In 1996, a fan stayed in same hotel as the WWF roster the weekend of Wrestlemania

This is actual home camcorder footage I took myself when I traveled to WrestleMania XII in Anaheim, CA. At this time, the wrestlers and the WWF Travel Club fans all stayed in the same hotel. These days, the WWF staff has their own hotel. There is various footage of the WWF crew hanging out in the Anaheim hotel including Steve Austin, Shawn Michaels, Vince McMahon, Undertaker, Hunter Hearst Helmlsey, etc, etc, etc. Pretty much everyone under contract at the time stayed here.

Here’s a few time code notes along the way:

8:15 - Vader and Shawn Michaels work out at the hotel gym. This would be where I got the reputation among friends for stalking HBK.

11:30 - This is various clips from the WWF-Celebrity softball game.

36:00 - This footage is prior to everyone attending the Slammy Awards, which was directly across the street from the hotel.

37:55 - This is from the WrestleMania brunch where they brought in a few guys to do a mini Q&A and sign autographs.

43:10 - This is from the WWF staff entering and leaving the post-WrestleMania party inside the hotel.

I met Arn Anderson around that time and was really surprised how small he was. He showed up at a radio station promo at a car lot wearing a competition radio stations t-shirt. They rushed him in the back of the van for a shirt swap and pretty much ruined his mood for the evening. Lots of great sound bytes between the promos and Little Caesars pizza slices. (He ate the whole time)

I was like 8 years old and I had subs for PWI and one other Apter mag. I especially loved the Almanacs every year. I would just go over all of this info, and a lot of the stuff I would read about I haven’t seen to this day. Still, I just had to know EVERYTHING.

If the Internet back then was what it is today, holy shit I don’t think I ever would have watched anything other than wrestling.

This reminds me of the time I stayed at the Holiday Inn in South Philly where all the ECW guys stayed when they had shows at the ECW Arena. It was so fun going on wrestler “scavenger hunts”….hey there’s Tommy Dreamer in that hallway…hey, there’s Francine in that other hallway! Best part was seeing Ballz Mahoney in a hallway near our room, calling out to him, and having him barge into our room and plop down on our bed and proceed to debate movies with us.