This is a loose script for a video on my YouTube channel that you can find here: https://youtu.be/jGuNAz9cN5o
One of the joys of being a wrestling fan is following the journeys of wrestlers you found in the smaller promotions and watching them make it to the big time, like discovering a young band who go on to sell out arenas. It's also fun to discover the pit stops they made a long the way. Wrestlers in WWE and AEW could have had very different careers had they been signed to a company sooner or done a different gimmick elsewhere. Impact Wrestling recently released footage of a generic looking luchador wrestling a couple of dark matches for them in 2011. How different his career could have gone had he joined TNA? Today as I'm making this video they have released another previously unseen match featuring a current WWE star, this time a very young looking Johnny Gargano.
For a bit on context on the then 22 year old Johnny's career at the time, in 2009 he was four years into his career, and looking at this chart, it doesn't look to be his busiest year. According to Cagematch he would wrestle 38 matches for 8 promotions that year not including the TNA tryout matches, but he would in later years work for many more well known promotions. In 2010 he would become a regular in Chikara, entering into a successful trio known as FIST, which stood for Friends in Similar Tights with AEW star Chuck Taylor and Icarus, who continued to work mainly for Chikara and seems to have stopped wrestling in 2020.
It's not clear exactly when these matches occurred, but in the background a poster for the next upcoming pay per view can be seen, that being Victory Road 2009. Yes, that Victory road 2009, the one with Sharmell and Jenna Morasca. A live report I found also confirmed that this took place at the June 24th 2009 tapings.. As Lethal makes his entrance you can faintly hear Mike Tenay , though the match is presented here without any commentary, making me think this might have aired on TNA's secondary show Xplosion, which included short matches between impact highlights.
The match itself while fun is very simple, and short clocking in at just over three minutes. Lethal wins after hitting his Lethal combination then an elbow drop from the top rope. The only form of a story was Gargano coming out as a good guy and immediately kicking Lethal and wrestling the match like a bad guy, only for it to not work out for him. Despite Johnny's very indie wrestler look he didn't look out of place in the ring with an established TNA star like Lethal, who was playing his Black Machismo character at the time, his tribute to the great Randy Savage which by this point was two years old and getting a bit old. One thing that is mentioned in a live report from this taping that the cameras don't catch is that Lethal goes to hand his entrance gear to So Cal Val which was part of her role at ringside, but what we don't see is that he throws his robe at her, and she walks away leaving it on the floor. This is a reference to the storyline that occurred a year earlier, a love triangle involving her, Lethal and his former best friend Sonjay Dutt. There's a match in that feud that I will definitely cover on this channel some day.
Johnny wasn't wearing anything that indicated what he might have been doing on the indies at the time apart from an arm band that I couldn't get a clear view of, but seemed to say SCJ on it. If anyone knows what this means let me know in the comments.
On the following night Gargano would again wrestle another dark match, this time against Eric Young. At the time of me making this video Impact hasn't released that match so I can't comment on it, but at the time Eric Young would have been the leader of his own evil stable for foreign wrestlers known as the World Elite. Although not being around for very long the group had some interesting members such as Doug Williams, Nick Aldis and Rob Terry representing the UK, Homicide in a heel run I completely forgot about representing Puerto Rico and weirdly according to Wikipedia, Kevin Nash representing the United States. Yep, TNA was still TNA after all.
One final trivia note before I go, on the July 28th 2022 episode of Impact as part of a hype video for the upcoming Josh Alexander vs Alex Shelley Impact world title match, Johnny Gargano would actually appear on Impact very briefly to praise Shelley. After his tryout in 2009 it only took him13 years and a month to make his debut... In late 2021 Gargano had left WWE after deciding to let his contract expire. While many expected him to reappear in another promotion he didn't wrestle anywhere, partly due to the birth of his Son while he was away. Johnny's brief appearance on Impact stoked rumours that he might show up there, but one month later he would make his WWE return.
As I mentioned earlier Gargano's career would continue to progress despite not joining TNA on 2009. By 2016 he had worked for many of the top indie promotions around the world, such as Smash in Canada, Progress in England, PWG, Evolve and CZW in the US among many, many others. 2016 would also be his busiest year, wrestling over 100 documented matches. This would be the year he and a wrestler he has become synonymous with, Tommaso Ciampa appeared on NXT as a one off tag team, and Johnny Wrestling's career was never the same.
