There were 55,000 people there that night, they told them. They told them it was all for them, that the knowledge that this would be the last battle between "The Wrestling Machine" Tristan McDaniel and "The New Age Punisher" Evan Andrews was too powerful to not sell out a building this big. However, neither one of them cared all that much about the people in the crowd. All that mattered to them was that they was here finally, doing the thing that they had dreamed about doing. All of the pain, all the sacrifice, was finally worth it. It was what they had spent their lives wanting, and it was finally here. It dawned on them, finally, that they had reached their moment. The chance to be to this generation of wrestling fans what their heroes had been to them. Like Misawa and Kawada in the 1990's, and Flair-Steamboat in the 1980's, this was the wrestling rivalry of the 2000's. They were as sure of it as anything, and this was their magnum opus moment.
But how did Tristan McDaniel and Evan Andrews get to this place, and how have their careers become endlessly entwined with each other into a Gordian knot of resentment, grudging respect, and volcanic competitive zeal? How did we get here? That's the part everyone wants to know about, now that both men's careers have finally separated, and in the case of one, ended forever.
But to truly understand what they meant to the sport they loved, and how their rivalry influenced wrestlers they would never meet or compete against, we have to start with what made this feud so special. And to be quite honest, to simply describe it as a feud in no way does it justice. This was a battle between two men who each wanted to achieve as much glory as it was possible for anyone to achieve, only to find their path blocked by the other. And each man found their complete, exact, polar opposite staring back at them blocking them from what they want. For Tristan McDaniel, the rakishly good-looking technician from Chicago whose all-American good looks and vast reservoirs of technical skill made him one of the most adored wrestlers of recent memory, he found himself staring back at a man who fancied himself a god among mortal men who possessed an arsenal of attacks and strategies that equaled his own, and a mastery of the sport's gray and black arts that far exceeded his own.
As for Evan Andrews, the inscrutable masked destroyer from the farthest end of Canada whose narcissism and undisguised God complex is matched only by his explosive talent, the roadblock to the success he knew himself entitled to came in the form of someone who was all too capable of attacking his own weaknesses, and someone as gifted.
This was a rivalry that would partition the sport into 2 equal halves, one side believing Evan Andrews had the killer instinct necessary for greatness, the other believing that Tristan McDaniel had the kind of technical brilliance found very rarely.
But to understand the story, one has to know where both men came from.