This photo is just a random shot of One Man Gang I found somewhere, but something about it speaks to me. It's very characteristic of the madness that is US pro wrestling; the head tattoo, mohawk, Pabst trucker cap and middle finger placard are all very indicative of a certain aesthetic. I've loved professional wrestling as long as I can remember. I don't remember the first time I ever saw a wrestling match, but it's been with me at least since kindergarten. I was born in 1982, and wrestling was big in the 1980s. It was marketed to kids just my age. Wrestlers were super heroes, cartoon characters. The colors. The cheesy acting. The goofy storylines. The cardboard characters. It all seems pretty silly now. But I was six. I loved Hulk Hogan, Big Bossman, Million Dollar Man, Randy Savage and all the rest. They were, with no exaggeration, gods to me. The WWF was my pantheon. I would gladly have given my life for Hulk Hogan, but that was ok, because I knew he would never ask me to. Hulk Hogan, like Superman, was an Absolute Good.
I didn't watch wrestling from the ages of about eight to fourteen, not because I had lost interest, but I was living with my dad at the time and we didn't have a TV. We were too poor, for one, and my dad didn't approve of television. I didn't think much about it. Wrestling had just become another thing I liked when I was a kid, no different than He-Man or American Gladiators. Then something changed, and that something came to be known as the Attitude Era. During this time, most of my social interaction was church based instead of school based, and the guys I happened to be friends with liked wrestling. I have a very clear memory of one of the first times I was hanging out with a guy named Tony, who became a good friend of mine. He asked if I liked any sports (a pretty common question). Usually when I get asked that, it just lets me know that the interlocutor and I won't be close friends, because the fact is I don't like sports. I said "Sort of. I play football..." Just trying to be personable. And Tony said he liked wrestling.
When I look back on it now, that conversation was really the genesis of my lifelong fandom of the wrestling industry. My face split into this huge Joker grin. Oh, we're not talking about sports. We're talking about wrestling! This I know! I knew nothing about the current climate, I had never heard of Steve Austin or Bill Goldberg (I think the only star I knew was Undertaker), but I knew wrestling.
Tony was more of a WCW fan, but Steve Austin became to my fourteen year old self what Hulk Hogan had been to my six year old self. Hero, god, savior and idol. I wouldn't learn the details until years later, but the WWF had lost most of its star power and was now trying (and succeeding) to attract an audience by being 'edgy', albeit in a pretty sophomoric way. But again, that was ok. I was fourteen. Who better to get off on middle fingers, boobs and cussing than a fourteen year old? Wrestling became my 'thing', and remained so... to this day, really. I have many 'things' now, but it's still one of them. As my ex-wife said to me once, "It always comes back to porn or wrestling or drugs with you, doesn't it?" That's one of the funniest things that's ever been said about me, and it probably doesn't paint me in a very favorable light, but c'est la vie, I have loved all of those things. A lot.
The next major incident in my wrestling fandom was getting my first computer. The artistry of wrestling is lost on most Americans, simply because basing your opinion of it on what you see on TV is like saying that music is stupid because you can't find a good song on the radio. I don't want to get too in depth about the nuances of independent and foreign wrestling, because this is more about my personal history, but trust me when I say: if the WWF and WCW were KISS and Foreigner, when I got the internet I started to listen to Black Sabbath and Guns N Roses. And I was both surprised and pleased to learn that the Internet Wrestling Community (note the caps) had the same taste as me. These were the equivalent of wrestling Trekkies. Before I got the internet, my two favorite wrestlers were Chris Benoit (more on him in another post, probably) and Kurt Angle.
And when I signed up for my first message board, who were everybody's favorites? Those same two guys. Just like when Tony told me he liked wrestling, I was home. It was as if I had been made to love wrestling. A little kid during the cartoon era, a young teen during the Attitude era, and a purist during the internet era. My own interest developed parallel to the industry itself. I really had no choice. People finally seem to have gotten over the "fake" thing (only about three decades after wrestling ever stopped claiming to be legitimate contests), but there's still some puzzlement from the non-fan as to what the appeal exactly is. Jerry Jarrett once said "For those who get it, no explanation is necessary. For those who don't, no explanation will do." A great answer, but in my case I'll do him one better. Why do I love wrestling?
My dear boy, do you ask a fish how it swims? Do you ask a bird how it flies? No siree, you don't. They do it because they were born to do it.
No comments:
Post a Comment