Get It Right

I have a co-worker that has been letting me borrow old wrestling DVD’s. When I say old I don’t mean the 90’s. I’m talking about shit that was made before I was born (1979) and when I was way little. Old NWA. Old WWF. Old WCW. As I watch them it makes me feel like I did when I was younger. When I watch I’m not thinking about ratings, buy rates, or who has heat with whom backstage. The one thing that stands out the most is the crowds.

Man, entire families used to go to wrestling shows! You see mother’s with sons. Father’s with their daughters. It blows my mind. But what I want to focus on for now is the crowd reactions. They went nuts when the two guys would just stand in one another’s faces. I try and figure out what the big difference is.

I can only blame the influence of the internet for so much. We as fans have changed so much over the past twenty years. When did headlocks that we cheered for become the butt of Randy Orton jokes? When did arm bars make us yawn the same way moonsaults now do?


This goes both ways. Just as we started to demand more from wrestlers they demanded more from us. They wanted us to believe in what they do. We were asked to suspend belief when they flew through the air. Later that week we find out that they are being suspended for drug use, the one thing we were told for years as children to stay away from. We said our prayers and took our vitamins while they prayed to Jack Daniel’s and took vitamins that violated Wellness Policies. We watched as gods fell left and right. But we stuck by them. We stuck by them through layoffs, suspensions, death, and injuries only to have them return (well, not from death) only to repeat the same things.

Ever notice that we as fans are the greatest when they’re on the bottom? But once they get back on top or as close to it as they can they shit all over us. This masochistic mentally that we have is astounding. Eventually some of us get tired of it and move on to new sports or back to the ones we neglected when we became hardcore wrestling fans. The sad thing was when we saw the folks that got us into wrestling dropping off. My older brother that got me into wrestling when I was 3 started recording the shows so that he could skip through “all the talkin’ and bullshit.” Even my young nephews started calling wrestling ”stupid.” I still stuck by though. Even when I saw guys dressed as dentists and hockey players I stuck by. I knew that eventually it would get better. But…

It has been a while since I was dying to see some wrestling. Sorry, some new wrestling. If I miss "Raw", "SmackDown!", ECW, or "iMPACT!" I know I’m not missing anything. I always wonder what my late brother would have to say about the nonsense that is shown. I didn’t say have to watch because some fans act as if they are tied down and forced to watch a shit show. Well, some of the writers here do and bless ‘em because I know I couldn’t watch Impact every week and stay positive. Would he do like me and pop in an old VHS and go back to that time when wrestling was fun or would it depress him to see how bad it has become?

Maybe one day it will get to the point where families are going to shows together again. I know the WWE are trying to bring kids back with their little magazines and such. But I don’t think that’s the way to go. What got me into wrestling when I was little wasn’t that I could relate to the wrestlers. How many kids did you know growing up behaved like The Ultimate Warrior? I guess those kids that wore helmets but that’s another thing. I liked that they weren’t like me.

I wasn’t jacked to the moon or super out there unbelievable. When I watch the old shows, yeah, some of it is silly. Guys flopping around and acting like a punch was a gunshot. But the quality shows compared to the shit ones were so spread out, so few and far between, that you didn’t focus on it as much. But now we get four months of shit shows and maybe one segment of a two hour show that pleases us. We each have our parts to play in wrestling.

There are those that do it, and those that talk about it. My job is to watch, talk and write about it, and compare. The wrestler’s job is to wrestle, entertain me, and thank me for spending my free time watching them do something they hopefully love doing. I’ll continue doing my part waiting for most of them to do theirs.

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