WWE’s Rhea Ripley on women’s tag teams at WrestleMania
With WrestleMania approaching, WWE’s Rhea Ripley talks about the importance and future of women’s tag team wrestling on the Under the Ring podcast.
Miguel Fernandez and Phil Strum, NorthJersey.com
It’s a WWE world. We just live in it.
Dave Bautista, John Cena and The Rock star in our biggest action movies. Donald Trump, who was a casino entrepreneur in pro wrestling, runs Smackdown campaigns full of WWE-like swagger. Can it be a coincidence that Hulk Hogan was the keynote speaker at this year’s Republican National Convention? “What are you going to do when Donald Trump and all the Trumpmen come after you, brother?” This is our policy in 2024.
In short, professional wrestling has come a long way culturally since 1947, when a flamboyant wrestler named Gorgeous George made his first television appearance. Since then, professional wrestling has been part of our lives and our living rooms.
But not like in Tommy Fierro’s living room.
“When I was 17, Jimmy ‘Superfly’ Snuka was at my house watching Wrestlemania XI on my couch,” Fierro said. “He was one of my favorites growing up. I had his action figure, his t-shirt and his poster. He was one of the greatest wrestlers of that generation and one of the most influential. He was also at my graduation and my birthday party.”
Did we mention that Fierro – then a teenager living with his family in Woodland Park – was already a professional wrestling entrepreneur?
And that’s where he is today, at the age of 47, still as the owner of the state’s only pro wrestling store, “The Wrestling Collector.”
“Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to open a wrestling merchandise store,” Fierro said.
One destination for all your wrestling needs
In his 1,000-square-foot warehouse in Stockholm, Sussex, you’ll find boxes of action figures, shelves of VHS tapes and DVDs, around 3,000 wrestling magazines, replica title belts, posters, books, gum cards, Lucha Libre masks, an ’80s wrestling arcade game, signed photos and every other collectible you can imagine.
You’ll also find a wall full of signatures: including Jake “The Snake” Roberts, Greg Valentine, Tito Santana, Bushwhacker Luke, Tony Atlas, Lex Luger, Brutus “The Barber” Beefcake and Doink the Clown. He promoted all of them and many others at some point during his 30-year career, at local games across the Garden State and as celebrity guests at the fan conventions he hosted in places like Morristown and Rockaway.
His store is just his latest venture. Many wrestling stars have come here to sign autographs and mingle with fans: Ken Patera, Larry Zbyszko, Demolition (a tag team), Jimmy Hart, Eric Bischoff, Ron Simmons. And fans come from as far away as Canada and Japan to browse his merchandise.
“I love collecting things, and this is a great one,” said Bob Kelly, flicking through a box of magazines on a recent weekday. He had driven here from Mount Laurel, Gloucester County, two hours away. He’s been there four or five times in the last month. That’s the kind of wrestling fan he is.
“When I first came here, I was just amazed at all the offerings,” said Kelly, a high school coach. “I didn’t know there was a real market for this.”
Fierro knew. He knew since he was 8.
“When I was little, I used to sleep over at my grandparents’ house in Paterson,” Fierro said. “Friday nights we had pizza, and Saturday mornings I would sit and play with my toys on the living room floor while my grandfather watched WWF. I would lift my head off the floor and be hooked to the TV. I was instantly hooked.”
Memories of the golden age of wrestling
This was the so-called Golden Era of Wrestling – the 1980s. The age when Ivan Putski, “Macho Man” Randy Savage, “Ravishing” Rick Rude, Andre the Giant, Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat, “Hacksaw” Jim Duggan, Sgt. Slaughter, “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, Ric Flair, The Iron Sheik, Jesse “The Body” Ventura and – yes – Hulk Hogan performed dropkicks, body slams, cobra clutches and the occasional folding chair on their opponents while the crowd chanted pandemonium and commentators Vince McMahon and “Mean” Gene Okerlund kept an eye on every scripted move.
Professional wrestling was – as fans already knew – “fake” in the sense that everything was carefully choreographed. Winners and losers were all decided in advance. But fans also knew that the stars of McMahon’s entertainment empire – then known as the WWF (“World Wrestling Federation”) and not, as later, more accurately as the WWE (“World Wrestling Entertainment”) – actually performed the stunts themselves. And sometimes they got injured in the process.
“The guys who participate are definitely athletes,” said Kelly. “They are well trained and take care of themselves. It Is Entertainment. But I still enjoy what these guys – and ladies – do physically.”
Getting a grip on the wrestling business
Judging by the traffic Fierro gets both at his three-year-old shop and through his accounts on Facebook, Instagram and X (he has 2 million followers on social media, he says), others do, too. There’s something about wrestlers of the ’80s and ’90s in particular – Fierro’s specialty – that seems to have struck a chord with kids growing up then.
“They were larger than life,” he said. “They all had different shapes and sizes, personalities and characters. The storylines, the Hulkamania craze, definitely hooked me in the ’80s. Back then, the WWF was on over 300 days a year. They came to the Brendan Byrne Arena almost every month. As a kid, my parents would take me to see the WWF every month. I had all the merchandise, the action figures, the magazines, the T-shirts, the posters. I was just a huge wrestling fan as a kid.”
When he was 16 and a freshman at Passaic Valley Regional High School (he graduated in 1995), he heard a wrestling show on William Paterson College radio, WPSC-FM 88.7. He won a contest to be a guest on the show, and it soon became a regular job. Shortly after, he launched his own wrestling fanzine, the Ringside Wrestling Newsletter. Such things were the only way fans could communicate with each other and find out about upcoming events. “There was no social media back then,” he said.
One thing led to another, he says, and at 16 he was promoting his first wrestling meet at the Wayne Holiday Inn. Another soon followed in Totowa. He sponsored his first match in 1995 at Rutherford High School. And soon he was hanging out with the biggest stars in the business.
“Everyone was pretty cool, very businesslike and respectable,” he recalled. “Jimmy ‘Superfly’ Snuka lived in Springfield, New Jersey, and he liked me. He was very friendly to me, even though I was just a teenager.” The Iron Sheik – you could say it now – smuggled the 16-year-old Fierro into bars. By the end of his high school years, wrestling had taken over his life.
“I missed my high school prom and graduation because I was hosting wrestling shows both days,” he said.
For years he put on matches around the state with his company ISPW – Independent Superstars of Pro Wrestling – sometimes as a fundraiser, at high schools, elementary schools and churches. He still puts on his big wrestling conventions twice a year, aimed at wrestlers from the ’80s and ’90s. But he had somewhat retreated from the scene when he decided three and a half years ago that there was a market for a store that sold wrestling memorabilia. People tried to talk him out of it.
“First of all, I opened the store during the pandemic,” said Fierro, who lives in Lincoln Park with his wife, Allison, and 8-year-old daughter, Emily. “Everyone thought I was crazy.”
But the store, he says, has helped him maintain his connection to the wrestling industry, as has his social media activity.
Ironically, the boy who breathlessly followed the wrestling stars in the 1980s is now following those same stars him.
“Through those social media accounts, all the big stars started following me, from Hulk Hogan to Stone Cold Steve Austin to The Rock,” he said. “Now they all follow me.”
Go…
The Wrestling Collector, 2772 Route 23, Stockholm. thewrestlingcollector.com
