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COURTESY OF THE NORTH TEXAS DAILY. Originally printed April 9, 2004.

Denton's one and only hardcore kingpin

Shane Gibson
Staff Writer
April 09, 2004

Every Friday night, the Hardcore Kingpin Scott Phoenix enters the XCW Wrestling Arena on McKinney Avenue in Denton and is greeted by hundreds of rabid fans chanting his name.

They want to see a fight. They want to see blood. It is Phoenix's job to give them what they want.

"It's very addicting when you step through that curtain and they're chanting your name. I can't get enough of it," Phoenix said. "You get addicted to it and you go out there the next time and try to get the same reaction and more."

The fans love Phoenix so much because he gives it his all to please them.

"He's willing to put everything on the line for them, his own well being, his own life. And they know that," said Nite Davis, the promotional manager for XCW.

"They explode. Their hero has walked into the building. It's almost like a superhero from a comic book. They just go nuts."

It was this same aspect that originally drew Phoenix himself to wrestling as a child.

"Wrestling was different than anything else or any other sport that you'd find," Phoenix said.

"You had your heroes and you had your villains and they would butt heads, they'd duke it out, and when it was good, you never knew what was coming next. That was the excitement of it."

Becoming a wrestler was a notion that Phoenix always toyed with, but it took some coercing from a significant other to get him to actually do it.

"I had been going through some personal things at the time and she basically gave me the 'shut up and do it' speech. She told me to get up there and take a shot at it before I looked back at a certain point in my life and regretted not doing it," he said.

Phoenix found a wrestling school and began training with Kit Carson. He immediately learned that he had no idea what he had signed on for.

"It was really rough," he said.

"I would leave every time all beat-up and sore, but at the same time I was loving every second of it. You just ain't lived until you've taken 50 backdrops in a day."

Physical injury is a very real danger when it comes to wrestling. Phoenix himself has suffered numerous concussions, broken noses and has had a herniated disc.

"God knows how much blood I've lost," Phoenix said. "I had a really severe concussion in a match last year and had to wrestle for another 20 minutes after getting it."

Phoenix thinks that some people would be surprised if they knew all of the injuries that wrestlers deal with.

"We're out there wrestling for considerably less money, with injuries that are keeping a multimillion dollar NFL player on the bench," he said.

The fact that the wrestlers are injured so often, Phoenix said, proves that XCW is legitimate wrestling, not merely a show where no one gets hurt.

"Some people try to look too hard at wrestling instead of just sitting back and enjoying the show like they would a movie or a TV show. I mean, we're sacrificing a lot of ourselves out there," Phoenix said.

Kit Carson, the man who first began teaching Phoenix to sacrifice himself for the entertainment of the fans, now wrestles at XCW as part of Team eXtreme and has faced Phoenix in matches.

Phoenix said, "The whole student-versus-teacher thing can be very interesting. It's like that old saying, 'I taught you everything you know, but I didn't teach you everything I know.' I've learned that lesson a few times."

Besides his teachers, Phoenix's biggest wrestling influence is Mick Foley, particularly when he was known as 'Cactus Jack.'

"He was a guy whose development had quite a few parallels to mine," Phoenix said. "He got bullied a little bit in school, he had a dream and he chased it. Even though early on people told him he didn't have a chance, he became one of the most respected people in wrestling." Phoenix says that he at least tries to come at wrestling with the same philosophy as Foley, which is to "Go out there and make it impactful and make it meaningful and memorable."

"Pain is temporary, but the memories, when they're done right, will last forever," he said. "And if you can, make sure you have them on tape."

Contact:scott.phoenix@verizon.net