Here’s a deep, dark secret that I’ve managed to keep hidden away from pretty much everyone other than my family and closest friends (a secret I’m quite positive they didn’t have knowledge of): I’m a major, major, major pro wrestling geek. I’m mean major. Unbridled. Unequivocal. Undisputed. Unadulterated. Undeniable. I am a pro wrestling fanatic. Let the jeers, jibes, and jokes begin.
From five years old on to today, I’m a fan. More than a fan. A zealot. From the days of AWA wrestling airing on my television screen at 10:30 p.m. on Sunday nights to the Monday Night Wars of the 1990s broadcast on Monday Night Nitro and Monday Night Raw on TBS and the USA Network, respectively on to today, I am a fan. From Georgia Championship Wrestling aired each and every Saturday on the SuperStation promptly at 5:05 to Extreme Championship Wrestling beamed on The Nashville Network on Friday nights, I am a fan.
I don’t feel I’m boasting in the least when I say I’m somewhat of an idiot savant where pro wrestling trivia, facts, history, etc. are concerned. I’m not saying that I’m necessarily proud of this. I’d just as soon harbor all kinds of mathematical or musical knowledge in my skull, but it is what it is. And let me state emphatically, I’m not some fly-by-night, Johnny Come Lately, either. This is a lifelong passion (some would say curse) we’re talking about here. From the moment I witnessed Andre The Giant at the Omaha Civic Auditorium while sitting next to my dad and my sister, I was hooked. The day I saw Rufus “Railroad” Jones at The Pershing Auditorium with my boys Brian and Daryl was one my greatest. (Those two losers have since grown up I assume and moved on to better things, like getting a life.) The day The Fabulous Freebirds “broke” Ted Diabiase’s neck (before he became The Million Dollar Man) early one Saturday morning in the Atlanta studios made my year. The first time I saw The Legion Of Doom enter the arena to “Iron Man” I “marked out.” The day The American Dream Dusty Rhodes (my all-time favorite wrestler) beat Harley Race for the NWA world championship was better than my birthday. The day Dusty and The Russian Nightmare Nikita Koloff formed the Super Powers to battle The Four Horseman was my own personal global summit. Peace has formed. The day I learned Magnum TA had legit broke his neck in a motorcycle accident, I felt my own personal loss. The morning after Owen Hart plummeted to his death in Kansas City I was numb. The instant after I saw Cactus Jack lay down his “Cane Dewey” promo I was forever changed.
Early on, of course, I believed pro wrestling was 100% legit. Try to tell me different and I’d put you in an arm bar and make you take it back. I believed Nick Bowkwinkel was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. I believed Bruiser Brody was from “Parts Unknown.” I believed The Crusher really was the man “Who Made Milwaukee Famous.” If I’d seen Super Destroyer I or II walking down the street with their masks on, I wouldn’t have batted an eye. That goes for Mr. Wrestling, too. I’m proud to have witnessed the early Wrestlemanias from The Stable Bar in Ashland. I’m proud to have owned Road Warriors action figures for nearly 30 years. I’m proud to have read scads of wrestlers’ biographies and that I can claim some of my dearest possessions are Nature Boy Ric Flair DVD sets.
My love affair with pro wrestling ran so deep in my early teenage years, my dream was to someday work for a wrestling magazine, of which I had accumulated dozens and dozens of copies by then thanks to parents who indulged my oddball fascination. One day I planned to own my own magazine. I often dreamt of living in the south, going to matches every night with my camera and notebook, and scribing great pieces on why The Great Kabuki’s green mist was the most underrated “foreign object” in all of pro wrestling. I often daydreamed about the day I’d land an interview with Gordon Solie, “The Dean of Pro Wrestling Announcers,” and pick his brain for hours and hours. I longed to travel to Mid-South Wrestling and meet Dr. Death Steve Williams or World Class Wrestling and give my condolences to the Von Erich family directly for the many tragedies that befell their family. I still long to take in a Lucha Libre card in Mexico and wear my coveted purple luchador mask all the while.
My love affair of pro wrestling survived countless eye rolls from my mother growing up, and her countless inquiries of “Why do you watch this crap?” My love affair has survived the same treatment from my wife and an assortment of girlfriends before her. It’s survived a seemingly endless stream of “you know this is fake, right?” questions from concerned family members and friends. My own kids have often questioned their old man as to “what exactly do you see in this?”
That’s a good question. What do I see in pro wrestling? What exactly have I continued to see for pretty near four decades now? Early on it was all about escapism. Some kids read comic books or played with G.I. Joes. I watched wrestling. It was all about diving into a different world that looked and felt a whole lot different from the one I saw when staring out my bedroom window every day. A world with grown men busting each other in the face. A world where bad guys got to break the rules and nobody could do anything about it. A world where Bobby “The Brain” Heenan could use his razor-sharp wit to insult anyone and everyone and brag and boast and tell it like it was. I loved the power of the Texas brainbuster and the claw and the figure four and DDT. I loved the cage match. The bullrope match. The Texas death match. The lights out match. The last man standing match. I love the loser leave town match and the loser shaves his head match and the your valet becomes my property if I win match. I loved that world.
Later on, wrestling became my ongoing saga, only except of unfolding in book form I watched it unfold on the tube. Sometimes the sage emanated from Minneapolis, other times it took place in Madison Square Garden. Most often it came from Atlanta, Georgia. In high school, when my girlfriend introduced me to her friend who was visiting for the summer and I learned that she was Atlanta, I flipped out. Eventually, I made her promise she would visit The Omni when she got back during the next big card and get me autographs. An eye roll ensued.
Today, pro wrestling has been exposed and altered, and any suspension of belief that was once possible has long been absent for me and pretty much any other fan. The Internet took care of that. What is still left for me is the backstage business and the behind the scenes happenings. It fascinates me. I’m endlessly enthralled why so and so was fired. Why a guy decided to “shoot” on another during a match and intentional hurt him. Why a guy goes off the script and “shoots” on “the mic,” breaking kayfabe and exposing the business by bringing reality into fantasy. I’m fascinated as to why certain guys are demoted to the middle of the card. Why someone is catching “heat” from management. Why someone won’t “do the honors” and “put another guy over” in the ring by letting him beat him. I love this secret world, one that can be sordid and sleazy but also honorable and united. I love that wrestling is like a secret society that only a few are allowed to enter and participate in. A society that only a few can rise to the top of. I love the “business” and that certain guys can “draw money” and others become “jobbers.” I’m hooked to this world that functions separately from the normal world, where men and women travel 300-plus days a year, hopping from town to town, sometimes wrestling in front of tens of thousands but sometimes wrestling in front of 50 people in a high school gym. I love the ecosystem it forms. It’s like early Hollywood or Wall Street or Skulls and Bones.
Am I embarrassed by pro wrestling? Yeah, sometimes. It doesn’t take a genius to understand a 44-year-old man probably has better things to do with his time than watch hours of faked sporting contests or read biographies of wrestlers or seek out videos from Japanese organizations to get a glimpse of The Giant Baba. Sometimes when my kids pass through the room with one of their friends and wrestling is on the television, I truly feel badly for them. I truly feel I’m putting them in the awkward position of having to answer, “Why the hell does your dad watch that?” I truly feel bad for putting my wife through countless dissertations about why Vern Gagne being inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame is so remarkable given that Vince McMahon ran Gagne out of business, took his lifeblood away from him, and left him an old, broken man with no future. I do truly feel bad and sometimes embarrassed.
But I can reconcile all that. Pro wrestling makes me happy. I like that I name all my fantasy sports teams after the Wild Samoans and that I can make my daughter laugh with embarrassment when I drop her off at school and let out a convincing Nature Boy-inspired “Whooooooo!” as she opens the door to get out. I like that I’ve wrestled with all my children when they were young, including these days with one Rockin’ Rubi June, otherwise known as Little Fists of Fury. I like it that Mick Foley is the “Hardcore Legend” and “King of The Death Matches” but also a college graduate and one of the most giving, charitable men walking the planet. I like that to this very day, I will actually stop what I’m doing at 5:05 p.m. on Saturday nights because the urge to turn the TV to Channel 11 and tune in Ted Turner’s old network for World Championship Wrestling for the next two hours overcomes me. I like that I’ve saw The Midnight Rockers before they were the Midnight Rockers and that Black Jack Lanza glared our way at the Civic Auditorium and that the Mulkey Brothers, Buck “Rock and Roll” Zumhofe, and George “Scrap Iron” Gadaski are my all-time favorite jobbers. I’m proud to still have copies of Pro Wrestling Illustrated from my youth. I’m proud that I still “pop” when I know something special is happening in the square circle before my eyes. I like that I like pro wrestling.
Roll your eyes. I don’t care.
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