Impact 1998 Go West

1998 Go West- I remember this was the year Morning Impact really became what it is today. Mike and I actually prepared for it. We planned out what we were going to say and what we would do in advance. We decided to make it more of a variety show than just a bunch of games. The ball race took off, we did this Mike vs. Todd angle similar to the Skid vs. Rubio deal we do now. One day Mike offered a loser gets his head shaved stipulation. Mike wanted to have his head shaved but I didn’t. Mike said "don't worry I'll make sure I loose". I thought "there is no way you can fix that" I was nervous. I don't think I have ever shaved my head. Luckily I won a close race and we shaved Mike's head on stage. The next day, however, I lost and the crowd was chanting "shave Todd's head", but I silenced the crowd luckily by running a video and changing the mood quickly. The Puppet was hilarious in his first year in the balcony. The real genius behind the Impact Puppet was the original guy who played the role, and here for the first time ever his name was Andrew Sutherland. That guy was a comic mastermind, we would plan out what he was going to do, but Andrew would never do it. My frustration led to the Puppet being huge. I did not understand why he was messing up our plans and my irritation was evident on the stage, which in turn was the funniest thing about it. Our skit was a Lone Ranger story that actually went somewhere. Mike played "Pronto" the Indian, and we had some youth ministers play villains. This was the tried and true formula we used most of the time during Morning Impacts infancy. We also did some fun intro videos and it was the first year we had a grand opening. In one of those videos I was almost injured bad. I was not much of a horseman and we made this Bonanza like video where Greg, Jon, Mike and I came riding down a hill on horses. I did not realize that you cannot run a horse toward a barn. I was riding fine and was getting pretty confident with my horseman skills, then it happened out of nowhere I was heading full bore towards the barn. I could not stop the horse. We were at Impact regular Spook Spikard's farm. He was yelling at me "pull back, pull back!" My horse was out of control. Luckily I gained control of the horse about 2 feet from us both smashing through the wall of the barn. One of the memories that I took a lot of heat from was my idea of making IWO t-shirts. The NWO t-shirts were really popular at the time, as it was a pro wrestling thing that was way popular. A lot of people were watching wrestling at this time, even people who did not watch it knew about the NWO. We ordered about 175 of those shirts but one of the few people who did not know anything about the NWO was the printer apparently, as the font on the shirt was awful and they looked nothing like the NWO shirts. We sold about 90, but were stuck with the rest. We sold them for years at half price and finally sold the last one around 2002. We did this thing where Gregg Spink, Jon, Mike and I came down as the NWO...it was terrible and did not catch on like I thought. One of the most oft remembered things from 98 is the penny throwing incident during the Accapella concert. Now maybe I should not report about this in this forum but remember these are my memories so, this was a major memory. Some dudes in the balcony thought it would be cool to hurl change at the group during the show. Apparently they were not Accapella fans (they had lost some momentum, they had changed members so many times the group was not as popular). This directly led to Greg Anderson the MC having to verbally chastise the group on the next day. He felt awful about it the rest of the week. I mean he dropped the guilt hammer. This is yet another reason being the MC is not all it appears to be. When I was younger I thought that interested me, like any attention starved kid, being the Impact MC was a big deal, but now that I have been on the other side for a few years, I like my gig and hope Jon is MC for years to come, it is a tough job. Three men, Jon Shoulders from 2000-now, Greg Anderson from 1996-1999 and Mark Hayes in 1994 and 95 have been the M.C. They all were really good at it. A lot of people have no idea how much time and work it takes to do this. You have to basically live back stage at Impact. As for the penny throwing, in the skit the next day Gregg Spink played the "Copper Kid" and threw pennies at our heroes.
Pause for personal reflection...Gregg Spink is yet another major influence on my life. Although he was kind of known as the Impact "bad boy" (all in good nature) pushing some of the curfew rules, he was quite a fixture at Impact for a decade or so. I would have liked to have gotten Gregg more involved but it never materialized. At Uplift in 88 when I went with just another teen, and my youth minister who at the time was Benji Nall (I wonder where he is now?). Gregg was also there. I was a nervous teen who had no one to hang with. Gregg has one of those larger than life personalities like Jon Shoulders and Mark Hayes. I have always gravitated to those people. Greg was kind of a celebrity at Uplift. You always knew when Gregg entered the room, the place just lit up. That year he taught the best encounter class I was ever in or have ever been to since, "J.C, and Luther". After attending that class I followed Gregg like a puppy, I believe he was the first person who planted the ministry seed in me. He was very kind and never said "give me some space kid" this meant a lot, to a kid who struggled with low self esteem. I think I still have a tape of that class he sent me in the mail. I used that story in one of my interviews at Crittenden Drive and tell it occasionally still today.
Back to Impact. I think this was also the year a teenager Courts Vesey shared her testimony on stage the last night during Walling’s lesson, it was powerful. We also started the tradition of handing out a "memory device" at Impact. This is an item to take home to remember the event by. We handed out gold painted rocks with the idea of sharing your gold. I hardly see Courts anymore but she is on my friends page. I really hope she is doing well. This was also my last year to be single I was kind of dating a girl I really liked called "Jackson" but I liked this "Montgomery" girl I met at Impact, that story is best left at that. I felt really good about myself, although I had changed; my self worth still swirled around how girls perceived me to a large degree. In September life changed. Little did I know that was to be the year I would settle down totally as I met Amanda at Western Kentucky University. This was also the first year of Junior Impact. The University had been wanting us to run a second week for a couple of years. The problem with that is that it would be hard on the youth ministers on the board to take two weeks for Impact every year. We fought against the idea. We did not like the idea of another completely different group of youth ministers coming in and running a second week of Impact. We thought we had a good thing going the way it was. There are allot of negatives to a different group running a second week. This changed one meeting when someone suggested we do a junior high only weekend just before Impact. It was a great move and a couple of years later we expanded Junior Impact by a full day. That year Switchfoot preformed for Junior Impact before they hit MTV.