I blame my stepbrother, really.
Of course I’d watched wrestling as a kid. I really liked it. What kid didn’t? It was the late ’80s/early ’90s. That stuff was designed for you. And I grew up in Calgary, which was a serious wrestling town. The Harts come from there. Wrestling was a tough thing to do. This memory is surely rose-coloured, but every single kid in my tiny elementary school loved it. Bret Hart was a national hero when I was a kid. Calgary had some other sports heroes, but none near Hart’s status, especially among my age group. I was 10 when Bret won his first WWE Championship in 1992.
When Bret won his third WWE Championship in 1995, I wasn’t watching. In fact, WrestleMania X in 1994 was the last wrestling show I would watch for several years. I was getting into this other thing a lot of my friends were into: girls. There was no room for a lame, childish thing like wrestling in my life when the possibility of talking to ladies was concerned. And for several years, it would appear that wrestling would stay in my childhood, like it would for the majority of people.
But in early 1997, my stepbrother casually mentioned something called the New World Order. It was a wrestling thing, apparently, but it wasn’t like other wrestling. It was cool. You’ve heard this story, before. Hall, Hogan, and (let’s be honest, mostly) Nash(1) made wrestling cool again, even for guys who liked girls and—here’s the most messed up part—even for girls.
Really, this is all his fault.
So of course you’ve got the popularity of the Attitude era, and I rode it with everyone. It was nice to watch wrestling again. It was like WWE and WCW had focused-group the crap out of my generation and served up everything we needed. And this was great for a while, until I began to realize that I perhaps liked wrestling a great deal more than my peers, that maybe it had become something of an obsession.
WrestleMania XVIII in 2002 should have been the end of it. I attended it with my girlfriend. We had great seats. I couldn’t have really asked for a better show. What better time to sign off, go to University, and forget about the whole thing? That really was the plan. But I found myself on Monday nights studying with the TV on, with Raw dimly brimming in the background, keeping its tendrils on my mind. Like most people, University changed me. But wrestling was still there. I couldn’t shake myself of it.
I began to wonder why wrestling was something I felt I needed in my life. What did I get out of this continual immersion? I studied this for a while. I guess I’m still studying it, in a way. I minored in dramatic arts. One of the classes(2) involved a week of study on professional wrestling. It’s the reason I took the class. I went in hoping to get answers. I received none. I got some basic flash-card responses: catharsis, a sense of constancy through life, habit, a replacement for smoking, etc. These aren’t things you haven’t heard before. Oh, watching wrestling is relaxing? How novel. It wasn’t it for me. I needed something more. How did a somewhat normal guy continue to watch this garbage, in 2005 no less?
Though I would continue to watch (and begin to write about, online), I mentioned wrestling less and less in real life. It felt like a dirty topic, like porn or being left-handed.(3) And this sort of hush-hush attitude about it only made it more fascinating.
In 2007, after graduating and moving in with a girl who has absolutely no patience for professional wrestling, I had a life-changing talk with Aaron Glazer from Inside Pulse. Glazer and I still disagree on most things, but I consider him a great inspiration. We were talking about dirtsheets or something, and I asked him why there was so little “real” writing about wrestling. Why was there no academia on the subject? Why did no real journalist ever touch the stuff? It existed somewhere between liberal arts and sport, and nobody in the world appears to work in that office.
Glazer’s Gandhi-lite advice was, of course, to become the change I wanted to see. If there was no thoughtful wrestling writing, why don’t I make some? So I did. I wrote nearly two dozen articles for Inside Pulse in 2007 that I still feel are unparalleled on that site for thoughtful analysis. And then Benoit happened and I wrote some poor stuff and then disappeared for a year and a half, appearing again as an impersonator.(4)
Something happened in that time I was away, though. It wasn’t just Benoit that drove me away from wrestling. It was the attitude, writing style, and dreadful persona of the “wrestling fan.” It really disgusted me, and it still does. I felt that I was all alone in my desire to see wrestling journalism taken to a respectable level. And even if I was right back then, I certainly can’t say that today. We are in the midst of a real resurgence in professional wrestling interest, and this is bringing a new crowd. And much like how more and more wrestlers don suits,(5) more and more wrestling fans know how to form an argument.
Jason, Mitch, Razor and I all really believe this. We believe we’re doing something important, and I feel incredibly lucky to have found them. Jason’s picked a great team, here. I’m going to talk more about the direction of the Quarterly later this week, but for now I’ll leave you with this: if you’ve ever felt like you wanted more of your interest, your obsession, your whatever, you’re likely not alone. It might take a long time and a lot of work, but it’s very likely there are others out there with the same fire and passion and talent. And if you’re interest, your obsession, your whatever is professional wrestling, and you need more than what’s currently out there, then you’ve found the right goddamn place.
K Sawyer Paul is an author and publisher living in Toronto. He tweets and tumbls. In the wrestling world he is known for This is Sports Entertainment and The Footnotes of Wrestling.
Edited by Jason Mann.
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1 Though all three had significant roles, it was Nash who would enter the ring whilst drinking coffee.
2 It wasn’t dramaturgy, but it was something like dramaturgy, which would probably make a dramaturge’s head hurt.
3 This world is just not built for us.
4 Though I am still getting compliments on Fake Vince, and I do really appreciate it.
5 WWE is apparently launching an adult style magazine of some kind this year, which is just zany.
