Pro Wrestling

As a young man, I was a very serious professional wrestling fan.  Very serious.  I would spend most of my time waiting for Monday night to watch Raw and Nitro, and Tuesday through Sunday, I would spend most of my time watching tapes of old pay-per-views.  My brother and I would collect them all, one way or another.  One of the main ways we had our collection was by renting the tapes from the video store and my brother would hook up our VCR's together and make a copy.  We had just about every pay-per-view either on a dubbed tape or the actual real copy.  I wouldn't say we watched them together all that often, but we both had seen them all, for sure.

One day, I took an interest in girls and started dating one, and she took my attention away from wrestling.  Also, I got a job that I worked evenings, and couldn't devote my Monday nights to the programming.  WWF bought WCW, their only competition, and it just sort of changed a lot for everyone.  It wasn't the same and I just wasn't that into it anymore, and it only got worse as I grew older.

Now, as I look at the WWE roster, I only recognize a few names, most of them being the holdovers from the days when I was a fan.  It's changed, where people don't have gimmicks anymore, it's more just dudes with a certain personality and catchphrases.  I really can't comment too much on the current state of affairs of the pro wrestling world, as I haven't watched any WWE programming in a while, and what I have watched in the past couple years has been short and usually low-quality illegal streams over the internet.

Part of what made wrestling so intriguing to me was that I knew it was "fake" or staged, and the wrestlers were basically acting, like dancing.  I sought the truth behind how it worked.  I wanted to know the secrets of pro wrestling, what was involved to make a match.  How they did it, how they would work together to perform the moves.  I wanted to know what went on backstage.  I wanted to know wrestlers real names.  Once all that stuff was revealed one way or another, the mystery of the whole thing sort of faded away for me.   I found out how the wrestlers communicate in the ring to coordinate what moves were going to be done next.  I found out how they make themselves bleed.  I looked up everyone's real name on the internet.  The veil of mystery was lifted with movies like Beyond the Mat and books like Mick Foley's Have a Nice Day.  The quest for the truth was over. I lost interest because there was nothing new to learn.

I still appreciate a good wrestling match.  I know a good wrestler when I see one, and I know a good match when I see one.  And you would know that I know who's a good wrestler, as my favorite wrestler of all time is X-Pac.  I still think the Undertaker is boring as all hell.  I still think Randy Orton is probably the best in the business right now, although remember, I haven't seen a lot of these new guys do their thing.  But from as long back as I can remember, the late 80's, until the summer of 2001, my life was professional wrestling.  In high school my dream was going to wrestling school when I was an adult.  Hell, I still would like to do it, maybe if I was more in shape, I guess.  Sometimes I wish I was still in those simpler times, just me in my room watching wrestling, eating popcorn, drinking Faygo, getting fat and full of cavities.  It was a great time, a happy time.