So... hi there, fellow wrestling kids!
My name is James and I'm a Pro Wrestling Fan. (insert hacky AA meeting joke here)
Unlike many of the people who normally write about/talk about pro wrestling, I am a relative newcomer to the world of wrestling fandom. I was a fan back in the territorial days when WWF was still a strong up-and-comer but other promotions were hanging around. I grew up in the Chicagoland area and on Channel 50 (I think?), that was where you hung out as a pre-teen on Saturday to watch wrestling. I remember the Von Erichs. I remember being all about Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant. I remember hating Randy Savage and Jake The Snake. I remember my first real tweener experience being with Roddy Piper. I remember that either HBO or Showtime was going to be airing Wrestlemania 2 sometime that summer, weeks or perhaps even months after the PPV. This was my first real love affair with pro wrestling.
Of course, like all first loves, you barely remember them, and when you revisit them, they're really not all they're really cracked up to be. But they're still there, and you remember them fondly.
I don't remember exactly when it happened, but one day, an adult told me that pro wrestling was fake. And just like Thanos snapping the Infinity Gauntlet, my love of wrestling was gone. It was now a joke; something to be mocked incessantly. If you weren't a child, you couldn't love wrestling. You were the subject of scorn and ridicule. Not long after, I lamented the day that I ever loved wrestling in the first place.
30 years later, something happened.
One of my very best friends, a friend from high school (who had kept his love of pro wrestling a secret all these years) came in from out of town to visit. The primary reason for his visit? A WWE pay-per-view. This friend, a man I dearly love and respect and a man of great intelligence, was a massive WWE fan and had been for all these years. Something changed in me. It was slow, but it was a rekindling of interest in pro wrestling. The love was in no way back, but an ember of that former love started to glow, but it was an ember that I largely ignored or pushed down inside me even further. I mean, I was 41 years old! Wrestling is for kids and morons... right?
Being the ultra-hip liberal that I am, I watched every episode of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (once I moved and had access to Comedy Central again) and suddenly, I started to see someone I was entirely unfamiliar with and would pop up on the show a few times in August of 2015.
That man's name was Seth Rollins.
On the evening of Sunday, August 23rd, 2015, my life was about to change and I didn't even realize it.
I was running through Twitter and one of the top trends was Jon Stewart. As I looked at more information, I found out that Stew-Beef himself had inserted himself in the Title vs Title match at Summerslam, hitting both Rollins and John Cena with a steel chair. He stood in the center of the ring and both Cena's US title and Rollins' World Champion title were on the line. He decided to continue attacking Cena to prevent Cena from tying Ric Flair's record-setting run of 16-time WWE Champion and suddenly, Rollins was both the title holder of both the United States and World Champion titles.
At that moment, staring at this massive trending topic on Twitter, I made a decision. Actually, I'm underselling it; I made The Decision.
I was going to watch Monday Night Raw for the first time ever the following night. My reasoning: if both my best friend and Jon Stewart, two extremely clever, funny and intelligent people, loved pro wrestling, hey... maybe I might like it too.
I called my friend that Sunday night and told him this and he was happy, but he encouraged me to not try to take it all in at first. His advice: "Start slowly. Don't expect everything to reveal itself at once. Give it time". And then he gave me this one warning: "If you allow it, wrestling will consume your life."
So I started slow. My first big favorite on the roster? Neville. He was my guy for that entire season. I loved the high-flying antics he put on. I loved that he partnered up with Stephen Amell, the star of one of my favorite shows, Arrow. It was fun. I really enjoyed watching the show, even if I didn't understand everything. Then I started hearing phrases specific to the pro wrestling vernacular in my conversations with my friend that I was unfamiliar with: "babyface" or "heel" or "booking" or "swerve" or "shoot" or "work". And eventually the word "kayfabe". I had recently started a new job, and when things were slow or I was on break, I would bounce around the internet, looking things up. When I searched for the term "kayfabe", the first result it brought me to was an article from WhatCulture.com. WhatCulture.com was my entrance into a different world; a bigger yet also at times more insular world... the world of the Internet Wrestling Community, more colloquially known as the IWC. Other people really really cared about WWE, and they certainly weren't ashamed to analyze and/or predict outcomes. And the more I explored for myself online, the more colloquialisms came to me: "fantasy booking", "work rate", "promos", "video packages" and so on. Shortly after, I started watching Smackdown. I didn't get the WWE Network to watch any of the PPV's for a while yet. It took me until the Royal Rumble in 2016 to get the network, because as my friend (as well as every person on commentary on Raw and Smackdown) said that I would need the network to watch the Royal Rumble, and at that time, I was very invested in the storyline involving Roman Reigns versus Triple H and how "The Authority" was forcing Reigns to start the Rumble at the #1 spot and if he was eliminated, he would lose the WWE title.
So now I had the network.
Before I go any further, there is something important I have to add to this equation and that addition is my wife.
You see, my wife was also a WWE fan once upon a time. She started watching back when it was still WWF back in 1997 amongst what was known as the Attitude Era. So when I started watching again, she was integral in introducing me to some of those wrestlers that were still working within the WWE, such as the Dudley Boyz... and that was actually about it. I knew about the big stars that were still at least part-timers if not full-timers in 2015, such as Jericho, The Undertaker and so on. The only really big name performer I didn't know anything about that existed during the Attitude Era was The Beast Incarnate, Brock Lesnar, who I hear was actually pretty good back in the day. And she undertook this reintroduction to WWE and pro wrestling with a voraciousness almost equal to my own. It was really something to behold. When certain people came back, such as the Hardys at Mania 33, she was already tuned into what they once were rather than what they had evolved into during their time in Impact.
See? I just mentioned Impact. This is how people must feel when they think about how Venom isn't set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but Spider-Man is. And that's just one part. And that makes a good segue into the next thing I wanted to lay on you: promotions.
When I was initially into wrestling back in the early 80's, I didn't understand why wrestlers weren't competing on other shows that I was watching, but now I understand that that was an era of different territorial promotions, and WWE wasn't the giant it is now. I missed out on the Monday Night Wars and all that jazz, and part of me is thankful that I did, but I also realized that, regarding the history of the sport (or "sports entertainment"), it would have been pretty cool to see some of that stuff. I've tried watching Impact Wrestling, and frankly, despite it being kind of a dumping ground for people WWE didn't want around anymore, I couldn't get behind the conceit of the hexagonal ring. It just distracted me. And not for a lack of interest per se, but rather a concerted effort to not let wrestling become my entire fucking life, I have not watched any of Ring of Honor, despite how loaded they seem to be with talent. But thankfully, a lot of the best talent in ROH is in the one other promotion that I do watch weekly, and that's New Japan. I loooooove New Japan. Albeit, I only see it on AXS TV for one hour at a time so I know I'm missing a lot of the detritus that I wish Raw or Smackdown would jettison, and I'm not loving that New Japan doesn't have any female competitors, but god DAMN is the match quality so much better in New Japan. It has better in-ring storytelling, some of the best matches I've ever seen, and probably my two favorite dudes to ever strap on a set of kickpads. But more on that later. I've also seen a fair amount of Lucha Underground, most of which I've enjoyed because it has two things I love: high-flyers and intergender matches, but my cable service recently dropped El Rey Network, so I'll have to catch up on Netflix.
I also know that most "real" wrestling fans don't even watch WWE; they are all about PWG, or Pro Wrestling Guerrilla, which I'm sure is great. But when I see people espousing the virtues of PWG and ignoring or shitting on WWE as a whole, I generally regard those people as gate-keeping assholes.
One of the things I have discovered over the course of the last three years is that as much as I love WWE, I hate WWE. It's impossible to overlook the good things that WWE has to offer, but it's equally impossible to ignore the dogshit that comes out on a weekly basis. Sometimes, episodes of Raw or Smackdown (although it's usually Raw) seem to dare us to change the channel, or feel like they're actively punishing the audience, both the live audience as well as the viewers at home. But this doesn't happen with everything WWE. For me, there is at least one thing WWE has that is as close to perfection as pro wrestling can get.
And that is NXT.
NXT has introduced me to the vast majority of my favorite wrestlers, and the majority of my favorite matches. Whatever it is; whether it's the talent, or that is more of Triple H's vision rather than Vince McMahon's, or whether it's a more compressed show, or whether it's the slow-burn storytelling, they don't seem to be nearly as afraid as the main roster to do unusual things or to give talented people a place to shine. Almost all of my favorites are currently on the Black and Gold brand, and in many ways, there are a great many of them I don't want to see called up only to be ruined by Vince. And now there's also NXT UK, which is also cool and I can see a lot of those men and women becoming potential favorites. There's also 205 Live, which is the Cruiserweight division, which is also a much shorter show than Raw or Smackdown, but they also travel with those shows instead of something like NXT which takes place almost entirely on the campus of Full Sail University in Florida. 205 Live was an interesting diversion in its infancy, especially due to the level of talent that was there at the start, but it started to fall very rapidly in quality, thanks to the title reign of Enzo Amore, but once he was out of WWE entirely, the "star factor" of 205 Live went away, and suddenly it was about the individuals again. The show started to really get pretty great and had some of the best matches I've seen on any promotion, but now that in the last month or so, cruiserweights are starting to pop up on Raw and Smackdown and now watching 205 Live seems less important than it did.
Okay... so I feel like I've broken down all that I want to right now about the whens and whys and hows and the whats of why I'm a wrestling junkie now, so you're probably asking the question that seems to be eternally on the mind of The New Day:
"Who?"
I don't want to rank my favorite wrestlers of all time because that's a Sophie's Choice scenario that I don't want to break my brain trying to rank them, so I'm just going to spit out some names, and maybe even tell you a little bit of why I love them. So without further ado, here are my favorites from any promotion and we'll go with ladies first:
Becky Lynch, Asuka, Shayna Bayzler, Charlotte Flair, Toni Storm, Io Shirai, Sasha Banks, Zelina Vega, Naomi, Paige (I miss you in the ring!), Tessa Blanchard, Bea Priestley, Candice LeRae and Kairi Sane.
Now to the men (and sadly, yes, there are a lot more men): Will Ospreay, Seth Rollins, The Miz, Finn Balor, Johnny Gargano, Ricochet, Mustafa Ali, Drew Mcintyre, Cedric Alexander, Buddy Murphy, Chris Jericho (despite him being several years past his physical prime, he can still go and he's always a great promo), Tommaso Ciampa, Aleister Black, Kazuchika Okada, Adam Cole (hell, all of the Undisputed Era for that matter, but especially Cole), The Usos, A.J. Styles, Kevin Owens, Sami Zayn, Minoru Suzuki, Rusev, Velveteen Dream, Daniel Bryan, Dean Ambrose, Elias, Braun Strowman, Kenny Omega, Cody Rhodes, Marty Scurll, Kota Ibushi, and my hometown boy, CM Punk, and that's entirely thanks to my best friend and his worship of him as well as having access to the network. That 2011 Money in the Bank match against Cena is a match I could watch over and over (and I have).
Yes, I'm fully aware that there's a dearth of female talent I've overlooked by not tuning into other promotions, but hopefully that will change with the upcoming WOW, and I'm making a more concerted effort to watch more Shimmer or whatever else I might find online.
So that's me in a nutshell as far as my current status as a pro wrestling fan. Since I've been a part of this fandom, I've treated it much in the same way I've treated my love of comic books; I've spent untold amounts of money on merch, and I've attended two episodes of Raw, an NXT Live event, and the 2017 Elimination Chamber was my entree' into the PPV world. It was pretty cool to see Naomi become the Smackdown Women's Champion as well as see Bray Wyatt become WWE Champion live. And ever since the Royal Rumble was announced last year that it would be in the Phoenix area (where I now live), my wife and I have been saving up to make that a really awesome weekend, and it's shapi..ng up that way. We got decent seats for the Rumble, even better seats for Takeover Phoenix, and we're going to the Axxess event on Saturday to have a meet and greet with none other than Finn, a man that my wife would leave me for in a heartbeat, and if he swung that way, I would do the same.
The reason I started this blog is so that I can put my thoughts out there on the pro wrestling scene and hopefully provide a bit of commentary that's a little bit different than what is already out there. I'm sure that I'll have more to say after this weekend's TLC (go, Becky!), so check back, because I've got a lot more to discuss.
Until next time, boys and girls.
My name is James and I'm a Pro Wrestling Fan. (insert hacky AA meeting joke here)
Unlike many of the people who normally write about/talk about pro wrestling, I am a relative newcomer to the world of wrestling fandom. I was a fan back in the territorial days when WWF was still a strong up-and-comer but other promotions were hanging around. I grew up in the Chicagoland area and on Channel 50 (I think?), that was where you hung out as a pre-teen on Saturday to watch wrestling. I remember the Von Erichs. I remember being all about Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant. I remember hating Randy Savage and Jake The Snake. I remember my first real tweener experience being with Roddy Piper. I remember that either HBO or Showtime was going to be airing Wrestlemania 2 sometime that summer, weeks or perhaps even months after the PPV. This was my first real love affair with pro wrestling.
Of course, like all first loves, you barely remember them, and when you revisit them, they're really not all they're really cracked up to be. But they're still there, and you remember them fondly.
I don't remember exactly when it happened, but one day, an adult told me that pro wrestling was fake. And just like Thanos snapping the Infinity Gauntlet, my love of wrestling was gone. It was now a joke; something to be mocked incessantly. If you weren't a child, you couldn't love wrestling. You were the subject of scorn and ridicule. Not long after, I lamented the day that I ever loved wrestling in the first place.
30 years later, something happened.
One of my very best friends, a friend from high school (who had kept his love of pro wrestling a secret all these years) came in from out of town to visit. The primary reason for his visit? A WWE pay-per-view. This friend, a man I dearly love and respect and a man of great intelligence, was a massive WWE fan and had been for all these years. Something changed in me. It was slow, but it was a rekindling of interest in pro wrestling. The love was in no way back, but an ember of that former love started to glow, but it was an ember that I largely ignored or pushed down inside me even further. I mean, I was 41 years old! Wrestling is for kids and morons... right?
Being the ultra-hip liberal that I am, I watched every episode of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (once I moved and had access to Comedy Central again) and suddenly, I started to see someone I was entirely unfamiliar with and would pop up on the show a few times in August of 2015.
That man's name was Seth Rollins.
On the evening of Sunday, August 23rd, 2015, my life was about to change and I didn't even realize it.
I was running through Twitter and one of the top trends was Jon Stewart. As I looked at more information, I found out that Stew-Beef himself had inserted himself in the Title vs Title match at Summerslam, hitting both Rollins and John Cena with a steel chair. He stood in the center of the ring and both Cena's US title and Rollins' World Champion title were on the line. He decided to continue attacking Cena to prevent Cena from tying Ric Flair's record-setting run of 16-time WWE Champion and suddenly, Rollins was both the title holder of both the United States and World Champion titles.
At that moment, staring at this massive trending topic on Twitter, I made a decision. Actually, I'm underselling it; I made The Decision.
I was going to watch Monday Night Raw for the first time ever the following night. My reasoning: if both my best friend and Jon Stewart, two extremely clever, funny and intelligent people, loved pro wrestling, hey... maybe I might like it too.
I called my friend that Sunday night and told him this and he was happy, but he encouraged me to not try to take it all in at first. His advice: "Start slowly. Don't expect everything to reveal itself at once. Give it time". And then he gave me this one warning: "If you allow it, wrestling will consume your life."
So I started slow. My first big favorite on the roster? Neville. He was my guy for that entire season. I loved the high-flying antics he put on. I loved that he partnered up with Stephen Amell, the star of one of my favorite shows, Arrow. It was fun. I really enjoyed watching the show, even if I didn't understand everything. Then I started hearing phrases specific to the pro wrestling vernacular in my conversations with my friend that I was unfamiliar with: "babyface" or "heel" or "booking" or "swerve" or "shoot" or "work". And eventually the word "kayfabe". I had recently started a new job, and when things were slow or I was on break, I would bounce around the internet, looking things up. When I searched for the term "kayfabe", the first result it brought me to was an article from WhatCulture.com. WhatCulture.com was my entrance into a different world; a bigger yet also at times more insular world... the world of the Internet Wrestling Community, more colloquially known as the IWC. Other people really really cared about WWE, and they certainly weren't ashamed to analyze and/or predict outcomes. And the more I explored for myself online, the more colloquialisms came to me: "fantasy booking", "work rate", "promos", "video packages" and so on. Shortly after, I started watching Smackdown. I didn't get the WWE Network to watch any of the PPV's for a while yet. It took me until the Royal Rumble in 2016 to get the network, because as my friend (as well as every person on commentary on Raw and Smackdown) said that I would need the network to watch the Royal Rumble, and at that time, I was very invested in the storyline involving Roman Reigns versus Triple H and how "The Authority" was forcing Reigns to start the Rumble at the #1 spot and if he was eliminated, he would lose the WWE title.
So now I had the network.
Before I go any further, there is something important I have to add to this equation and that addition is my wife.
You see, my wife was also a WWE fan once upon a time. She started watching back when it was still WWF back in 1997 amongst what was known as the Attitude Era. So when I started watching again, she was integral in introducing me to some of those wrestlers that were still working within the WWE, such as the Dudley Boyz... and that was actually about it. I knew about the big stars that were still at least part-timers if not full-timers in 2015, such as Jericho, The Undertaker and so on. The only really big name performer I didn't know anything about that existed during the Attitude Era was The Beast Incarnate, Brock Lesnar, who I hear was actually pretty good back in the day. And she undertook this reintroduction to WWE and pro wrestling with a voraciousness almost equal to my own. It was really something to behold. When certain people came back, such as the Hardys at Mania 33, she was already tuned into what they once were rather than what they had evolved into during their time in Impact.
See? I just mentioned Impact. This is how people must feel when they think about how Venom isn't set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but Spider-Man is. And that's just one part. And that makes a good segue into the next thing I wanted to lay on you: promotions.
When I was initially into wrestling back in the early 80's, I didn't understand why wrestlers weren't competing on other shows that I was watching, but now I understand that that was an era of different territorial promotions, and WWE wasn't the giant it is now. I missed out on the Monday Night Wars and all that jazz, and part of me is thankful that I did, but I also realized that, regarding the history of the sport (or "sports entertainment"), it would have been pretty cool to see some of that stuff. I've tried watching Impact Wrestling, and frankly, despite it being kind of a dumping ground for people WWE didn't want around anymore, I couldn't get behind the conceit of the hexagonal ring. It just distracted me. And not for a lack of interest per se, but rather a concerted effort to not let wrestling become my entire fucking life, I have not watched any of Ring of Honor, despite how loaded they seem to be with talent. But thankfully, a lot of the best talent in ROH is in the one other promotion that I do watch weekly, and that's New Japan. I loooooove New Japan. Albeit, I only see it on AXS TV for one hour at a time so I know I'm missing a lot of the detritus that I wish Raw or Smackdown would jettison, and I'm not loving that New Japan doesn't have any female competitors, but god DAMN is the match quality so much better in New Japan. It has better in-ring storytelling, some of the best matches I've ever seen, and probably my two favorite dudes to ever strap on a set of kickpads. But more on that later. I've also seen a fair amount of Lucha Underground, most of which I've enjoyed because it has two things I love: high-flyers and intergender matches, but my cable service recently dropped El Rey Network, so I'll have to catch up on Netflix.
I also know that most "real" wrestling fans don't even watch WWE; they are all about PWG, or Pro Wrestling Guerrilla, which I'm sure is great. But when I see people espousing the virtues of PWG and ignoring or shitting on WWE as a whole, I generally regard those people as gate-keeping assholes.
One of the things I have discovered over the course of the last three years is that as much as I love WWE, I hate WWE. It's impossible to overlook the good things that WWE has to offer, but it's equally impossible to ignore the dogshit that comes out on a weekly basis. Sometimes, episodes of Raw or Smackdown (although it's usually Raw) seem to dare us to change the channel, or feel like they're actively punishing the audience, both the live audience as well as the viewers at home. But this doesn't happen with everything WWE. For me, there is at least one thing WWE has that is as close to perfection as pro wrestling can get.
And that is NXT.
NXT has introduced me to the vast majority of my favorite wrestlers, and the majority of my favorite matches. Whatever it is; whether it's the talent, or that is more of Triple H's vision rather than Vince McMahon's, or whether it's a more compressed show, or whether it's the slow-burn storytelling, they don't seem to be nearly as afraid as the main roster to do unusual things or to give talented people a place to shine. Almost all of my favorites are currently on the Black and Gold brand, and in many ways, there are a great many of them I don't want to see called up only to be ruined by Vince. And now there's also NXT UK, which is also cool and I can see a lot of those men and women becoming potential favorites. There's also 205 Live, which is the Cruiserweight division, which is also a much shorter show than Raw or Smackdown, but they also travel with those shows instead of something like NXT which takes place almost entirely on the campus of Full Sail University in Florida. 205 Live was an interesting diversion in its infancy, especially due to the level of talent that was there at the start, but it started to fall very rapidly in quality, thanks to the title reign of Enzo Amore, but once he was out of WWE entirely, the "star factor" of 205 Live went away, and suddenly it was about the individuals again. The show started to really get pretty great and had some of the best matches I've seen on any promotion, but now that in the last month or so, cruiserweights are starting to pop up on Raw and Smackdown and now watching 205 Live seems less important than it did.
Okay... so I feel like I've broken down all that I want to right now about the whens and whys and hows and the whats of why I'm a wrestling junkie now, so you're probably asking the question that seems to be eternally on the mind of The New Day:
"Who?"
I don't want to rank my favorite wrestlers of all time because that's a Sophie's Choice scenario that I don't want to break my brain trying to rank them, so I'm just going to spit out some names, and maybe even tell you a little bit of why I love them. So without further ado, here are my favorites from any promotion and we'll go with ladies first:
Becky Lynch, Asuka, Shayna Bayzler, Charlotte Flair, Toni Storm, Io Shirai, Sasha Banks, Zelina Vega, Naomi, Paige (I miss you in the ring!), Tessa Blanchard, Bea Priestley, Candice LeRae and Kairi Sane.
Now to the men (and sadly, yes, there are a lot more men): Will Ospreay, Seth Rollins, The Miz, Finn Balor, Johnny Gargano, Ricochet, Mustafa Ali, Drew Mcintyre, Cedric Alexander, Buddy Murphy, Chris Jericho (despite him being several years past his physical prime, he can still go and he's always a great promo), Tommaso Ciampa, Aleister Black, Kazuchika Okada, Adam Cole (hell, all of the Undisputed Era for that matter, but especially Cole), The Usos, A.J. Styles, Kevin Owens, Sami Zayn, Minoru Suzuki, Rusev, Velveteen Dream, Daniel Bryan, Dean Ambrose, Elias, Braun Strowman, Kenny Omega, Cody Rhodes, Marty Scurll, Kota Ibushi, and my hometown boy, CM Punk, and that's entirely thanks to my best friend and his worship of him as well as having access to the network. That 2011 Money in the Bank match against Cena is a match I could watch over and over (and I have).
Yes, I'm fully aware that there's a dearth of female talent I've overlooked by not tuning into other promotions, but hopefully that will change with the upcoming WOW, and I'm making a more concerted effort to watch more Shimmer or whatever else I might find online.
So that's me in a nutshell as far as my current status as a pro wrestling fan. Since I've been a part of this fandom, I've treated it much in the same way I've treated my love of comic books; I've spent untold amounts of money on merch, and I've attended two episodes of Raw, an NXT Live event, and the 2017 Elimination Chamber was my entree' into the PPV world. It was pretty cool to see Naomi become the Smackdown Women's Champion as well as see Bray Wyatt become WWE Champion live. And ever since the Royal Rumble was announced last year that it would be in the Phoenix area (where I now live), my wife and I have been saving up to make that a really awesome weekend, and it's shapi..ng up that way. We got decent seats for the Rumble, even better seats for Takeover Phoenix, and we're going to the Axxess event on Saturday to have a meet and greet with none other than Finn, a man that my wife would leave me for in a heartbeat, and if he swung that way, I would do the same.
The reason I started this blog is so that I can put my thoughts out there on the pro wrestling scene and hopefully provide a bit of commentary that's a little bit different than what is already out there. I'm sure that I'll have more to say after this weekend's TLC (go, Becky!), so check back, because I've got a lot more to discuss.
Until next time, boys and girls.
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