I got a heel to the chin from the flying backflip kick. I was clotheslined. I was shoulder slammed. I was leaped upon from the top rope.
They did things to me, things I didn't know humans did to other humans. Things like the Boston crab and the crippler cross-face. Hours after a knife-edge chop I still had the mark of a red hand clawing across my chest.
I probably wasn't prepared for just how much it would hurt. From a mere hour's punishment, I learned a lot about wrestling.
I did my best to look the part. I'd bought a silly mask. And trying on singlets in a crowded Glassons, searching for one that was suitably tight, was an early contender for my 2012 most embarrassing moment.
But wrestling is more than just the ludicrous outfits. There's more to it than simply pulling on your girlfriend's leggings.
I'll admit my interest in professional wrestling has waned since the halcyon days of WWF in the late 80s and early 90s, where the Ultimate Warrior ruled supreme and Hulk Hogan still had hair. The days of Ravishing Rick Rude, Macho Man Randy Savage, Andre the Giant, and Bret the Hitman Hart. A time when New Zealand's very own tag team, the Bushwhackers, once held centre-stage on our screens.
But I was once a devotee. I wrote a letter to the Hart Foundation tag team that my mum never sent. It's still on the wall in my childhood home, my tribute to New Zealand's declining wrestling popularity a faded 6-year-old's depiction of two men in pink lycra.
Grown males wearing tights, long flowing hair, shaven chests and fake tan. It's hard to see what it was that captured New Zealand's hearts in those days. But wrestling was huge here then. And overseas it still is.
Yesterday I got in the ring with Marc Perry, a 24-year-old lad from Birmingham with 10 years' wrestling experience. Like his peers, he's as much actor as athlete.
Around the time I learned to question wrestling's legitimacy, to cringe at its pageantry, my interest in the pursuit began to wane. Getting in the ring with these guys, though, it all came flooding back. The excitement, the expectation. The drama. What Perry called "sports entertainment".
"I do like to think of it as a sport," he said. "You've got to be athletic, you've got to be trained, you've got to practise. You can't just do the moves, you've got to entertain. If you go in there and you half-arse it, people are going to know."
Even when the guys are warming up, they're calling to their imaginary audience, baying for their attention and adulation.
It may be cheesy but it's entertaining. It's like a play, only Hamlet's tanned and shirtless, and MacBeth's wearing speedos.
Tonight, Queen Elizabeth Youth Centre, doors open 6.45pm. Adults $15, 10-16 $10, under 10s $5.
