I’m 25. I’m married. I have a coat and tie job, live in a pretty nice house, and enjoy moderately expensive bourbon.
But despite my young professional, middle class, white picket fence existence, I still have not outclassed or outgrown my love for professional wrestling. At least for now.
If you’re a guy (In fact, if you’re a girl, you can probably stop here.), you remember being glued to your TV sets on Monday nights in the mid 90s to see if Goldberg could beat Hollywood Hogan for the title on WCW Nitro or to see if Stone Cold was really going to give Mr. McMahon a beer bath on WWF (now WWE) Monday Night Raw. You remember pooling $30 or $40 together with your friends and then finding the “cool parent” who would let you order Wrestlemania or the Royal Rumble on Pay-Per-View at their house.
You wore the t-shirts, played the video games, and went to the live shows in your hometowns. You duplicated the moves on playgrounds and cheered for the good guys and booed the bad guys. Wrestling was to eight to thirteen year old boys then what Justin Bieber is to that same age group of girls now. It was an obsession.
And then middle and high school came along and it all stopped. Wrestling was kid stuff or redneck stuff. It was fake. It was cheesy. It didn’t match up to the newfound interest you had in football or rock music or girls or (insert anything else but wrestling here). Wrestling had lost that something that brought you back every week.
But it didn’t lose me.
I remember vividly fighting tooth and nail as a kindergartner with my mom to let me postpone my bath time so I could stay up and watch the first episode of WWF Monday Night Raw. I remember the 1-2-3 Kid upsetting Razor Ramon on a Monday night when mom gave in to my begging and pleading. I remember Lex Luger body slamming the monster bad guy Yokozuna on the deck of the USS Intrepid and winning one for America.
Later I remember getting to school fifteen to twenty minutes early in fifth and sixth grade to discuss whether or not Sting was going to join the NWO Hollywood or the NWO Wolfpac and to see if people really believed that Stone Cold Steve Austin got crucified by the Undertaker.
And then when people stopped watching wrestling, I pretended that I stopped too. I was embarrassed that I still liked it. I was worried people would make fun of me for enjoying something that they so adamantly hated. But every Monday night, I was still right there in front of my TV, waiting to see what The Rock or Shawn Michaels or Triple H had in store for me.
Towards the end of high school a lot of my friends found it very trendy to enjoy such a kitschy form of entertainment. So I was able to vocalize my interest again. We would play the video games in the senior lounge at school and even went to a live show together at the local arena. The interest was there but it wasn’t quite the same. People liked it because it was dumb, kind of like the way people like Jersey Shore these days, but I still loved it.
I loved pro wrestling through college and forced my roommates to put up with it on Monday nights. I found a few friends that enjoyed it, and we would go to Memphis for live events and discuss it every now and then, but it never dominated their lives like it used to on the playgrounds in elementary school.
After I graduated college and entered the adult world, I continued to watch it on Monday nights, but it started losing some appeal. The product was stale. Vince McMahon, the Chairman of WWE, stopped putting on a show that was exciting and well written and started putting on a show so he could sell t-shirts. He created a movie studio that puts out films featuring his wrestlers that are universally panned by critics and usually straight to DVD releases so that he can make even more money. He started treating wrestling like a business instead of treating it like a spectacle to its fans.
This Sunday is Wrestlemania 28. It features a decent card of matches highlighted by the Rock vs. John Cena, a battle of yesterday’s face of WWE vs. today’s, and a Hell in a Cell bout between the Undertaker and Triple H, two future WWE Hall of Famers in the twilights of their careers. The other matches are relatively ho hum and don’t offer much for a former or casual fan.
If this Wrestlemania fails to get good ratings judged by how many people purchase it on PPV, and if the ratings for the weekly WWE TV shows continue to drop, then I personally think that professional wrestling sees a major fall from the glory it once had and that it desperately tries to cling to today.
I know that kids still love it and their parents try to love it with them, but when a diehard wrestling fan of 20 years starts becoming disillusioned with the product, something is wrong. I will probably find a bootleg website and watch Wrestlemania this weekend without paying for it, but there’s a good chance that this Sunday is the beginning of the end for me.
I will still go to Royal Rumble parties that function like glorified drinking games where guys can dress like white-trash. And I will still get the box tickets from work for the live events at the arena in Memphis because nobody else will want them. But Mondays have lost their excitement. I don’t look forward to Raw like I did no less than two or three years ago. Wrestling just isn’t what it used to be.
Honestly there’s still that 5th grader inside of me that thinks Sunday night will resurrect wrestling to the golden years it lived in from the late 80s to the mid 2000s. It’s silly to think that kid might be right, but I really hope he is.
