A Language Only We Know: Why I’m About To Watch A Bunch Of 10-Year-Old Indie Wrestling Shows
I’m not really sure what draws me to professional wrestling, but I suspect at this point, part of the appeal is that it’s a fairly uncomplicated thing I know a lot about. To stand on line waiting to get into a wrestling show is to be soothed by the familiar pitter-patter of 500, or 1,000, or 20,000 people having the same five or six conversations they have outside every wrestling show. One fan presents a widely circulated internet rumor; another complains that a wrestler beloved on message boards is being held down by his employer; a third explains a half-baked storyline idea they’ve been sitting on for weeks. That no one has anything original to say is besides the point. It’s the ritual that matters.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, as I’ve been trying to put my finger on what exactly has caused me to devote so much time and headspace to an artform whose contents contradict everything I profess to stand for. Professional wrestling, at least as practiced by the vast majority of the companies that produce it, is by turns homophobic, racist and sexist, and it is pretty much always violent. Certainly, my enthusiasm for wrestling is not due to its popularity among other media-class millennials, or because talking about it all the time reflects well on me as a person or a professional.
The best rationale I can come up with, or perhaps the rationale I find most acceptable, is that I dove back into wrestling fandom these past few years because life in my mid-20s has been very confusing and professional wrestling is not. For me, graduating college was a bit like stepping off the escalator that had carried me through life and into a wide open space filled with thousands of paths to walk down, with each prospective choice feeling irreversible, unpredictable and somehow not quite right. Amid the uncertainty of Adult Decision-Making and the strangeness of the corporate world I’ve stumbled into, it’s been comforting to go online and speak fluently in the language of wrestling fandom I picked up as a teen, a dialect of “shoots” and “works” and “pops” and “turns.” If tweeting a bunch of dumb jokes about the WWE isn’t exactly the best use of my time, it is at least solid ground.
The other piece, of course, is that I just fucking love this shit. Not Vince McMahon’s poop jokes or the idiots in the crowd who yell “show your tits” every time a woman appears on-stage, obviously. But the kinetic beauty of Ricochet somersaulting through the air, the catharsis of Bayley’s long-awaited title victory and yes, I confess, the unadulterated violence of Katsuyori Shibata kicking some dude’s chest in … there are few things as thrilling as wrestling when it’s done right. I often think about taking a sabbatical and using the time I spend watching shows and listening to podcasts to go to the gym or, like, write a thing I’m proud of. But then I’ll watch the latest AJ Styles masterpiece and know that there’s no way in hell I’m going to miss the next one.
In any event, I’m stuck with this pro wrestling habit for at least the time being, so I feel I ought to at least use it as a means of quieting the voice in my head that’s always telling me to stop being a lazy dummy and write something. Lately, I’ve been diving into the mid-2000s Ring of Honor shows that got me hooked in the first place as a disgruntled suburban teen, and I’ve found that I have a lot of ~thoughts~ about what I’ve been watching — on the virtuoso brilliance of Bryan Danielson, the blockheaded gender politics of the promotion’s storylines and the early rumblings of the internet fan’s takeover of mainstream wrestling culture. My plan is to write one blogpost/essay about each of the 44 events ROH put on in 2006, with the goal of publishing one piece a week. My intention isn’t to write show reviews or to assign star ratings but rather to dig a little deeper into a seminal moment in the U.S. wrestling scene that happened to coincide with my formative years. Along the way, I hope to get a little bit closer to understanding why I love this dumb fake sport so much. Finally, it’s an excuse for me to watch some primo sports entertainment content without feeling like I’m completely wasting my time on unstructured leisure activities.
I hope that I will follow through and write these posts, and that you will maybe read some of them, assuming independent wrestling from 10 years ago is a thing you would read about.
