There comes a time when every big wrestling fan has been following wrestling for so long and you begin to think “What kind of Wrestling fan am I?” and then you begin to think of what kind of things you like and what kinds of things you get into as a fan.
Every so often I have those things cross my mind.
I’m a kid of the 1980s and got into wrestling around 1988 and became and hardcore fan a few months later just after the 1989 Royal Rumble when I attended my first wrestling show and saw Angelo Savoldi’s ICW ringside from the Civic Center in Augusta Maine.
I came along during the tail end of the ’80s wrestling boom so I like a little razzle and dazzle with my wrestling. I’m not the type that thinks that everyone should be in short black tights and boots like the New Japan trainees but some gimmicks can take something to the next level.
I like a standard good guy v/s bad guy dynamic in my wrestling matches. While I have no problem seeing a couple of good guys wrestle against each other, sometimes having bad guys fight and feud just screams about lazy writing. Like the recent program on Smackdown with Lacey Evans and her issue with Bayley and Sasha Banks. We aren’t supposed to be cheering for any of them so why put them into a feud?
Despite coming from the “America First” 1980s I have watched enough Japanese wrestling or Mexican lucha libre to not automatically cheer for the American by default. That also means that just because someone is not American they should automatically be a villain. I was really disappointed when they made Shinsuke Nakamura a bad guy after winning the Royal Rumble and getting the title match at Wrestlemania. He just low hit AJ Styles below the belt a bunch of times and brought a lot of disappointment that he never really recovered from.
I remember the time before websites would tell you everything you need to know. Heck, I read wrestling magazines back in the day. Most of that time I had only read briefly of newsletters that told you what was really going on outside of kayfabe. I grew up on Pro Wrestling Illustrated and The Wrestler and magazines like that. I bought a lot of them too.
Looking at the landscape of wrestling nowadays, I am not one to cheer for a company just because it is an alternative. I remember some of the things that happened on WCW Monday Nitro and I remember reading about the AWA Team Challenge Series. Just because it wasn’t WWF doesn’t mean it was better. Watching video of the Ding Dongs from The Clash of Champions should be good enough warning of what happens when ideas go wrong.
I’m not one of those “Things were better back then” types of people but I am one that looks back at wrestling’s past and says that there are plenty of familiar things going on in today’s wrestling landscape.
So looking at where I sit as a wrestling fan I see that I am not the youngest or even the most desirable for wrestling promotions or its advertisers. Even still, there is wrestling out there I can enjoy too. It may not be the hippest or the most happening thing right now, but that doesn’t matter to me and I hope a number of you reading this feel the same way.
