Your First Taste

Just as you will always long for that special meal or dessert that only Mama or Granny could make, so too will wrestling lovers long for the specific type of in-ring action they saw for the first time. That intense flavor from the first exposure to wrestling leaves a taste in your mouth that you’ll always crave.  Do you recall how you watched in wide eyed excitement when you first saw pro wrestling, sitting just a few inches from your TV?

The specific taste and aroma of the wrestling that you knew and loved as a youngster will vary depending on your age and where you grew up.  You may be an older fan who grew up on those solid, masculine brawlers from the Golden Age when wrestling was broadcast in black and white and wrestlers were blue-collar manly-men.

The wrestling back then was hearty and robust, with plenty of meat and potatoes.  The action was meant to be real, so the atmosphere was very serious and dramatic.  You could tell from the screaming crowd that plenty of people in those days believed that these brutes were really trying to hurt each other. “Hey, he’s cheating!  Do something, REF!” they’d shout in angry frustration.

Or maybe you grew up on a healthy diet of “Studio Wrestling” that was popular in any number of cities in the 60′s and 70′s. The ring was set up on a sound stage and the action was taped for local television with under 100 fans in the audience.  You could hear every rude comment by the small crowd, every shout of encouragement, every grunt or groan inside and outside of the ring.  There was a homey flavor, and you felt like you could reach out and touch the wrestlers.

I’ve even heard of wrestling fans who prefer to watch wrestling that looks grainy or cloudy on the screen because they grew up watching it on snowy channels (before cable and satellite, back when you had to move the antenna around or thump the top of the television to get a clearer picture.)  They miss that gritty flavor and long for the days when they had to squint to see the action through a blurry or rolling screen, like a music fan who prefers scratchy old vinyl records to the perfection of CDs or MP3s.

Maybe you’re from another country and grew up on servings of your own local heroes and villains.  The culture and history of your home country dictated the amount of spice in the pro wrestling you consumed.  Maybe it was bloody, maybe it was hot, maybe it brought tears to your eyes — I’m sure it was exciting to watch, whatever the specific seasoning.

Or maybe you began your wrestling habit in the days after the World Wrestling Federation established dominance as the one super-power.  In this case, you grew up on a steady diet of jobber squashes, with lovable but incompetent young hopefuls like “Quick Draw” Rick McGraw, Gino Carabello, Jerry Allen, and Jose Luis Rivera getting destroyed and publicly humiliated every time they climbed in the ring.  The competitive matches were reserved for the next Pay-per-View or arena show, so your weekly fare was served one-sided.

If this was the type of wrestling you first experienced, I’ll bet you still have a craving f0r a nice, old-fashioned squash.

Or maybe you’re a younger fan and got your first taste of wrestling on-line with the rise of the modern Indy federations.  You grew up probably knowing from the beginning that pro wrestling was more performance art than athletic competition, but that doesn’t diminish your love of wrestling for what it is.

I think it’s interesting that it doesn’t matter which federation you grew up on.  If you were born to love wrestling, you loved whatever specific style or stable that was presented in your area.  Attraction to pro wrestling is based on the nature of the sport itself, not on the particular size, fitness, gear, appearance, age, race, or fighting style of the combatants.

Whoever invented the Internet was nice enough to include plenty of pro wrestling on the menu, allowing us to view those same  matches, the exact same broadcasts, the same outrageous interviews that first roused our love of pro wrestling.  We can go back in time to see what it was that made our mouths water whenever we heard that bell ring.  We can see if the in-ring scenes etched in our memories still have the same effect on us, and whether the action was as exciting as we remembered it.

Like some kind of dream, we now can watch the old heroes and villains whom we never thought we’d see climbing into the ring again in our lifetime, and get a whiff of that old flavor that we remember from so long ago.