How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Enjoying Professional Wrestling

Isn't wrestling fake?

Or

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Enjoy Professional Wrestling. 

These are just gonna be random anime X wrestling pictures and junk. Sorry not sorry.

For those who don’t me very well, I have recently gotten into the world of professional wrestling. By that I mean I watch it, mainly WWE products but also some other stuff, enjoy it, I follow the story lines and have favorites and have become a fan of the product. It’s sort of strange for me to have fallen in love with wrestling, it isn’t something I ever thought I would enjoy, but over the past 9 or so months I have really fallen for it. I want to sort of tell my story of how I got into it, my perspective on it, and probably other random things. This is a bit of a strange journey, so thanks for sticking it out with me. 

I’ve always known about wrestling. I have clear memories of watching it as a child, but not really understanding what was going on or who were involved. For some reason I think remember Kurt Angle and not liking him, and the Hardy Boys come to mind from my childhood, but other than that I couldn’t tell you anything. Most of what I know about wrestling in my youth is stuff I have learned since then by reading Wrestling news sites and watching YouTube videos of people talking about older storylines. What I’m trying to make clear is this enjoyment I get from wrestling is something new. It isn’t a rekindling of an old passion and it isn’t nostalgically looking back at what I think was a better time. I’ve essentially only watched the product since like, August of 2015. Well, kind of.

The New Day dressed in Freizas army's uniform. Its awesome.

While I only started watching the actual series that WWE produces, I did have some familiarity with wrestling before that, beyond what I barely remember from my childhood. Wrestling and nerd culture have always been surprisingly close, though you’d never guess so from the outset. Wrestling presents itself like a sport, its beefy macho guys beating each other up. It presents itself as boxing but with more body slams. Nerd culture needs some sort of narrative to find interest in a subject. It is a characters narrative that draws us in and makes us want to watch. But the thing is, while wrestling presents itself as a legitimate sport, it is actually a fictionalized narrative. As many people like to cry, wrestling isn’t real. But that’s the point. WWE Raw, their flagship program, is not a wrestling show. It is a show about a wrestling show. It is a narrative driven series about the competitors of a wrestling program who solve their problems in the ring. And because of that we see their lives outside the ring, we see feuds and rivalries grow and friendships get broken and reignited, we see villains rise and heroes come to stick them down. Nerds love wrestling because it is a narrative driven spectacle where they get to see the mechanics of what happens behind the scenes going on. Remember the clear Gameboys? Everyone loved them because you got to see all the mechanic parts in it. It’s the same thing with wrestling. And because nerds love wrestling, a lot of the nerdy personalities who I follow on the internet also love it, and would talk about it. I would learn somethings by osmosis, like that Damian Sandow was really popular or that no one liked John Cena and the there was a really popular goat man running around. And then came a night in late February, early March of 2015.

Tiger Mask is a manga turned into a real wrestler. There is a real Tiger Mask. Its awesome.

I needed to get some laundry done but I had a ton of it to do and the only available time was around11 pm. I was tired, but had nothing to do the next day except sleep so I bit the bullet and started doing my laundry, a task that took 3 hours and 30 minutes if I am remembering correctly. I needed to stay awake so I was watching random YouTube videos, when on my subscriptions page on YouTube Little Kuriboh had uploaded a new video. I love Little Kuriboh. I had been watching his stuff since high school but I wasn’t watching this series yet, which he posted a new episode for. It was called the Mark Remark, a satirical look at the past week in WWE wrestling. I hadn’t watch the previous episodes because I thought I wouldn’t like them, I didn’t watch wrestling so I probably wouldn’t get the jokes. But it was late, and I needed something to keep me awake, so I started the video.  It turns out it was very funny. I didn’t get everything that was going on but I was able to get the jokes he was making and thought it was a really funny series. I watching the Mark Remark whenever he posted a new video, until unfortunately he got sick in the summer and had to stop making them for a while. He is better now, and Little Kuriboh still makes the series and it’s just as funny. But at the time, I had no wrestling content to watch. 

I really should watch Ultimate Muscle one of these days.

I was now more in tune with what people I followed online were saying about wrestling. I knew names and had a greater context with references and stuff, and the one day all over my twitter feed was a story about John Cena. Apparently In a match he was seriously injured, and just kept wrestling. Something about that was really strange to me. It must have never occurred to me that a wrestler when injured, like seriously injured, would just keep wrestling. I had thought it was like a television show, or a movie. If an actor got injured they would stop the scene and people would fix them up and if they were healthy enough to continue filming they would. But instead it’s much more like a play. When an actor gets injured the play must go on. Sure many play actors will stop, even stopping the play if they are seriously injured. But some will continue, regardless of their injury. The play must go on. It was surprising to me to see that in wrestling. So I had to see that episode of Monday night RAW, and I watched it and just like reports said, John Cena Had his nose broken. His opponent, Seth Rollins, went for a knee to the face and John Cena got all of it, right on his nose. And it was very bloody. Like, blood was poor everywhere, people kept having to check on Cena to make sure he was ok and wipe some of the blood off of him so he wouldn’t scare the children, and in the end Cena won, like I suspect he was meant to be before his nose was broken. I had to know what would happen next, how they would handle one of their top stars getting injured like that. So I watched the next week’s episode.

Moe around the world!

Next week starts with Seth Rollins, the Heavy Weight Champion and the man who broke John Cena’s nose in the ring talking about how he broke Cena’s nose, bragging about it. He showed a picture of Cena post-match, and his nose was swollen like a grapefruit. It was kind of disgusting, but really hammered home to me that wrestling is more real than I ever thought it was. Then to top it off, Rollins decided he would “honor” Cena by continuing what he was previously doing the past couple weeks. I learned later that John Cena was having a weekly open challenge for the United States Championship, where any wrestler could come down and have a title match with John Cena, and as I watched later they were amazing matches. But since Rollins is a bad guy he make a stipulation to the challengers, they had to be under a certain height and under a certain weight, one that matches practically no current wrestler for the product. But of course someone has to stand up to the bad guy, so out runs a guy named Nevil. I had heard him talked about on the Mark Remark as someone who did lots of flips and jumps, so I knew who he was. And then I watched the match, and this is what sold me on wrestling as a fun thing to watch. The match was fast and powerful and exciting. There were moments where I was mesmerized by the action, and I was cheering for Nevil. The match ended when Nevil hit his signature move, a huge number of flips done after jumping high off the top rope and then landing on his opponent, the ref counted to three but then saw that Rollins foot was on the ropes and apparently you can’t be counted out when your foot is underneath the ropes. (I learned there are a lot of rules to wrestling over the next few months after this) Nevil took too much time trying to re-pin his opponent, and Rollins defeated him quickly with the given time. This match will always hold a special place in my heart because it’s what made me understand why the action in wrestling, while (for lack of a better word) “fake”, can also be compelling and really fun to watch. But even then I wasn’t really into wrestling, I just understood it better. It would be a few weeks until I became a fan of wrestling. 

Moe German Suplex!

I was watching on and off for the next few weeks, interested but also not really into it. I liked Nevil, he was awesome, but other than that I never felt really invested in what was going on. And then came a segment that just made the entre thing click for me. The basics is that John Cena was back, and Seth Rollins claimed that because he broke Cena’s nose he deserved a chance at his title. And somehow his own title was on the line to sweeten the deal. So whoever won the match the winner would be the United States Champion and the World Heavyweight Champion at the same time. This lead to a contract signing. Contract signings are a strange part of the WWE world, where they have the participants sign the contract for the match in the middle of the arena. It is a good way to get the main combatants in the ring together without having to give them an official match together. They get to argue with each other and build up the match, and even fight without having an official winner. It is usually very cliché. But apparently this one was a bit different. 

This is my favorite fanart on earth.

Let me set the stage for you. In the middle of the ring was a table with the contract, Seth Rollins holding the World title, and the two main members of the Authority Triple H and Stephanie McMahon. Triple H is a classic wrestler in the WWE, and the mentor of Seth Rollins, and Stephanie McMahon is his wife and the daughter of the owner of the company, and together they basically run the show within the show. Seth is there personally chosen champion, the one they want in series to be the main character of the series. Ultimately they are bad guys. So the three of them stand in the ring, and John Cena’s music hits, and he walks to the ring. And he enters and doesn’t let anyone talk. He grabs a mic and gives the entire reason this random wrestling match is important. Cena shows that he’s wearing new cloths, covered in the number 15. He designed these cloths and merchandise because he has won the World Championship 15 times during his career and at this point in his career he has realized that he won’t have many more chances at getting the greatest prize in WWE. And that ultimately, at the stage in his career he is in, he’s ok with that. But now, Seth Rollins has come up and rubbed this challenge in Cena’s face, he has a chance to win the title for the 16^th time. Now, the most anyone has ever won the title is 16 times, and that honor is owned by Rick Flair, and old school wrestler who was the mentor of Triple H, who is the mentor of Seth Rollins. And Cena knows this. He points out that if he loses the match, he loses his title and that’s awful. But if he wins, he just doesn’t defeat Rollins, he defeats Rollins mentor and his mentors mentor as well. Then he signs the contract and drops the mic. And that was how they sold me on story telling in wrestling.

Yes, this is wrestling and Naruto mixed

In one felled swoop in understood the importance of this match and how interesting the story was. They took a story about a cocky young man trying to cement his legacy at an early age into a story about the same young man doing that while also risking the legacy of both his mentor and the his mentors mentor. It put all the weight on the back of this villain, and it changed how you viewed everything involving the match. It was honestly fantastic. Sure, it didn’t go the way people thought it would during the actual event, Jon Stewart hit John Cena with a chair and Seth Rollins won, yes reread that sentence that happened, but it ultimately sold me on wrestling as a viable means of storytelling. And it’s why I continue to watch it. It’s why I watch WWE RAW on Mondays and I try to catch the pay per views, and now I’ve branched out to other promotions and I like seeing how they tell their stories. It’s really fun. 

Cena-kun must go save CM Punk-kun from Orochimaro

Wrestling is a strange beast. It is far from perfect, sometimes it is incredibly childish and stupid, but every so often there is a glimmer of something amazing. A reason to watch it always comes up for me. Either there will be a great competitor having a great match, telling an amazing story in the ring, or there will be a feud or storyline that I find interesting because I want to know where it will go. I surprisingly really enjoy wrestling. It is something that is singular and fun to watch. And I hope I get to continue enjoying watching it in the future. 

John Cena is totally Naruto and I love it.