Post by Chiral on Feb 28, 2022 17:23:37 GMT -5
Talks his departure from and return to wrestling, various falling outs, and more.
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At thirty-five, Phil Brooks walked away from the only life he’d ever known into a world he barely did. Being able to do anything—including, and maybe especially, failing—protected him from repeating the worst mistake of his wrestling career: loving it too much. “I don’t want to focus 100 percent of my energy on any one thing, if it’s not my wife and my dog, because what I’ve learned is you will burn the f*** out,” he tells me. He stops again and thinks. “If I focus on any one thing as crazy as I focused on wrestling before, I’ll f***ing expire.”
Khan had pitched Brooks on AEW in 2018, when the two met for coffee at a Chicago Starbucks the day after Christmas. Brooks wasn’t interested. “He made it pretty clear that he’d seen and heard a lot of start-up ideas come through the woodwork over the years and many of them hadn’t really come to fruition,” Khan recalls.
Once Dynamite debuted, Brooks started texting Khan about matches he liked, an interview segment he thought worked well, newer wrestlers who stood out to him. In the first couple years after he left the WWE, Brooks never talked about wrestling with his friends. But after AEW’s debut, his friend Lou D’Angeli noticed a change: It wasn’t just that Brooks was talking about wrestling but the way he was doing it. “He was listing all the guys he wanted to work with,” D’Angeli remembers. “Not only did he find his passion but he found a way: Here’s my path, here’s who I can work with, here’s who I can help.”
“The seven years he spent getting married, adopting a miniature werewolf, writing comics, cage fighting, and starring in horror movies were all part of him finding his way back to healthy,” says his friend Nora Flanagan. “And once he did that, he could find his way back to wrestling.”
It can take a while to realize the path you were on was the right one at the wrong time. That the thing you loved then is still the thing you love now, and that it’s still there, waiting for you. For Brooks, the thing he missed the most wasn’t the matches, the arenas, or even the fans. It was the family. He missed being in a car with a friend, driving from town to town. He missed the way all the wrestlers and the crew would come together from across the country for tapings every week, falling into an easy rapport in the locker room. In the old-school language of wrestlers, to be a part of the locker room is to be a “good brother,” and that camaraderie, that family, is what he missed.
Once Dynamite debuted, Brooks started texting Khan about matches he liked, an interview segment he thought worked well, newer wrestlers who stood out to him. In the first couple years after he left the WWE, Brooks never talked about wrestling with his friends. But after AEW’s debut, his friend Lou D’Angeli noticed a change: It wasn’t just that Brooks was talking about wrestling but the way he was doing it. “He was listing all the guys he wanted to work with,” D’Angeli remembers. “Not only did he find his passion but he found a way: Here’s my path, here’s who I can work with, here’s who I can help.”
“The seven years he spent getting married, adopting a miniature werewolf, writing comics, cage fighting, and starring in horror movies were all part of him finding his way back to healthy,” says his friend Nora Flanagan. “And once he did that, he could find his way back to wrestling.”
It can take a while to realize the path you were on was the right one at the wrong time. That the thing you loved then is still the thing you love now, and that it’s still there, waiting for you. For Brooks, the thing he missed the most wasn’t the matches, the arenas, or even the fans. It was the family. He missed being in a car with a friend, driving from town to town. He missed the way all the wrestlers and the crew would come together from across the country for tapings every week, falling into an easy rapport in the locker room. In the old-school language of wrestlers, to be a part of the locker room is to be a “good brother,” and that camaraderie, that family, is what he missed.
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