I don’t know if this will make sense, but when I stopped watching wrestling in the early 1990s it wasn’t because I had outgrown wrestling, it wasn’t because wrestling wasn’t cool any more, and it wasn’t because I had developed different interests. It was because the specific version of Professional Wrestling that was then available in North America no longer appealed to me. The main storyline in the WWF at the time had Sgt. Slaughter taking the wrong side in the Gulf War. The National Wrestling Alliance was basically dead, and to be honest, WCW didn’t exactly rise phoenix-like from the ashes to save wrestling from itself. Check out the card for the 1991 Great American Bash:
Non-Televised Match: Junkyard Dog pinned Black Bart
Flag Match: PN News and Bobby Eaton defeated Steve Austin and Terrance Taylor in a scaffold match. (Scott Keith gave this minus four stars).
The Yellow Dog defeated Johnny B Badd by Disqualification (one star)
Ron Simmons pinned Oz. (DUD)
Big Josh pinned Blackblood.(star and three quarters)
Elimination Match: Dustin Rhodes, Tracey Smothers, and Steve Armstrong defeated The Freebirds (Badstreet, Jimmy Garvin, and Michael Hayes) in an “elimination” match. Rhodes was the only survivor. (star and a quarter)
The Diamond Stud pinned Tom Zenk. (half star)
El Gigante pinned One Man Gang. (minus two stars)
Ricky Morton pinned Robert Gibson. (one star)
Russian Chain Match: Nikita Koloff defeated Sting in a “Russian chain” match. (one star)
World Heavyweight Title Match (Steel Cage Match): Lex Luger pinned Barry Windham in a “steel cage” match to win the vacant title. (This horrible match was the result of Jim Herd firing Ric Flair for refusing to drop the strap to Luger).
Steel Cage Match: Rick Steiner and Missy Hyatt defeated Arn Anderson and Paul E Dangerously in a steel cage match when Steiner pinned Dangerously. (Pretty Much The Worst PPV Of All Time ends with a two-minute abortion of a Main Event).
I missed the 1991 Great American Bash, but I had friends that watched it and called me to tell me how bad it was. I missed WrestleMania 7, but I had friends at University who made fun of me for being a wrestling fan because the Hogan vs. Slaughter storyline was so blatantly exploitative. I wasn’t watching any more, but I didn’t feel like I had turned my back on wrestling, I felt that wrestling had turned its back on me.
The house my friends and I were renting had a TV, but it didn’t have cable. The local stations that we could pick up with the antenna didn’t carry any wrestling programs. I suppose my friends and I could have scraped enough money together to get cable but this was the era that brought us The Chamber of Horrors match, and it just didn’t seem worth it.
We got a Super Nintendo. At the start of the 1992 school year, my housemate’s brother gave us a box of tapes that contained every episode of the first three years of The Simpsons. The bands that we used to see at small punk rock clubs started breaking on a national scale, and music became interesting again.
After a while, I didn’t even miss wrestling any more.
In a way, that was too bad, because it wasn’t until 2003 that I got to see Ric Flair’s run with the WWF title, Hogan putting the Ultimate Warrior over cleanly, or Cactus Jack being power bombed on the concrete. My favourite wrestler, Bret Hart, made his big singles run without me watching. I missed Pillman vs. Liger, Hitman vs. Perfect, and the Monday Night Wars. On the other hand I never had to suffer through Spin the Wheel Make the Deal, The Shockmaster, Arachnaman, King Mabel, or WrestleMania 9.
From time to time a friend from the old days would come up to visit, and sometimes they’d bring a wrestling tape with them. I was introduced to puroresu in this way, and although I was resistant at first I eventually became kind of a fan of Misawa, Kawada, Hansen, Tsuruta, Muta, Tiger Mask and Liger. I might have gone on to become a full-fledged puro nerd, but in 1995 I moved to Europe, and it would be two years before I saw my next match.
In one of those coincidences that would seem too good to be true if it hadn’t really happened, I went to visit some of my then-wife’s relatives in March of ’97, couldn’t get to sleep, and turned on their television. They just happened to have satellite, and one of the German sports channels just happened to be showing WrestleMania 13. Vader and Mankind were double-teaming Owen Hart outside of the ring! After getting beat on for a few minutes, Owen nailed Mankind with a belly to belly on the concrete floor. He made the hot tag to Davey-Boy! I was blown away to see the two former stampede stars as WWF champions. Even though the match ended in a double count out, I was glued to the screen waiting to see what would happen next.
What happened next, of course, was that I marked out like a little bitch as Bret Hart and Steve Austin brawled into the crowd, Bret broke out the ringpost figure four, Austin dripped blood on the canvas, Bret got superplexed, and Austin eventually blacked out from the pain.
By the end of the match, I was a wrestling fan again.
SPECIAL PIMP SECTION!
Get ready for a bunch of very interesting year end special features here on Inside Pulse Wrestling and throughout the site. It’s amazing to me that guys like Blatt and Goforth are able to keep putting out excellent columns while working on their special projects. The Big Guns are out in full force, too. Even Grut.
The forums are still a great place to go for interesting discussion on a wide variety of wrestling topics.
I’d also like to pimp IP forumer Crippla, who writes reviews for some other site under the name of Spanky. Check out his review of Ring Of Honor’s Reborn Stage 2. Tell ’em Gordi sent you.
