How Your Views on Wrestling Have Changed

[dawho5]

I ask because it has been something I've been thinking about on a broader scale recently.

 

I'm 37 years old. If you talked to me at 25, 30, 35 and now, asking any questions you liked you would get different answers. I know this for a fact. The interesting part to me is that the gaps between the answers get closer to one another as I get older. My feeling is that my tastes in wrestling have changed in a very similar manner. I don't think it's ever going to stop. I do, however, know that my opinions will continue to change. To the point where I could go back and read something I wrote this year about a match and wonder what I was thinking about it if I dug it up a year later to the day. So I'm going to try and track my personal evolution in terms of watching wrestling and what I looked for/enjoyed.

 

I started with WCW somewhere in 1996. Loved me some cruiserweight wrestling. I also enjoyed the internet darlings of the time quite a lot. I tried watching WWF but it didn't have the same feeling for me. There was a lack of all the cool stuff the guys I liked in WCW were doing.

 

Then I got into tape trading and the NJ juniors and All Japan stuff blew me away. For the same reasons, all the cool stuff. I enjoyed a lot of the Hayabusa matches I watched. I thought RVD was a lot of fun to watch. Not saying these are inherently bad or good things, just giving a general idea of how I looked at wrestling. If you did loads of cool stuff, I liked watching the matches. ECW was incredible stuff when Tajiri, Lynn, Guido, RVD, etc. were wrestling.

 

Then I stopped watching wrestling until I one day decided to start again. And oddly enough, the first thing I hit really hard was Stan Hansen. For whatever reason, it stuck. It's nothing like the stuff I used to watch and love. But the simplicity of it without losing any of the effectiveness really spoke to me a lot more than any amount of cool stuff ever could. I followed that up by going back through All Japan and I'm still up in the air as to the results on that. I liked a lot of what I saw and I think a lot of it does have value. But I'm a bit hesitant to start my rewatch of it all. Since then I've bounced around from watching stuff as far apart as the 1985 I Quit match, selected stuff from the 2014 G1, Chigusa vs. Dump, a bunch of Starrcade and WWE SNME stuff, and going through 2000s Japan.

 

During that trip through 2000s Japan I discovered a lot of differences in the way I looked at matches from when I had started the All Japan project. Somewhere over the course of that I had really found a lot of the core things I like about wrestling. And my feeling is that I may find a lot more of the flaws in All Japan as I go through again. Because when I watch stuff like Tully vs. Magnum and see how that same level of hate and desperation, the way it seemed like everything was a struggle and this was a fight to the finish, can by achieved with so much less, I start to wonder if Misawa and co. had to go to the lengths they did. I understand that they had different audience demands, but they largely shaped those demands through their work. Watching through the Starrcade set, I found that matches that came in under 20 minutes (unless they featured very skilled and experienced wrestlers) got on my nerves. The Luger vs. Flair match from Starrcade had a great section of Luger work on Flair's arm. It was well done by both and it surprised me to have that reaction. The only problem was, they went right back to cycling through Luger power spots for the third time not long after. If you cut off enough of that match where Luger doesn't have to repeat himself with the powerslams, it's far better for it. One thing about the SNME set I'm seeing is how great Savage was. He's got this great, believable tough guy persona, but he'll hide behind Liz when Jake brings out the snake. And I think it's the Bret match where he does this incredible leg selling at the end. If nothing else on those discs clicks for me I'm glad I watched those two matches for sure. And last year I would have never even thought of watching it, so there's a pretty big change for me as well.

 

I'm interested to see how other people see their own evolution as wrestling fans, what they think triggered the changes, things they might have been surprised to find out they liked. That's one of the things I like about reading people's posts here , seeing how they react to the same things I watch. I think that the way we came to where we are now, even if things have changed, is just as important as the opening part of a wrestling match is to the middle (where we are now). I also think that seeing that kind of thing would help a little in being able to see how other people view matches when we disagree with their conclusions.

[clintthecrippler]

Honestly, after the 1-2 punch of the Benoit and Misawa tragedies, I became way more appreciative of what I (lovingly) refer to as "bullshit" in my professional wrestling. Less headdrops, table stunts, balcony dives, and more phantom foreign objects, Dusty juking and jiving for five minutes before locking up with Tully, and whatever the fuck you call what Sid does.

 

That's not to say I don't like me a good spotfest every now and then still. I still love watching old FMW from the glory years of Onita and Hayabusa, and watching Great Sasuke taking modern deathmatch wrestling to an ultra-absurdist level with the "Great Space War" series. I love Chikara almost as much as I do classic Memphis. And I am a solid defender of modern WWE, perhaps to a fault. And my mouth continues to drop in awe of the amazing athleticism on display in Ricochet matches.

 

But I am also much more appreciative of watching Mr. Wrestling II and Les Thornton work headlocks to a 15-minute draw on WWF World Championship Wrestling on TBS than I may have been when I first saw it years ago on a random tape, as well as matches where someone may take three bumps the entire match, but does a shitload of stooging and riling up the crowd to the point where all three of those bumps really mean something.

 

But the absolute biggest turnaround I have probably made in my modern wrestling viewing has been David Crockett on '80s JCP commentary. I used to be of the general smark opinion of the late '90s/early '00s that he was terrible because he wasn't great at calling actual moves and action. But the last five years or so I have made a complete turnaround on him. I now love that he is basically the voice of "the average Crockett wrestling fan if he got a commentary gig." His enthusiasm for the majority of matches and angles more than makes up for lack of calling holds as far as I'm concerned.

 

I think I turned the corner on David Crockett with:

 

1. repeated viewings of Match 7 of the Nikita-Magnum series where the final call is David Crockett talking about how "the Nightmare has come true."

2. A "Dusty and Friends" vs Horsemen six-man tag on the Dusty Rhodes DVD set where the first 30 seconds is Dusty and Flair taunting each other while the crowd goes wild and the first moment of commentary is simply David Crockett giddily saying "Isn't this GREAT Tony!" in reference to the match Dusty and Ric being in the ring together.

 

I apologize for that becoming a bit of a ramble.

 

EDIT: and for the record since the original poster mentioned it, I am 35 going on 36. Grew up as a kid watching WWF, Crockett NWA, and post-86 AWA and World Class. Watched WWF/WCW/GWF on ESPN in early '90s but kept up with Smoky Mountain and ECW through the Apter mags 92-96. Was in college during the tape trading/Internet explosion/Monday Night Wars-era of the late 90s and got huge into FMW, New Japan Juniors and Michinoku Pro for a while, and a huge booster of ROH/CZW/IWA Mid-South/Dragon Gate from 02-08. Modern viewing habits are RAW every week, Smackdown sometimes, PWG, and sometimes NJPW along with DVDVR '80s sets I am catching up on - though I keep meaning to get back onboard with Chikara since the relaunch.

[BillThompson]

I'd like to think I've changed a lot.

 

When I first got into wrestling I was very young, and basically if you weren't a main eventer I didn't care about you. I loved guys like Randy Savage, Hulk Hogan, Ultimate Warrior, Ric Flair, etc. I was very much a WWF kid, as they had TV I could watch all the time, that was not the case with WCW. Workrate, or insider knowledge if you will, weren't really a factor for me. I liked the good guys, disliked the bad guys, and cheered accordingly.

 

I took a long break from wrestling and when I came back I was a teenager and I was suckered in by certain voices online. I read Scott Keith and took his word as gospel. I discovered places online like DVDVR, but they seemed so beyond what I thought of wrestling as. They were talking about elements of wrestling that I didn't care about or thought mattered, and they certainly weren't spouting their opinion as if it were the truth like Keith would. I considered myself an extreme workrate guy, but the truth is that I was a Keith guy, I wasn't really paying attention to workrate as much as I was making sure I liked what he liked,

 

I took another break from wrestling and returned around the Attitude Era. I didn't really care for the product WWF was offering at the time. I liked Austin, but I didn't care for the flash-bang style of WWF at the time. I gravitated more towards WCW where at the very least it seemed like there were more wrestlers I enjoyed; Jericho, Benoit, Guerrero, Malenko, La Parka, etc. I still read Keith regularly, but I noticed that I was caring about different elements of a wrestling match than I did before. It was no longer strictly workrate, as most would define it at least, that concerned me. I appreciated the hard workers, but I was paying more attention to elements like psychology, selling, bumping, timing, etc. This is also the time period when I got heavy into the tape trading scene. I discovered Lucha beyond the few shows I had previously seen, and truly delved into Japan for the first time. I began to understand the guys at DVDVR more, and for the first time ever I had the sense I was becoming more of a complete wrestling fan, if that makes any sense.

 

Fast forward about twelve years and I returned to wrestling once again. To say that I changed would be an understatement. I now loathe the opinions of Keith, he's essentially a representation of the close minded sarcastic prick I used to be. I now look forward to exploring wrestling theory and taking in as many viewpoints on wrestling as I can from as many people as I can. I took on PWO as my de facto wrestling home, and this place has helped to cultivate me as an adult wrestling fan. Heck, I've gone from an extreme workrate guy to someone whose tastes align more with Matt than anyone else I know. I still have my moments, don't get me wrong, but I'd like to think I'm a better wrestling fan. I've reached the stage where exploration, knowledge, ad wisdom are what matter to me. My concern is no longer with being right, arguing, or spouting off the rhetoric of Keith.

 

So yeah, my views on wrestling have changed a fair amount.

[Petey]

I'm 27 and my views have changed several times.

 

I started off watching wrestling at a real young age in the early 90's, the end of Hulkamania into the New Generation. I loved pretty much all wrestling though and would watch old WWF and WCW tapes just because it was wrestling.

 

Things started to change as I reached the end of elementary school and into middle school when the WWF/WCW war was the big thing and "coolness" became a big draw. At first it was WCW with the nWo storyline but once the Attitude Era took off, the WWF became the "cool" company.

 

Change continued as I reached high school and started to appreciate "workrate" and "good workers". I started watching ROH at the end of '03 and that shaped my wrestling preferences for a while. I checked out some 90's AJPW online and fell in love with head drops (not knowing the context) and really liked that style for a wrestling, not realizing until later how silly it was for indy workers to do Burning Hammers in the middle of a match in front of 200 people.

 

Like mentioned above, the Benoit tragedy and Misawa's passing changed my views again into what they are today... less is more. I've rewatched a lot of 80's JCP and really enjoyed it. Also watched a lot of the old house shows and Prime Time Wrestling's that were on Classics on Demand and enjoyed those too. At some point I liked the ultraviolence stuff but not all that much.

 

I started to really get back into WWE last year with my interest peaking around WrestleMania and a little bit after but it's waned again. Thank God for The Network.

[JerryvonKramer]

I've just turned 32. The main way I've changed as a fan is that 10 years ago my love for wrestling was all about kitsch. I loved it in a one-eyebrow-raised post-ironic sort of way. I was more or less solely about what you'd call "the bullshit". I'd watch it in the same way I'd watch Adam West Batman.

 

The main change is basically admitting that I just love wrestling. Not in a post-ironic sort of way, but just straight up.

 

I still do a mean sideline in kitsch, and still marvel at how something like TNT ever got on national TV, but for the past four years or so I've become increasingly interested in all aspects of wrestling from burrowing deep into its history to gaining exposure to matches and workers from different times and places. It's more than an obsession at this point, it's just part of my life.

[goodhelmet]

Great posts so far. I may have to do a podcast on this subject.

[concrete1992]

I'm 21 and I've had my views on wrestling changed pretty drastically in that short period of time that we call life. Not going to do a big post cause I'm a scumbag:

• When I was young my dad had me watch WWF Raw with him. I started getting a bit older, he no longer cared, but Monday night became a bit of a ritual. My bed time would always be a little later that night because the last thing I did before going to bed was getting out the worn VHS tape and putting it into the VHS player and pressing record. Then I got to watch the first segment up to the commercial. It was a helluva time. Also want to include I had no idea about WCW at this time. No other reason just to give you an idea on what I was raised on. MICK FOLEY AND STONE COLD!
• Now I'm going to be terrible with measuring time but maybe someone can approximate things based on matches. Fell out of love with the GREAT SPORT, as the kids called it because none of my friends were watching it. They didn't NOT like it they just didn't watch it. Stopped recording Smackdown! and Raw and just didn't watch anymore. Wasn't until 2006 apparently, just did a quick google search of a memory, that I decided to give it another go. It was less of a conscious decision and more I stumbled upon TNA at the very end and remembered the good old days. It must of been AJ Styles vs Shannan Moore that I had caught cause I remember Daniels throwing in the towel. The Impact Zone felt different and unique from WWE, I was in again. And DVR.
• From TNA I branched into indie wrestling through Samoa Joe. I discovered ROH and had no idea what I was looking at. Ordered Joe vs Kobashi after some research. Had never ordered a wrestling DVD before outside of WWE ones from Amazon. It was different. Welp, I gobbled that DVD up and then was into a whole new realm of wrestling I had no idea about before.
• ROH got me to start watching more critically. I was very much into workrate stuff and was for a long time. Probably up to 2010. Like Davey Richards was my boy and Cena was utter trash.
• Someone posted the WKO100 on Wrestling Forum and my head started spinning. One hundred wrestlers and a ton I had never even heard of. A good chunk of posters were dismissive but not me. I had no idea why Cena and Henry were so high and had very little clue who Blue Panther was. I didn't feel like I was smart and I don't like feeling that way but I enjoy changing that.
• Probably didn't look back into WKO too much until 2 Cold Scorpio versus Vordell Walker happened in 2012. I thought it was absolutely marvelous but still had reservations calling it one of the better indie matches of the year for some pre-conceived notion of what a match has to have to be GREAT. That is something for the most part I think I've changed.
• Heard WKO was all over that match and thought maybe my tastes are more align now and WHAM they were. Probably started digging into lucha at the end of 2012 into 2013 and I feel like a whole new fan. I've almost done a 180 on what I like in wrestling. The guys that didn't change though remain my favorites. Such as Foley and Danielson. You can approach wrestling in so many ways and none of them are at all wrong and that may be my biggest view change. I'm no longer as dismissive and can appreciate where people are generally coming from even if I like some different things in my wrestling these days.

PS Not incredibly short.

[jushin muta liger]

I'm 26 and my views on wrestling have changed a bit as well but mostly because of my breaks from wrestling. Add me into the category of people who saw things different after the Benoit murders and the Misawa death. Benoit was favorite wrestler and it didn't help that the murders occurred close to my birthday. I won't say that I stopped watching altogether but I stopped watching WWE and focused on Japan because it still fed my hunger for state of the art wrestling and wrestling that is considered a "go go" style. Once the Misawa death happened, I stopped watching altogether because I felt guilty being a fan of style that could result in people dying.

 

And that is a big factor because I cringe now at head dropping spots, headbutts and kicks to the face. I've said it before that I'm not a fan of Ishii because of the headbutt spots and him being dropped on his head. I watched the G-1 this year and his physical state concerned me. Honma is another guy cause I wanted to yell at him and say "Don't do that diving headbutt from the top to floor!"

 

However, I still tend to like a more athletic style of wrestling but it needs to be paced out more and everybody should not kick out of someone's finisher (which is starting to be my gripe with everything I see from modern wrestling). With me, I try to find a happy medium for what is good cause this board has pointed to people that I would never watch such as Titus O Neil and Mark Henry. I always dismissed those guys cause they were big and the image of the WWE being a big man promotion but the thing is that there is not enough legit big men in the business for me to look at and say "That's how a big man should work". I watched a bunch of Titus O Neil matches from Superstars and I like the guy now. I wouldn't have said it back then.

 

The barnstorming trio of Thatcher, Busick and Gulak are another example of guys I wouldn't watch before 2009 and now I've got my eye on them. On the other side, I watch guys like Kyle O Reilly and Cedric Alexander cause they naturally catch my eye and I see what they can become down the road and not what they currently are. If a guy is spectacular at first glance, I will always notice them.

 

But, now I look for guys who actually sell and pace out stuff in order to a good match. An example of this was a match I watched with Chris Hero vs Kyle O Reilly for the PWG Title. I was never a big fan of Hero but I was interested in O Reilly. I watched the match and it made me like Hero a lot more and made me lose faith O Reilly in his development. It seemed like Hero was trying to get control of the match and slow it down but O Reilly was trying to get his stuff in. And don't blame indy guys for that mentality cause if the promoter wants you to tear it up, you got to do it. I think that's why I see not talking about the indies because it's a Wild West show and guys have to go over the top in order to please the crowd. A lot of the modern stuff I see kinda gets lost with me because I see them doing too much. I want to see guys like ACH, Rich Swann and AR Fox do better but their matches get lost cause they are doing too much.

 

When I came back to wrestling and saw Davey Richards vs Michael Elgin for the first time, my initial reaction was that they did too much. Younger me would not have said that but that's the beauty of getting older. Granted, I'm pretty sure that I'm never gonna be in the fan club of Lawler, Dundee and Rose but I understand what they do and it doesn't bother me.

[BillThompson]

Great posts so far. I may have to do a podcast on this subject.

 

Yes please.

[rainmakerrtv]

Am I the only one who went from loving All Japan Heavyweights and New Japan Juniors to loving All Japan Juniors and New Japan Heavies? ( at least 90s era, don't follow much modern Japan).

[WingedEagle]

Does it count if you went from loving AJ heavies and NJ juniors to loving AJ and NJ heavies?

[Lust Hogan]

I'm REALLY enjoying old school heels a lot more and all the facials made during matches. I like how heels weren't afraid to show ass to get the face over.

[fxnj]

Interesting, though this a difficult topic for me to answer since I like to think I'm continuously evolving in how I appreciate wrestling and art in general. Compared to when I first started critically about matches, though, I think the main overall shift comes from my studying of philosophy and critical theory. It's led to me adopting a mindset of just being to have the opportunity to see wrestling from all over the world and always looking for a way positive way of interpreting what I'm watching. I think that's a lot more interesting than nitpicking matches to death or feeling guilty over watching do what they want with their bodies. I guess that's led to me going in kind of the opposite direction to people here in that I gravititate towards the more physical and athletic matches without having much patient for the ironic uber heel shit. In particular, I've really become biased for prime AJPW/NOAH style and its derivatives, but again, I try to enjoy whatever I watch so that doesn't mean I can't watch something way far off from that like Lesnar/Taker or Ultimo/Atlantis and just be in awe of the cinematic quality of everything.

[MikeCampbell]

I'm 31, almost 32, and I've always loved wrestling and I think I always will. But, it's just not a priority right now. I've got two kids, (one of which is in school now and having some troubles), my job, and just every day stuff. Five years ago, if I heard about a highly praised match like Ultimo/Atlantis, or an upcoming Cornette shoot, they'd be at the top of my to-do list, But now, I'm excited to see them, but if it takes a year or more, then I'll see them when I see them.

[Sidebottom]

I'm 31, almost 32, and I've always loved wrestling and I think I always will. But, it's just not a priority right now. I've got two kids, (one of which is in school now and having some troubles), my job, and just every day stuff. Five years ago, if I heard about a highly praised match like Ultimo/Atlantis, or an upcoming Cornette shoot, they'd be at the top of my to-do list, But now, I'm excited to see them, but if it takes a year or more, then I'll see them when I see them.

 

I'm in a very similar position. I look back at how much wrestling I used to watch, hunt out etc and it is nowhere near what I ingest today. I used to have 20K posts on a board which was mainly me talking about wrestling. 20,000! Thinking about that makes me shudder a little. How much wrestling talk was I willing and able to get involved with, not to mention how much spare time I had on my hands Jesus. Today I have a cat, house, career and family. My spare time is spent looking into home improvements, holiday's, day's out and all that good stuff. I still enjoy wrestling obviously, but my fandom is nothing like what it was which is frankly a good thing IMO.

 

EDIT: an honourable mention must go to the ease of access to podcasts over the last few years, especially the last year where they have seemingly exploded. It's so easy for me to get my wrestling "fix" twice a day going to and coming home from work. Also being able to read boards on my phone at the same time, WON updates, etc.

[Ricky Jackson]

I've been a wrestling fan for nearly 30 years and in many ways things have come full circle. When I was a kid I watched and enjoyed everything I could from WWF, Stampede, AWA, followed all the other territories through the mags, and appreciated wrestling history through the sparse access of the original Coliseum tapes and the history articles in the mags. I was into wrestling for the "wrestling", the overall package of angles, characters, matches, and all the silly shit too.

 

By the early 90s I was a teenager, the territories were dead, WWF and WCW were struggling, and I had become a heel fan/"old wrestling is boring"/(sigh) workrate guy. This lasted, with ECW and tape buying later thrown into the mix, until I tapped out on wrestling in 01/02. When I returned around 05 I was still in the workrate mindset, but increasing exposure to old wrestling through dvds and youtube, mixed with reading a lot about wrestling history, meant that by 08 or 09 I was totally and completely obsessed with the territory years and was sampling all kinds of wrestling from the past.

 

Now, with the Titans podcast, I've kind of returned to the days of my youth, when watching old MSG matches was one of my favorite wrestling pleasures. I've come to despise the workrate mindset, and look at my previous interest in it as youthful naivety, like going through a socialist phase in college or something. With each passing year I seem to hold less and less regard for tracking down "great matches" and just want to watch wrestling for the total package of the characters, the crowd, the announcing, the presentation, the crazy angles and promos, the good, bad and everything in between. I've also acquired a bunch of old wrestling mags recently! (scans, but still)

 

Yep, I'm perfectly content in my bubble of history right now

[TRMD]

I watched the heavily favored Young Bucks/REDragon match from months back and hated literally every second of it. It literally pissed me off.

 

I watched a Finlay/Thatcher match from a while back and thought it was really enjoyable.

 

2 years ago. This would not have been the case. At least, I don't think so.

 

I think I heard Dylan on a podcast once talking about a certain indie wrestler who's name escapes me (Maybe Eddie Kingston or Michael Elgin) and he talked about how he must be the biggest pussy on Earth, because he can give you everything he has and the other wrestler is just going to get back up in a couple of seconds. That shit spoke to me. Watched wrestling differently ever since.

 

But some things will never change. I fucking love the Attitude Era (Specifically WWF/E). It doesn't matter to me how much people shit on it now. I love the craziness. I love the realness. I love the "Flash Bang" TV, as Bill puts it. I love big pops and great mic work. I love crowd brawls and chair shots. I love the entrances. I think Austin is the GOAT. That's my favorite type of wrestling. And I don't think that will ever change.

 

I also love most everything I've watched because of this place. I like a lot of shit now that I wouldn't have liked in 2010.

 

So, I've changed, but not THAT much.

[Johnny Sorrow]

I used to hate guys with one name, like Sting.. and guys who wrestled in street clothes, like Big Bubba Rogers. Now I don't care.

[Matt D]

Johnny's nickname is "The Trippy Time Capsule"

 

I need to really reply to this one at some point.

[shoe]

I'm much younger than Johnny. I was kinda from 96-2001 kinda dazzled by high spots. I was into Sabu and that Ilk for a bit. When WCW went out of business I started looking for smart work. Now that's what I need . I don't need some high spot to make me invest. I need good work.

[Exposer]

I turn 22 in December. I've certainly changed my opinion on wrestling over the years.

 

I've been watching for almost fifteen years now. As a seven year old in 2000 I cried when HHH beat Rikishi. I was more concerned with who was good or bad then. When I moved to Tennessee, Dylan gave my brother Dustin and I an old tape that I assume he got from tape trading. We'd pop it in and there'd be Liger-Sano, Funk-Foley King of the Death Match, and Misawa. I watched that tape several times. It was completely different from anything else I'd ever seen. It's amazing that at seven I was watching shit like that. Of course, I didn't watch it critically at the time.

 

When Austin turned heel at Mania 17, my brother Dustin and I were like "What the fuck?" This started a trend of routing for the bad guys. We loved Jericho, Benoit, Rock, and the other faces, but we loved goofy Kurt Angle and heel Austin making funny facial expressions and harassing Tazz. We remained Jericho fans when he turned heel and thought Booker T was hilarious. Ultimately, we started to pick and choose who we liked no matter what side they were on.

 

During the same period, my uncle started taking Dustin and I to a local indie fed called UEW. This was a huge influence for me as a wrestling fan. It was a totally unique experience going to a warehouse every Saturday where take out pizza was sold in the concession stand, a mix of classic and modern rock music glared in the background, the smell of cigarette smoke sticking to your clothes, and the fans sitting next to you either being an "old timer" wearing a cowboy hat, four "ring rats," a family of eight, the guy who claims he's Scott Hall's cousin, or the referee's kid who talked about old Tommy Rich footage. These experiences allowed me to see Terry Gordy in one of his last matches ever, one of the Moondogs in a feud based around stalling and foreign object hiding (the dog bone), Tank Norton crushing people with back fists, Iceberg Slim bleeding everywhere all the time, Raven, Johnny Swinger, David Young, Sonny Siaki, Jake Roberts, the Naturals, Lex Luger, and others live, and a vampire wedding angle. By the closing of UEW in 2004 and many more trips to local indie federations over the years I've fallen in love with southern wrestling. It's a shame I've seen so little of Memphis, because I saw shit like that every week for over three years.

 

By middle school, I was both a WWE and TNA fan. I'll admit, I loved me some TNA. I thought the X-Division was awesome. I loved guys doing flips, trading blows, doing crazy dives, people going through flaming tables, barbed wire, and thumbtacks. I loved blood too. I thought John Cena sucked. I thought Shelton Benjamin was being "buried" by WWE. I was completely different back then. Dylan gave Dustin and I an early ROH tape. I think it was from the first shows. We watched it and loved it. It was similar to some of the stuff we had seen in TNA, but better. YouTube and Dailymotion weren't on the scene quite yet, I didn't have a personal computer, and I still kind of had a bedtime. Therefore, exploration outside of the modern product on television was difficult for me.

 

Then high school came and my opinions on wrestling really began to shift the other way. In the summer of 2008, Dylan called me up and told me about the WWF Smarkschoice poll. I had made my own personal lists like that before, so I was thrilled. I didn't watch all that much, but I dived into some old WWF wrestling, mostly 90s, and started to expand my knowledge outside of the modern product. However, my true opinion shift didn't happen until the following summer. In the summer of 2009, I stayed in South Carolina with Dylan for a quarter of my summer. While there we watched the ThunderQueen Joshi match, the famous Fujinami match where his eye orbital exploded (I think he faced Maeda?), among other things. More importantly, he brought up the WCW Smarkschoice poll. When I got home to Tennessee I jumped on that bandwagon right away. I probably watched 150 WCW matches from 1988-2001. I was totally blown away from the stuff I was watching. The MX-RNRS Wrestle War 90 with Jim Cornette fighting Nick Patrick (I believe I'm right there), The MX-Southern Boys in a fucking karate off, Vader-Sting series, Foley's numerous brawls with the likes of Sting, Orndorff, Vader, and the Nasties, Regal-Larry Z, Rhodes-Studd Stable feud, old man Terry Funk, awesome cruiserweight matches, some of the best tag wrestling I've ever seen, and Ric Flair still kicking ass well past 40. I ended up compiling my own list and contributed to one of my favorite projects ever. I'll never forget staying up until past 4 AM on the first school night before my Junior year of high school watching Brian Pillman and Barry Windham beat the hell out of each other at Superbrawl I.

 

At the end of 2009, I had almost completely changed my views on wrestling. Heel Don West was the only reason to ever watch TNA anymore and he got booted for Tazz. I stopped watching TNA, pretty much never to return again except for a brief period in 2012. I was making WWE MOTY lists every year, discussing them with Dylan, and comparing. Rey Mysterio was blowing my mind every week on television, so was Christian. I became more impressed with selling, timing, structure, and the ability to put a match together. My WCW watching helped me appreciate character work within a match, which I take seriously as well. Punk, Eddie, and even Cena are all guys I've enjoyed watching accomplish that. Head drops, big moves for the sake of it, and violence for the sake of it was becoming less and less engaging for me. I was beginning to think none of it was really all that good. To be fair, I have to give credit to WWE home video and all the DVDs I bought over the years from Rey, to Savage, to Michaels, to Bret, to Austin, to Rock, to Jericho, to Starrcade, to SNME, and so on and so forth. Those wrestler compilations introduced me to a lot as well and I learned a ton about each wrestler and their strengths and weaknesses.

 

The summer after high school (2011) I joined PWO and Dylan bought me the Buddy Rose set as a graduation present. Holy shit was that the best graduation present ever. I flew through that shit in a month. I became totally appreciative of 70s and 80s wrestling which I was still a little cold to. Buddy Rose's ability was remarkable. I realized how much better he was than a lot of wrestler's during his time and after him. He completely blew me away. He mastered in character work, selling, timing, putting a match together, an all-time great bumper, etc. Around this time I really started to investigate older wrestling online. I fell in love with wrestlers who had an unquestionable aura to them like Tenryu, Fujiwara, Onita, Hash, and Choshu. Visiting Dylan on holidays allowed me to see the classics from the 80s from New Japan, All Japan, Memphis, Texas, and so on. The next summer I bought the AWA set and loved the hell out of it.

 

In the last few years I've gotten the privilege to watch some WWF and Puerto Rico for the 80s sets and have joined WKO where I try and watch all that I can from the modern wrestling product all over the world. No longer do I care about big moves, egregious violence, head drops, and spot fests. I love me some lucha mat work, heel stalling, the Buddy bump, and Jerry Blackwell launching himself into cages. I will continue to change of course. In another fifteen years who knows where I'll be when it comes to wrestling opinions.

[khawk20]

That's easy....you'll be an AWA fan.

[flyonthewall2983]

I'm 30 and view it much more cynically since WCW and ECW went under. Maybe even before that with Montreal. People focus too much on the Vince/Bret/Shawn angle, and not enough that Vince telling the guy to ring the bell painted in the largest strokes possible that he does not really care about the audience's perception of the "reality" of what they're watching. Maybe even more than saying it in words in 1989 just to get the athletic commissions off his back. Admittedly it's not something I thought about at the time, but looking back more was lost that night than Bret Hart to WCW.

 

I lost interest in small increments from the time I was 13, when I was discovering music in a big way. Later film and television, mediums where the perception of reality is not something in question like it was with pro wrestling. Now the genie is out of the bottle, and I do find myself regretting not having been born 10-15 years before I was, when I could fully appreciate the 80's boom without that lingering feeling that yeah it's all scripted. I get the occasional buzz when I'm watching a really good match or angle, but I don't have that feeling of investment that I did watching wrestling as a kid, or even now when I am so engrossed in shows like Breaking Bad.

 

I'm much more interested in engaging in nostalgia than bothering with WWE's current product. And I'm almost ashamed to say it but I've never really taken much interest in indies or Japanese stuff (unless it's involving someone I know who's wrestled here). So how I view it now, is kind of like how people will go see classic rock bands in concert. They're older, often with diminished talent or charisma because of the ravages of age, but the songs carry them through. And they deal in nostalgia as if it were a currency. WWE kind of does the same thing when they drag Hogan or someone else back out, but it also happens when I watch a match like the ones Daniel Bryan had at WrestleMania this year. Stuff like that is often worth it to wade through what doesn't feel worth it at all.

[goodhelmet]

Not ignoring flyonthewall but how a 22 year old can change his opinions so much on wrestling is amazing and insane.

[flyonthewall2983]

It's okay to ignore me, like I said before I'm clearly a tourist compared to some of you guys.