In today’s hyper-connected world, no one and nothing is new. This is especially true for professional wrestling. With the advent of YouTube and so many other media outlets, it is damned near impossible for anyone to stay hidden from the public eye. Thanks to this, you can now see every modern wrestler in their early indie matches. And while it’s a great thing for young talent to build a following and get their name out there, it also has removed the ability for a star to debut on a big stage and immediately wow the audience with their skills. It’s an unfortunate side effect lost to the passage of time and fast-tracked technology. So today, we will look at one of the last great examples of someone showing up on the big stage out of seemingly nowhere, fondly remembered well over 20 years later, but who also disappeared almost as fast as he arrived.

Hailing from Southern California, Jay Ross decided to take his background as an acrobat and parlay it into a professional wrestling career. Ross would head to the All Pro Wrestling camp out of Northern California and train under the tutelage of the late Roland Alexander, who ran APW from its formation in 1991 until his passing in 2013. At the time, APW was building its reputation, which would take off years later, helping hone the skills of such varied talent as Jake Atlas and ‘The Man’ Becky Lynch. Oh, and also The Great Khali. Ross would take on the name of The Fabulous Blitzkrieg under the hood as a masked luchador. From his debut in 1994 until late 1997, by which point he had shortened his name to simply Blitzkrieg, he would compete sporadically before catching the eye of WCW officials and being offered a contract in 1998.

In July of 1998, he would make his official WCW debut, albeit in a dark match before a taping of Thunder. The match would see Blitzkrieg tagging with Super Dragon (a man who would go on to have a run in CZW and become one of the founding members of Pro Wrestling Guerilla) against American Wild Child and Dragon Yakuza, which had to ostensibly be a tryout match for most of the talent involved. Blitzkrieg wouldn’t be seen again until early 1999, but seeing as he was the only one from this tag team match that would return to WCW, it’s safe to say he impressed.

Blitzkrieg’s next match wouldn’t come until months later, competing in a series of 6-man (or Trios, if you will) matches as part of the ill-destined WCW Festival de Lucha taping. Throughout the tapings, he would compete alongside fellow luchadors La Parka and Super Calo while facing off against talent like Villano III (as opposed to Villano IV), Psychosis, Kaz Hayashi and even Rey Mysterio Sr.

Following the Festival de Lucha tapings, Blitzkrieg would finally make his WCW television debut proper, competing in a match against Rey Mysterio Jr. on the February 8th, 1999 episode of Nitro. While he would come up short, people were beginning to notice this new crazed luchador and his unique (for the time) style. The following week would see him team up with Juventud Guerrera, and Psychosis in a trios match on the winning side, defeating El Dandy (who we all know not to doubt per Bret Hart), Hector Garza and Super Calo. A few days later on Thunder, he would face off against Juvy in a losing effort.

The following weeks would see Blitzkrieg popping up all over television, usually seeing him pick up some victories over the low-card Cruiserweights on WCW Saturday Night shows while doing the honors for the higher-card talent like Kidman and Konnan on the bigger shows like Nitro and even on house shows. This would all lead to the moment when the entire wrestling world would take notice of his insane talent when he made his PPV debut at Spring Stampede 1999.

Widely considered by many to be the last great pay-per-view outing presented by WCW, the opening match of Spring Stampede would see Blitzkrieg and Juventud Guerrera face off to become the Number

One contender to the Cruiserweight Championship. While Blitzkrieg would fall short in his attempt, it would take a top rope Juvy Driver to finish, seemingly cementing him as a talent to watch even in defeat. The fact that people still talk about this match 23 years later speaks to the talent of both men and the show they put on.

Unfortunately, this would be the peak and beginning of Blitzkrieg’s WCW career decline. The next few months would see him primarily compete as enhancement talent to help put over other talents on house shows and the occasional TV taping. One can imagine that having to lose to Van Hammer on a September ’99 edition of Thunder had to be an indicator of how the powers that be viewed the masked talent.

Somewhere along the line, Ross was tired of the constant bumping and hurting, seemingly realizing that his position would not change anytime soon. He decided to walk away from a moderately lucrative WCW contract to become a computer technician. This was famously joked about on the Spring Stampede 1999 episode of Tony Schiavone’s What Happened When podcast, where Tony and co-host Conrad Thompson joked that it was Blitzkrieg that invented the iPhone.

Following his departure, it has been reported that one of the main reasons Blitzkrieg left was a missed spot resulting in a severe concussion for Ross. Of course, this was a time when if a guy became concussed, he was supposed to keep on keepin’ on, which we all know in retrospect was the worst possible choice. Regardless of the validity of these reports, Ross would eventually go on to enroll in nursing school at the University of Texas. In a matter of years, Ross went from being a wrestler who was always banged up and needing repair to be a registered nurse who could help care for those who were banged up. Ross still resides in the Austin, Texas, area, helping raise a family friend’s child and continuing to work as an RN.

While Ross retired in late 1999, he did make one more wrestling-related excursion. In 2004, a young man Blitzkrieg had explicitly inspired would receive his blessing to take on the mantle he had left behind, becoming Blitzkrieg II for a short period. That young man was Jack Evans, the recently released AEW superstar. Who knows, now that he is back in the indies and will take up the mantle one last time? It would certainly make sense to see Blitzkrieg pop up out of nowhere, just as he had for a hot minute in 1999.