That Was Then, Is This Too? 01.12.10: The Born-again Wrestling Fan

Welcome to yet another installment of That Was Then, Is This Too?, the column that looks for parallel lines in all the right places. Unfortunately being one of the few columns that didn’t discuss Monday Night War II, I don’t have any comments to speak of, so let’s get right into it with Banner 2.0!

I am very much a child of the internet wrestling community. Coming from a country where professional wrestling is ranked somewhere between donkey shows and midget juggling, the internet has provided me with the opportunity to both watch and discuss wrestling. Without the internet, my wrestling viewing would be restricted to weekly WWE recaps with godawful commentary on Eurosport.

Thanks to the internet, I can follow WWE, TNA and ROH programming and order DVDs from pretty much every company out there. For sanity’s sake, I stick to WWE, Ring of Honor, CHIKARA and Pro Wrestling Guerilla for my regular viewing. I mainly follow TNA through 411Mania’s own reports, and use Youtube channels to keep up with various Japanese companies.

My first steps into becoming an internet wrestling fan were taken in several different places at once. Through WWE.com, I kept up with the storylines. Through Wikipedia, I learned of wrestling’s history, both in kayfabe and non-kayfabe terms. The place where I learned most however, was the now-defunct website of 411Mania’s own Arnold Furious. The good man had reviews up from everything from WWE to Ring of Honor to XPW to NOAH, and I read it all, learning what I could about the differences between good and bad matches.

Thanks to the internet, I was also able to find that I wasn’t the only wrestling fan in this country. As my interest in wrestling grew, I was able to find a constant stream of new material to enjoy. My journey had started with following WWE in the aftermath of WrestleMania 22, soon expanded to Ring of Honor and TNA, and from there to pretty much anything I could get my hands on. I started visiting 411Mania.com regularly about three years ago, both to keep up with the weekly WWE and TNA shows (which are still hard to follow using only sites like Youtube) and to read the many excellent opinion columns.

This journey, from following just WWE through their official website to writing my own weekly column on one of the biggest wrestling websites in the world, has not been my first run as a wrestling fan. I am in fact a born-again wrestling fan. My first serious brush with professional wrestling came almost nine years earlier, when the Veronica channel began airing WWF Raw.

That Was Then…

Most people remember the match that made them a wrestling fan. It could be anything from Flair vs. Steamboat to Hart vs. Austin to Benoit vs. Angle. For me however, it was a three minute match between Rhyno and Tajiri taking place on Raw. It was a quarter final match for the 2001 King of the Ring tournament, and only the second ever match Tajiri had in the WWF (ignoring the 1997 PPV match in which he challenged TAKA Michinokou for his WWF Light Heavyweight championship), having defeated Crash Holly in a qualifying match on SmackDown the Thursday before that.

It’s only 2:52, but as a young wrestling fan, the amount of action they managed to pack into that short amount of time. Of course I didn’t understand the “E-C-Dub” chants, and I was only vaguely aware of who Rhyno was, but I can still point to that match as the one that made me a wrestling fan. From the moment Tajiri flipped out of Rhyno’s powerbomb attempt, I knew I was watching something special. Tajiri went through much of his signature offense, such as the asai moonsault, the octopus hold, the Tarantula and of course the Buzzsaw Kick, which he timed brilliantly to counter the dreaded Gore. Even to someone who barely knew anything about wrestling at all, the basic story of the match was simple to follow. Tajiri was the young upstart who managed to control Rhyno with his unorthodox offense, only to end up losing because of his inept manager.

Over the weeks I continued to watch Raw as much as possible, and even though I couldn’t watch SmackDown, Heat or the pay-per-views, I managed to follow the stories well enough, with the war between the WWF and the Alliance raging constantly. Yet week in, week out, I wasn’t looking forward to apperances from wrestlers like The Rock, Austin and Angle. Rather, I wanted to see the cruiserweights, guys like Spike Dudley, The Hurricane and the aforementioned Tajiri. I never marked out for the Rock Bottom or the Angle Slam like I did for moves like the Dudley Dog.

As my interest in wrestling grew, it was only natural that I sought to combine it with another hobby of mine: video games. Unfortunately I only had a PC at the time, which meant that the pickings were incredibly slim. There was the WrestleMania Arcade game, which was just that, an arcade game, not a wrestling game. In the end, the game that I ended up playing most was WWF With Authority!, a trading card game.

Of course I didn’t have a credit card, so I was stuck playing the game with the free trial decks, which were basically all identical, with the cards for either The Rock, Triple H or Kane and their respective finishers being pretty much the only option unregistered players had to customize their decks. Still, I greatly enjoyed the game, if only because it was the first place I ever found fellow wrestling fans to discuss my newfound hobby with. In the end, I frequently spent more time in the game’s chat rooms than actually playing the game itself.

Eventually the Veronica channel pulled Raw, and without my weekly fix, my overall interest in wrestling eventually faded. It wasn’t until five years later when, mostly out of boredom, I started searching for random wrestling-related videos through Youtube. From there I found WWE.com, various wrestling forums and sites and DVD trading rings, which made me the wrestling fan I am today.

…Is This Too?

Of course, the differences between my time as a wrestling fan and my time as an internet wrestling fan are huge. When Raw started airing on the Veronica channel, I was fifteen and completely overwhelmed by the spectacle of it all. When I saw Randy Orton send Vince McMahon’s head into a low orbit, I didn’t see a heinous act of violence against a defenseless old man. It still sparked my interest in what would happen next, but in a very different way.

I hate to use the old “ignorance is bliss” cliché, but it definitely applies here. When I just watched Raw in 2001, I didn’t care that the Invasion angle was horribly booked. I wasn’t even aware that I was watching one of the most important angles of wrestling history, and only vaguely aware of what World Championship Wrestling and Extreme Championship Wrestling were. Going back to watching wrestling from that era as a ‘smart’ fan has shattered many illusions.

These days there are very few genuine surprises left. Through wrestling news sites, I not only know who is backstage at various live shows, but also what they’ve had for lunch. When I watch a tag match, the classic tag formula always nags at the back of my head, and I find myself counting the seconds to the hot tag in stead of rooting for the face in peril. When reading PPV reports, I don’t decide who I want to win or lose based on traditional face and heel roles, but rather on who I think ‘deserves’ it more, on who entertains me more regardless of their role, on who wouldbe better for the company. I know that when Kenny Omega challenges Austin Aries for the ROH world title, there’s no way Omega will win, no matter how many times he has pinned Aries in the buildup to the big title match.

Yet I can still enjoy wrestling. I can enjoy the lucha antics of CHIKARA, the work rate of Ring of Honor and the drama of WWE. When I’m in the mood, I can even enjoy the spectacularly bad XPW, when I’m in the mood. Still, I miss the days I was an honest-to-god gee-golly-willikers wrestling fan, completely overwhelmed by larger than life spectacle that wrestling once was.