the time, if you wanted to know about a show, you found out through word of mouth… or because someone handed you a flyer in a parking lot.
The first independent wrestling shows I ever went to were during my time in the Army in North Carolina. A friend of mine, Jones, somehow knew about them. To this day I still have no idea how he found out about those shows.
Neither one had more than 50 people there.
It probably didn’t hurt that my first independent experience was an OMEGA show, the promotion run by the Hardyz, but I was instantly hooked. The atmosphere was completely different from what I was seeing on TV. The wrestlers were right in front of you, the crowd felt part of the show, and anything felt like it could happen.
When I got out of the Army and moved back to Southern California, I couldn’t wait to see what the local scene looked like.
The problem was… I had no idea where to even begin looking.
Eventually, while leaving a WWF show at the San Diego Sports Arena, someone handed me a flyer for CCW, based in Vista.
Finally.
I started regularly attending CCW shows, and eventually I even started doing production work for them. That’s where I first learned about other local promotions, and about a website that covered the scene: socal-wrestling.com.
The site, run by Adair Cole, Tom Walters, Aaron Hassan, and others, was a great resource. The problem was that many of the people running the site were also involved in the wrestling scene. Over time promotions started influencing the content, sometimes heavily. At one point the message boards were even wiped after too many posts criticized a decision UPW had made.
Around that same time, I got involved in something else that was huge for wrestling fans in the early 2000s: tape trading.
Before YouTube, and before most promotions realized how much money they were leaving on the table by not selling video of their shows, the main way to see wrestling outside your area was through VHS tapes passed around between fans.
You’d hear about matches from Japan, Mexico, ECW, or random independent promotions and hope someone you knew had a copy.
I arranged to trade some tapes with a guy I met on an XPW fan site named Franco. Since we were both going to be at an upcoming XPW show, we decided to make the trade in person.
After the show we stood around talking for a while with some of the people he knew. One of those people was Lonnie Hill, who was well known for his posts on several local message boards.
Before long we became friends. I even hosted an XPW fan site that he and some others created.
I kept running into Lonnie at wrestling shows, and while we didn’t agree on everything, especially when it came to Chargers vs. Raiders debates, we shared a lot of the same opinions about independent wrestling.
One night in the parking lot of the Los Angeles Sports Arena, we started talking about creating a place online where fans could talk about wrestling in Southern California. At first the idea was just a chat room. We talked about bringing in guests and throwing around big ideas like we were starting the next big thing.
Two things eventually pushed the idea further.
First, CCW had mostly stopped running, which meant expanding beyond a single promotion made sense.
Second, the situation with the other website made it clear that what the area really needed was an independent voice, a place that wasn’t controlled by promotions.
When the site first launched, we were honestly just having fun with it. We didn’t have some grand plan for what it would become.
We posted whatever we thought was interesting or funny. Some of it probably wouldn’t get published today, like a movie review written by Samoa Joe. (Although let’s be honest… we’d probably still publish a movie review by Samoa Joe. Because he’s Samoa Joe.)
Slowly the site evolved.
More news.
More show reviews.
More discussion about the scene.
And the audience kept growing.
And over the years there was plenty to talk about. Southern California independent wrestling went through some incredible eras. XPW was doing crazy stuff in the early 2000s. Promotions like RevPro, AWS, EWF, and countless others were running shows every month in VFW halls, armories, small venues, and anywhere else they could set up a ring. And then PWG began building the reputation that would eventually make it one of the most influential independent promotions in the world. For fans willing to seek it out, Southern California quietly became one of the best wrestling scenes anywhere.
Eventually Lonnie moved on from the site, but others stepped in to help keep things going, Scrub, Justin Crast, Joshua Shibata, Andrew Pessina, and countless others who contributed over the years.
People who genuinely love Southern California wrestling, even if that love sometimes shows up in the form of criticism.
Contributors have come and gone over the years (including myself), but the mission of the site has stayed the same.
The Southern California wrestling scene is incredible. Yes, this site can be critical sometimes, okay, a lot of the time, but that criticism has always come from a place of wanting the best possible scene for both fans and wrestlers.
Because independent wrestling only works when people care enough to support it… and care enough to speak up when things can be better.
For twenty-five years, socaluncensored.com has been a place where fans can follow the scene, discover new promotions, argue about shows, celebrate great matches, and occasionally stir up a little trouble.
And that’s a good thing.
So thank you to everyone who has written for the site, everyone who has read it, and everyone who has helped keep the Southern California wrestling scene alive over the last twenty-five years.
And most of all, thank you to the wrestlers, the people who drive hours for small crowds, wrestle for little money, and put their bodies on the line so the rest of us can enjoy the show.
Here’s to the next twenty-five years.
I’ll leave you with a link to the very first thing ever published on SCU, Uncensored by Lonnie Hill.