Just Too Sweeeeeet!

I used to eat, live, and sleep WCW and WWF wrestling. I was a freshman and sophomore in high school. My next door neighbor and best friend at the time, Trey, loved it too. We would watch 3 hours of wrestling on TV every Monday night; changing channels between WCW Monday Nitro and the WWF's Monday Night Raw.

We knew all the wrestlers, all the moves, and all the rivalries. Stacks of floppy discs next to our computers housed the wrestling theme song to every wrestler we had ever heard of. The cartridge in the Nintendo 64 was WCW vs. nWo: Revenge. Wrestling mottos and slogans were often stretched across our chests on our favorite t-shirts. We made mental notes and strategies on how to perform every move we saw on TV. We both had a trampoline and the moves we saw were constantly practiced. My trampoline saw most of the action because it was close to a brick pillar that we could substitute for jumping off the turnbuckles of a ring. A lot of the maneuvers were risky, even for a trampoline, so we practiced them as much as possible. We did hope to wrestle for a career, but like so many other passions when you are young, this one came and went.

The biggest reason for the abandonment of wrestling by the two of us was our change of interest. Trey started to develop a passion for music that still exists today and, I predict, will continue to dominated his life for as long as he lives. I moved away and thus, was disconnected...somewhat, from the only person I knew who shared my love for pro-wrestling. Sure, other people watch the stuff, but they didn't know it like Trey and I did for those years. For me, the time and energy I had invested in pro-wrestling dissolved into other pre-existing interests of mine. Wrestling was left in the dust. It became another childhood memory that I locked away in my brain to gather dust until it would randomly be thrown into my thoughts today. I do respect the people who choose that for a career. Yes, you may say it is fake, and yes, a lot of it is fake, but the the work that goes into it is very real and demanding. And some of the hits those guys and girls take, simply to entertain the audience, are really painful. So, I respect it, but don't live and die with this macho soap opera anymore, and never will again.