My Story Part 5
What Internet Wrestling Sites Mean to Me
Catching Bret Hart vs. Steve Austin at WrestleMania 13 on German satellite television in 1997 made me a wrestling fan again after years of apathy. The match made a real impact on me for a number of reasons. For one thing, I grew up in Western Canada watching Stampede Wrestling so the wrestlers who got their start there were pretty much guaranteed to be among my favourites. The Hart Foundation, for example, were my favourite tag team when I stopped watching in the early 90s. I still though of Bret Hart as a tag specialist, so it was a real surprise to see him fighting in a key singles match at the biggest show of the year. Another thing that caught my attention was that Stunning Steve Austin had morphed into Stone Cold Steve Austin, complete with a shaved head and a goatee. I grew my first goatee in 1991, and started shaving my head in ’93. Back then, my wrestling friends teased me for going with the Nikita Koloff look. I was actually a little torn over whether to cheer for the Canadian or for the badass brawler who shared my grooming habits. That slight conflict played pretty well into the story being told in the ring.
When they took the fight into the stands, I marked out because it was clear that the WWF were no longer putting all of their eggs into the “Cheesy Saturday Morning Cartoon” basket. I could remember seeing Abdullah the Butcher and the Sheik brawl through the crowd on videotape and thinking at the time that it was something I’d never see in the WWF. When Bret slapped on the Ring Post Figure Four, I just about lost it. After seeing that, I was 100 per cent behind Bret, up until Austin got busted open. There was something about the way that Stone Cold refused to give up, even when the Hitman trapped him with his Sharpshooter. Watching Austin pass out face first into a pool of his own blood, I am sure, made many of us bigger fans than we’d ever been before.
I was ecstatic that Bret won, bit I also wanted to see Austin get another chance. The trouble was, there was really no way for me to keep up with what was happening in the world of Professional Wrestling while I was living in the Czech Republic.
There was also the bizarre experience of watching the rest of WrestleMania 13, being bitterly disappointed by the boring Undertaker vs. Sid Main Event, and realising that I honestly didn’t know a single person in country where I was living who might have wanted to discuss that with me.
In 1998, when an opportunity arose for me to go back to Canada and work for a year, I took it. I knew that I would miss Europe, but I wanted to see my friends and family again, and I also wanted to watch football, eat chicken wings, drink huge cups of good coffee, and catch up with everything that had happened in the world of wrestling.
One of the fist things I did was to pick up a copy of Pro Wrestling Illustrated. It blew my mind to see that both the WWF and WCW had bald, goateed World Heavyweight Champions. My job involved running recreational programs for “special needs” kids. I couldn’t stop laughing when, on my first day at work, an argument broke out over whether I looked more like Stone Cold or Goldberg. It seemed that Pro Wrestling was more popular than it had ever been before.
I caught my first episode of RAW that evening. The last time I’d seen wrestling on free TV the shows had consisted of nothing but squash matches, and the rules of Kayfabe were strictly enforced. For example, my “insider” friends and I knew that goofy commentator Vince McMahon was in fact the owner of the WWF, but we only knew that because of the connections I’d made while I was working for All Star Wrestling. If you can remember those days, then you can probably imagine my shock when I turned on the TV expecting more of the same, only to catch the Monday Night Wars, and the Austin vs. McMahon feud, in all their glory.
Obviously, I picked a pretty good year, wrestling wise, to come home for an extended visit. I saw DeGeneration X invade Nitro. I saw Ric Flair return to WCW. Damn near everywhere I went, I met fellow wrestling fans. If anything interesting happened on one of the shows, there was always someone who wanted to talk about it the next day.
I went back to the Czech Republic in January, which was also pretty good timing wrestling wise. I avoided having to see the Finger Poke of Doom, for example. I didn’t know what I was missing, though, and it drove me crazy to be cut off from wrestling again. Some of my friends from the Pilsen Tornadoes American Football team were wrestling fans and I got to watch an occasional show with them, but we never got into arguments or even discussions about wrestling. This was partly because of language difficulties and partly because they tended to believe that the matches might be genuine athletic contests.
I bought a second hand computer with money that I’d saved while working in Canada. A small mountain of paperwork later, I had a dial-up internet connection. I was pretty happy to find that there were so many sites devoted to Pro Wrestling, at least until I started reading them. The first few sites I tried seemed to be written by people who fit pretty well into the unfortunate stereotype of 14-year-old idiots with limited understanding of the rules of English grammar who were using their parents’ computers to complain about things that they don’t understand. I also found a few wrestling sites and message boards that seemed to be populated entirely by people who took themselves and their opinions far too seriously. The writers on those sites and the posters on those boards seemed to believe that wrestling should be written about in absolute terms. They seemed to be utterly committed to a very narrow and specific definition of what comprised good wrestling, and there didn’t seem to be much willingness to discuss any ideas or opinions that were even marginally different from their own.
I found the Wrestling Observer website, but it was just too expensive to get a subscription delivered to where I was living.
It took me a while, but I eventually found the PW Torch and then the 411 Wrestling websites. It was worth the effort, though. Both sites had columns and reviews that were written with humour, personality, and genuine insight. I not only got to keep up with the latest wrestling news, but I was able to compare my thoughts on what was happening with those of several very talented writers who, despite their frequently sarcastic and cynical approach, clearly enjoyed watching, thinking about, and writing about wrestling.
Of course, you can now find many of them right here.
