The Magnificent Seven: The Top 7 Artifacts from a Wrestling Childhood

To get this out of the way early, there is an inherent flaw to this particular column. I’m in my early thirties. People within a five year-or-so age range of me will probably have significant overlapping memories from their own childhoods as pro wrestling fans. It’s the nature of toys, media, and publications, though that you fall outside that age bracket you probably have your own, very different memories of the tangible items that made wrestling a part of your youth.

All that said, whether you’re from my generation or not, hopefully this column might stir up some memories of your own most treasured possessions from childhood, or maybe you remember some of the same items as hand-me-downs, or pieces of a younger sibling’s (or your own child’s) youth. This week, I’m looking back at seven artifacts from my wrestling childhood.

#7. Bret Hart Sunglasses

I wasn’t converted to believing in Bret Hart until relatively late in his first world title reign. Just the same, even before I became a loyal fan to The Hitman the idea of him giving his sunglasses to me in the crowd seemed like about the coolest thing that could happen at a wrestling show.

I never was that kid—the handful of times I went to live WWF shows in my youth, we were never all that close to ringside. Just the same, as I grew more, grew more devout in my wrestling fanhood, and began to recognize Hart as my favorite star, I had a friend who was just falling out of his interest in the wrestling world, and I bartered with him—a few basketball cards for the Hitman shades.

The Bret Hart sunglasses weren’t particularly well made, fancy, or durable, but they mark a pretty distinctive piece of merchandising from the era of WWF programming when I fell in love with the business. As such, I think I’ll always find them to be one of the coolest retro-souvenirs on the market.

#6. Wrestling Buddies

As a kid, I had a pretty massive collection of stuffed animals.

And then there were Wrestling Buddies.

The WWF released Wrestling Buddies in the late 1980s—big, pillow-like stuffed animals that bore the likenesses of stars including Hulk Hogan and Randy Savage. From the time they came out, Wrestling Buddies were an object of desire for me, but also unattainable—just a little outside my family’s price range for toys. Just the same, there came a point a few years later when the market cooled, surplus Wrestling Buddies had to move, and their price point came closer into alignment with what my parents could rationalize. Truth be told, I was probably a little old to playing with these guys once I got them, but my Ultimate Warrior and Ted Dibase Wrestling Buddies were nonetheless some of my most prized possessions for a brief period.

#5. Coliseum Videos

Back in the mid-1980s when the WWF started releasing its new line of pay per view events and best of- compilations via their new line of VHS cassettes, they did so under the banner of Coliseum Videos. The tapes were distributed in oversized, clear plastic-coated cases that portrayed photos of top talents and match listings.

While I don’t want to mischaracterize my childhood as impoverished, we did live on a pretty strict budget and twenty to thirty dollar videos were most certainly not on the shortlist of items to indulge in.
So, I accessed Coliseum Videos via rentals from stores like Blockbuster, and still remember the sheer excitement of seeing those oversized cases on the shelf, each time silently praying that there would be a less ornate case positioned behind them to signify that the video was, in fact, in stock.

A few years later, I did procure a couple Coliseum Videos—WrestleManias 2 and 3—when one of those video stores sold used copies at about five bucks a pop. In the age of DVDs and streaming media (particularly via the WWE Network) these old tapes seem increasingly antiquated. Just the same, that old childhood wonder at having something to hold in my hands to demark my ownership of these epic pieces of wrestling history sticks with me as one of my fonder tangible memories from my youth.

#4. Royal Rumble for Super Nintendo

Yes, there were plenty of pro wrestling video games before and after this one—some that might hold more nostalgia for you and some that might be objectively better. Truth be told, Tecmo World Wrestling almost stole this spot for its campier elements and the diversity of holds available. All of that said, Royal Rumble hit at just the right time in my life, and hit with just the right balance of smooth game play, an iconic cast of characters, and innovation that I can scarcely recall another video game I had more fun with—particularly in two-player mode.

The game play modes for this one included one-on-one matches, tag team matches, six-man tags, and, of course, a mini-Royal Rumble bout (limited by the size of the roster—twelve for my Super Nintendo iteration). For a budding fan in the pre-hardcore era, this game also featured the novelty of getting to swing a steel chair outside the ring.

#3. The Complete Book of Wrestling

This tome of wrestling profiles isn’t all that easy to find nowadays, and once again I need to emphasize the relatively personal nature of this countdown–The Complete Book of Wrestling was released in the 1980s and included full-color pictures and detailed, kayfabe descriptions of the careers of hundreds of wrestling stars from across the United States (and a handful abroad).

As a novice pro wrestling fan, this book functioned as a survey of the wrestling world beyond what was readily accessible to me on TV in upstate New York—of different territories and what felt like entirely different genres of wrestling, when it came to accounts of the wars between Carlos Colon and Abdullah the Butcher, or glances at major storylines of GLOW. All of that, plus there were the pictures—encapsulating all of those faces, physiques, and gimmicks. It was my first and one of my most lasting gateways to the wide world that wrestling was.

Taking a step beyond my personal experiences, including this book in the countdown is also a bit of a stand in for the big glossy books that George Napolitano published around the same time and in the years to follow—oversized volumes that put equal weight on photography and prose. In the days of the Internet, not to mention WWE’s ownership of so much media and intellectual property, I don’t suspect there will ever again be the same kind of market for books like these, but as a child of the 1980s, they were absolutely priceless.

#2. Pro Wrestling Illustrated

You can take a lot of what I said about The Complete Book of Wrestling and transfer it to this entry. As a pre-Internet fan, Pro Wrestling Illustrated and its sibling publications like Inside Wrestling and The Wrestler offered a kayfabe look at the goings on in wrestling around the world, featuring in-depth fabricated journalism and interviews, house show results, and arbitrary rankings from across the territories—all that, plus more photography capturing images of all of the day’s stars, and many of the stars on the way.

Bill Apter, widely recognized as the driving force behind these publications, is no longer affiliated with the so-called “Apter Mags,” but Pro Wrestling Illustrated is one of the few institutions denoted on this list that is still fully alive today—still publishing monthly, still shipping hard copy magazines to subscribers, still available in the magazine sections of grocery stores and pharmacies across the US.

Pro Wrestling Illustrated was the first artifact to make me feel like a student of wrestling—that I was moving past the glossier, more kid-friendly pages of WWF Magazine to the fuller story that the WWF didn’t necessariliy want for me to read. My favorite volumes included the annual year-end awards issues, and recurring PWI 500 in which the magazine ranked the top 500 active wrestlers of the day through a combination of kayfabe accomplishments, workrate, and largely nebulous and arbitrary criteria. The awards and expansive lists were each somewhat silly for their obtuse criteria, and the apocrpyphal voting processes that went into each. Just the same, I’m happy to have held on to a number of these issues from my youth, for their value as not only nostalgic keepsakes, but as catalogs of so much of what was going on in wrestling in those years.

#1. AWA Hemco All-Star Wrestling Action Figures

For folks who either grew up in the same era as I did (or who had children, or younger si7blings who did) it may not surprise you to find action figures toward the top of this countdown. It probably does surprise you that I went with the AWA figures, though, rather than the WWF ones of the day.

Don’t get me wrong—I loved the big rubber LJN WWF figures and once owned a respectable collection of them. They were aesthetically pleasing, realistic by the standards of the day, featured a stellar roster, and as far as collectibles go, I totally get why these would be the most desirable dolls to have on your shelf as a collector.

But just as Pro Wrestling Illustrated and The Complete Book of Wrestling fostered my studies in wrestling, it was the AWA figures that best fostered my play.

Cast in a size befitting a scrawny elementary school kid, and fit with moveable arms and legs, the AWA figures were ideal for play. At some point around the age of six or seven, my parents bought me a collection of a couple dozen of these figures, plus an AWA ring which proceeded to be the definitive set of toys that I played with for years to follow. I kept up the play until llong after it was probably normal to do so, into my early middle school days, when I would scrawl fantasy cards in the unused backs of notebooks, recast my figures into the roles of the stars I was watching on TV those days, and build my own ongoing storylines and mythologies.

Yep. You can tell the wrestling nerds early.

I suspect many of the readers here grew up as wrestling fans as well. What were your favorite artifacts from that time in your life? Let us know in the comments section.

Read more from Mike Chin at his website and follow him on Twitter @miketchin.