The Beautiful Thing: What I Did This Summer

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Burned Out on Sports Entertainment

In real life, I am the Director of a small church camp. This means that I lose almost all of my free time every summer while we’re running our kid’s programs. What little time I have needs to be divided between getting this column done, taking care of my relationship, playing my saxophone, and enjoying my hobbies. Watching wrestling is my biggest hobby, but I’m lucky to find more than a couple of hours per week to devote to it from July through August. The past two years, I have usually taped RAW and Smackdown, and watched them when I had some time to myself. This year, I haven’t bothered. Reading the reviews on this site, I haven’t really felt that I’ve been missing much. In some sense, I’m kind of glad that my job has helped me to avoid sitting through the Hassan storyline, the rise of Heidenreich and Masters, the second Bimbo Search, and the transformation of Chris Benoit into enhancement talent.

I guess I’ve missed a couple of good Rey, Eddie, Shelton, London, and Regal matches, and the stunning return of Hulk Hogan. Sometimes we all have to make sacrifices.

I’m a big fan of great technical wrestling, stiff strikes, crazy bumps, solid psychology, long matches that tell a compelling story, and gifted athletes who give their all in the ring. I don’t always get those things from North American Corporate Professional Wrestling.

Here’s What I’ve Been Watching Instead

I’ve got a ridiculously large collection of wrestling on tapes and on disc. When I get a free fifteen or twenty minutes, I’ll often watch a match from my collection. It’s a fantastic way to take my mind off my job and stop thinking about the camp for a little while. If I get a half hour or more where it looks like I’m not going to be interrupted, I’ll pop in one of the compilation discs that I got from Rob at Golden Boy and enjoy a mid-90s All Japan match. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no better way to take a short mental vacation.

I’ve been enjoying all kinds of matches, though, not just ones involving Misawa.

I’ve got a bunch of tapes filled with nothing but Bret Hart matches. After I’m done writing this, before I go to bed, I’m going to watch his classic encounter with Rowdy Roddy Piper. I’ve seen the match a dozen times or more, so I already know what Piper is going to do when fate hands him a chance to clock Bret with the timekeeper’s bell. That won’t make it any less dramatic, though. That’s the kind of moment that stands up to repeated viewings. That is classic Pro Wrestling story telling.


Yeah, baby!

In fact, a lot of my favourite matches get better, in a way, the more I watch them. Much like Piper vs. Hart, much of the greatness of Masahiro Chono and Keiji Mutoh’s ’91 G-1 Climax Finals match is in the small details. The more I watch those matches, the more I appreciate the near-perfection of their pace and build and the way they allow the story to unfold without rushing things. I don’t think it’s overstating the case to say that watching such matches several times is like listening again and again to Yehudi Menuhin playing Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, in that every exposure can reveal new nuances.

There are other matches I enjoy just as much which rely very little on subtlety. I have a couple of ECW fans on my staff, and last weekend we sat down together to watch some Big Japan Death Matches. It wasn’t the finer nuances of Winger’s senton that impressed them so much as it was the fact that Winger did his senton off a balcony while he was lit on fire.

There also isn’t a great deal of subtlety in the way that Dump Matsumoto punches Chigusa Nagayo right in the face, but regardless of how you might feel about the subject, I find that watching Nagayo bleed for her art somehow refreshes my soul and recharges my batteries. After watching their Hair vs. Hair match I found myself in much better shape to go and teach little kids that Jesus loves them.

I’ve also been getting a real kick out of watching MMA lately. In particular, Antonio “Minotauro” Nogueira seems to fight a lot of matches that are every bit as dramatic as any worked fight could hope to be. His first fight against Heath Herring featured a ton of stunning reversals of what seemed to be sure tap-outs, and his fight with Mirco “Cro Cop” Filipovic had him playing the classic underdog in peril as he survived a tremendous beating before finally being able to gain an advantage in the second round.

I Still Love Wrestling

Ultimately, my busy summer schedule has helped me to increase the enjoyment I get from watching Professional Wrestling. I don’t have to endure the xenophobia, the misogyny, or the alternately hateful and sophomoronic storylines of World Wrestling Entertainment, and I get to watch Stan Hansen and Terry Funk go toe to toe, Vader slamming Inoki into a table, and American Dragon working the mat with Doug Williams instead.

I hope you’re enjoying your wrestling this summer every bit as much as I am.

Thank you for reading!