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CONFESSIONS OF AN OLD WRESTLING FAN: WHY DO I STILL WATCH?

A funny thing happened tonight: I watched the August 1st, 1995 episode of ECW Hardcore TV, and was astonished to discover that even though I had only ever seen the episode once before, that being when it originally aired 15 years ago, I remembered nearly everything that happened on the show.  I remember the exact moment when Marty Jannetty superkicked Mikey Whipwreck during the #1 contender's battle royal.  I remember the neck brace clad Taz cutting a promo with the Steiners.  I remember Eddy Guerrero shaking Dean Malenko's hand after losing the TV Title to him, only to sucker him into a short clothesline.  And my personal favorite, I remember Jannetty saying he was going to kick the Sandman's ass, which caught a then 16 year old WWF fan named Stu Carapola completely off guard.  What language!

But if you asked me what happened on Raw or Impact last week, I couldn't tell you.  If you asked me to name all the champions in either promotion off the top of my head, I probably couldn't do it.  Whereas in 2000 I knew pretty much every major match on every PPV ever, now I probably won't remember any major match unless it happened on Wrestlemania.  In short, I am just not as emotionally vested in today's wrestling product as I was in the 90s.

But why is that?  It's certainly not for lack of trying.  Believe me, I definitely WANT to enjoy wrestling as much as I did then, and have gotten my hands on copies of enough wrestling shows from the post-2001 world to prove to myself that I am at least open to new things.  But for some reason, it's just not the same.  And why is that?  If you look around the wrestling landscape in 2010, you'll see a lot of the same guys you saw in 1997, and a lot of younger, more athletic guys having great matches with each other to boot.

I suppose I could make the music comparison, in that much the same way as your parents hated the music you listened to growing up, you hate the music of the generation after you.  But is that it?  Is my apathy towards wrestling in general really just the fact that my generation ended in 2001 and, by trying to immerse myself in the modern wrestling scene, I'm the 30 year old guy at the White Stripes concert?

I like to think I'm more open minded than that, and I'd even point to the fact that I'm a huge ROH fan as evidence to the contrary.  With ROH, you're talking about a very young roster doing things that nobody of my generation ever thought to do, yet I find myself going to every ROH show I can physically make it to and am missing less than ten DVDs of ROH shows.  But even where ROH is concerned, I have a hard time looking at Davey Richards, Tyler Black, and Austin Aries as being on the same level as Low Ki, Bryan Danielson, CM Punk, and Samoa Joe.  Are we really just looking at generational separation here?

And even if I take the original ROH stars like Joe and Danielson, if I put them next to the stars I grew up on like Bret Hart, Shawn Michaels, and even to some extent Ric Flair, do they even come close to matching up?  Not even close.  That's not to say that the potential isn't there if used right, but as it stands now there is no comparison no matter how many great 40 minute matches Joe and Danielson have had.

Of course you could point to WWE's apparent refusal to push new stars as part of the problem.  Whereas Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels were both beneficiaries of WWE decisions to elevate talent to the main event, there have been more guys to come down the pike than I can count, who could have been elevated to the main event and had the talent and fan support to do it, but were instead buried.  If I feel like WWE doesn't care, why should I?  If I feel like they don't want to make me interested, why should I be?

I'm a little softer on TNA given that they've basically raided the top of the original ROH roster and pushed them to varying levels of success, but even there they've never truly been given that push to the top, and have repeatedly, and infamously been referred to as the future of the business rather than the present.  Complicating matters further for someone like me is the fact that guys like Hall, Nash, Waltman, and others that I was a fan of growing up are competing for top level spots with guys that I grew to love after my time and want to see become the same kind of top level guys that the nWo were in their day.

The most interesting fact of the matter is that in the one night that drew more ratings than the business has drawn in one night for years now, the names that were drawing the ratings were Bret Hart, Vince McMahon, Hulk Hogan, Eric Bischoff, Kevin Nash, Scott Hall, Sean Waltman, and Shawn Michaels.  Let's face it: the people who were tuning in for Samoa Joe and AJ Styles, or CM Punk and John Morrison were already tuning in, and there's a large percentage of people who were fans of the 90s guys and won't watch unless they're on.

Sometimes I feel like wrestling has become on old friend, in that you've known them since you were 5 years old and have always been close to them, but over the years you've watched them change into a person you barely know anymore, and even though deep down you know that it's never going to be what it was before, you feel somehow like a traitor if you just cut them loose because you just don't have any emotional connection to them anymore.

At the end of the day, I'm a stubborn enough person that I'll probably never give up on the business.  The closest I came was in 2004 when I was ready to give up and live off of my tape collection before I discovered ROH, and that extended my stay in the annals of wrestling fandom, but even if ROH didn't come along and I just gave up on today's product, I'd probably still follow it in some fashion.  I'm not too proud to admit that there have been times in my life when wrestling was literally all I had, and that attaches you to a genre in a way that might seem ludicrous to outside observers.

But let's be honest with ourselves: we're wrestling fans, and that gives us a special loyalty to our chosen pastime that no other form of entertainment enjoys.  People give up on TV shows when they jump the shark.  People might decide not to buy a PS3 or Wii.  People will decide there's just too many Harry Potter books.  But for some reason, wrestling just has a way of keeping us fans fixated and enthralled, and in much the same way that one might endlessly cyberstalk an ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend, even if you make a conscious decision to leave wrestling behind, I'd like to meet the person who truly has no interest whatsoever in what's become of the business once they've made the decision to move on.

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