Greetings all,
My name is Shane Toepfer and I'm yet another lifelong wrestling fan and longtime lurker (more on that in a bit). I grew up in New Orleans and have been living in the metropolitan Atlanta area for the past 15 years. My first wrestling memory is of switching through channels on a Saturday morning in 1988/1989 (ish) and seeing Demolition on my screen. From there, I went and rented WrestleMania IV, and quickly found my life revolving around the antics of my favorite WWF performers. While I watched on television, my passion was finding tapes at local video stores of various promotions and watching them over and over again, which has remained a vital part of my wrestling fandom to this day as I love to explore the archive of previous wrestling content. In those early days of fandom I remember watching lots of JCP, WCCW, and even Glow to round out my wrestling infatuation.
Of course I grew out of wrestling in the mid-90s as WWF moved towards a more cartoonish conception of wrestling and WCW featured Hogan against a menagerie of characters, moving away from the grittiness I liked. I was also entering high school, so I abandoned wrestling for a period of time to indulge in music from a variety of genres/eras, leaving my previous pursuits to an era I was no longer part of. And like many others, when wrestling boomed in popularity in the late 90s I found myself intrigued again, and started to dabble. It wasn't until Mick Foley's first book, however, that I really was as inspired by wrestling as I had been in my youth, and that book inspired me to write a research paper on wrestling for one of my college classes. That project pushed my life in the current direction it is now, where I have studied wrestling fans and earned a Ph.D. in studying media audiences, often using wrestling fandom as a case study for comprehending the larger media landscape.
I currently teach at Kennesaw State University and am still a huge wrestling fan. I have spent the majority of the past decade lurking on various message forums learning about the ways wrestling fans evaluate and engage wrestling texts, rarely directly engaging any wrestling fans. As enlightening as this is, it is often a solitary experience so I am determined to start participating more, as my schedule permits at least.
My fandom of wrestling itself went into decline during the past decade and was actually saved by Ring of Honor during the promotion's glory period of 2003-2006, and more recently by my exploration of Japanese pro wrestling like AJPW in the 90s. I have recently started to watch all of NJPW's big shows starting in 2010, and am thoroughly enjoying the product: I watch them slowly and view each show twice so catching up is a bit of a predicament. But given my history of enjoying shows in the archive and my meticulous nature of wanting to watch in order, I am content being five years behind when it comes to this product.
I look forward to being part of this forum, and in particular can't say enough great things about the yearbooks.
Shane
