The 50th edition of the Nashville Film Festival brought with it an opportunity for us to catch This Is Wrestling: The Joey Ryan Story, the documentary chronicling the rise of The King of Dong Style to the indie wrestling staple he is today. It’s drawn high praise at other film festivals, and rightfully so.
It carries with it a larger message than professional wrestling, one about the process of finding your own way in life.
As viewers, we learn the origins of this story, getting the firsthand account of Ryan’s beginnings from the man himself – back to the PWG days, scratching and clawing to get airtime during those TNA Gut Check segments, and ultimately getting that one ‘no’ that kept him out of the WWE.
When you’ve devoted your life to something, having the moment when you realize a dream taken from you can be completely dejecting. But, for Joey Ryan, that rejection ended up freeing him in a way. That brings us to the infamous ‘YouPorn-Plex,’ the penis flip, if you will. We see what that moment was like when Ryan transcended pro wrestling and became a viral internet sensation. More importantly, we see how it reinvigorated his love for the craft of wrestling, how he was able to parlay that moment into one hell of a run on the indies. What happened when Ryan started to ‘look at the open doors as they opened?’
This is a success story.
Watching his metamorphosis over the years, and seeing the importance that Candice LeRae played in this story, seeing how his star rose when he elected to limit his inhibitions and do something truly creative – all of it is a lesson in finding your own way. It’s a smart criticism of the wrestling world, one that all too often is bound by traditional stories and people who don’t want to let that go. It’s an assertion that wrestling is still, at its base, performance art. There’s always a creative way to elevate it and make it something different.
Ryan serves as an inspiration…a testament to the importance of finding your own happiness, being yourself, trusting your instincts, and blazing your own trail.
That applies for all of us, whether we’re wrestlers or not. You will leave the theater feeling that.
Stoney Keeley is the Editor in Chief of The SoBros Network. He is a strong supporter of Team GSD and #BeBetter. “Big Natural” covers the Tennessee Titans, Nashville, and a whole wealth of nonsense. Follow on Twitter @StoneyKeeley
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