I'm a Wrestling Fan, and I'm Proud of It
By Joe Foering

It's the early afternoon of Sunday, March 7, and I'm standing in line outside the First Mariner Arena in Baltimore, Maryland. A veritable sea of ravers, kids, and young adults — overwhelmingly male — line the city block in front and behind me. Like them, I am there to take in a wrestling show put on by the Superstars of World Wrestling Entertainment, aka WWE. In fact, a month earlier I had even woken up early on a Saturday morning so I could score the best tickets online via the price-gouging monopoly known as TicketMaster. So here I am, about to attend the final "house show" (non-televised event) on WWE's "Road to WrestleMania," and to be honest, I'm not entirely sure why.

A Brief History of Turnbuckles

Now before we go any further, I'm sure that there are a lot of non-wrestling fans out there that are reading this, so for their benefit a little background may be in order about me and about wrestling. To start, I'm not going to insult your intelligence by calling pro wrestling a competitive "sport." The outcomes of the matches are predetermined, and today's wrestling show — now called "sports-entertainment" — is often described as a "soap opera with violence," with as much emphasis on what goes on outside the ring as inside. But similarly, I'm not going to insult the wrestlers by calling what they do "fake." These athletes train for years to reach the peak of physical condition, and push their bodies to the limit over 200 nights a year. Injuries are quite real, often quite severe, and occur rather frequently-just like in "real" sports. And unlike "real" sports or other forms of entertainment, there's no off-season to recuperate and no reruns.

For my part, I'm in my early thirties and I've followed pro wrestling for over 20 years. Among my fondest childhood memories are those of my friends and me crowded around the TV on Saturday afternoons, thrilling to the exploits of Sergeant Slaughter and Jimmy "Superfly" Snuka. We cheered Hulk Hogan as he flexed his muscles and we booed the Iron Sheik's claim of "Iran, Number One!" In those days good was good, bad was bad, and to a ten-year-old boy anything was possible if you trained, said your prayers, and took your vitamins.

In those days pro wrestling was divided into regional "territories," with each promotion covering a swath of the country. The promotions had an unspoken agreement: everyone stays in their own territory. Nobody would advertise in someone else's market, and nobody would steal talent away from someone else's promotion. The Northeast was the territory of WWE, then known as the World Wrestling Federation (WWF). When current WWE owner Vince McMahon bought the promotion from his father he broke this agreement, first by luring top talent away from other organizations, and then by promoting his own brand of sports-entertainment nationwide by sending weekly tapes of his shows to local TV stations. In 1985, McMahon gambled everything on the infant medium of closed circuit Pay-Per-View television when he presented the first WrestleMania. It turned out to be a success, and Pay-Per-View was established as a viable medium for entertainment. More importantly for McMahon, it established the WWF as an international brand name, and brought pro wrestling out of its carnival origins and into the national consciousness.

Now, twenty years later, WWE has outworked, out-muscled, or outlasted all its rivals to become the dominant brand name for pro wrestling in America, if not the world. It's so large, in fact, that a little over a year ago the roster was split into two brands: RAW, centered on the Monday night cable show; and Smackdown!, centered on the Thursday night broadcast TV show. The March 7 event I was attending would feature the RAW roster.

Mind Candy

Just as wrestling changed over the years, my view of it changed as well. As I grew older and wiser-when I learned that the clotheslines and body slams were part of a show-wrestling became more of a guilty pleasure for me, something that I sheepishly admitted to watching. I thought of myself as just a "casual" fan, someone for whom wrestling was a minor vice rather than a hobby. Looking back, I know that some of that point of view came from my family; they didn't think ill of me, but they also remembered my watching wrestling as a child, and were somewhat concerned that I was "still" watching wrestling "at my age." And at least partially, I bought into this mindset.

Oh, I still continued to watch wrestling. Whatever else I did, I always did my best to keep my Monday nights (and later, Thursday nights) free. I rationalized my hobby by saying that as long as I didn't spend money on it (by buying a ticket to a live event or ordering a Pay-Per-View), I was not a lost cause. Even as wrestling's popularity continued to skyrocket in the mass media and several of its stars crossed over into mainstream notoriety and fame, wrestling was still largely looked upon as "mind candy," and its fans were largely looked down upon as uncultured. Not wanting to be lumped into that category — or worse, to lose face with my friends — I continued to publicly downplay my love for wrestling.

A Big Red Surprise

So what changed? What caused me to break my self-imposed restrictions and not only buy a ticket, but jump through logistical hoops in an effort to get top seats? Strangely enough, the answer was connected to my other major hobby: Japanese animation, i.e. "anime."

For the last eleven years I have helped staff Otakon, the "Convention of Otaku Generation." Otakon is the largest anime convention outside of Japan, and my involvement reached its zenith in the summer of 2003 when I was elected convention chairman.

Coincidentally one of my fellow staffers, a tall fellow named Geoff, was an aspiring wrestler who worked for an independent promotion owned by the WWE superstar known as "Kane." Apparently Geoff had been talking up the convention to his boss and co-workers for some time now, so when I received an email from the "Big Red Machine" himself inquiring about attending the convention, needless to say I was rather surprised.

While I certainly understood that "wrestlers were people too," and that the odds were good that there were some anime fans among them, I honestly hadn't considered the near seven-foot "monster" to be one of them. However, as convention chairman I certainly had the authority to take measures to ensure Kane's privacy, and secure him a free badge and shirt in the process.