02/15/00 -- The Wide World of Wrestling

Confessions of a woman who watches WCW

Or something...

I brought it up yesterday.  Yes, I watched wrestling on Valentine's Day.  Surprise you?  I'm an intelligent (I'd like to think) woman.   And I watch wrestling.

And it's kind of like reading porn.  If I buy a wrestling magazine, I feel like I've got to hide it.  If I turn on WCW Nitro, I feel all sheepish when someone else is watching it with me.  I don't go so far as to change the channel, but I twitch when my sweetie tells me how fake it looks and gives me TheLook(tm).  That look that shows that maybe he's starting to doubt that I'm an intelligent woman because I watch this crap that's obviously fake.

I watched wrestling when I was a kid.  I watched GLOW (the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling).  It was cool.  My sister and I would tape it on Saturday mornings/afternoons if we weren't going to be around to watch it.  It was fun and silly and we talked about being wrestlers when we grew up.  I never watched WWF because, well, at that point, it wasn't entertaining to me.  At that point, I preferred GLOW with it's little taped skits between matches, with it's cute little characters.  And hey, maybe I liked it better because it was women rolling around on the mat with each other.  Who knows.  I certainly don't remember my thought process from fifteen (or more) years ago when I watched it.

I stopped watching wrestling when GLOW went off the air.  I pretty much forgot about wrestling after that, really.  Sure, I knew who some of the big names were.  I knew who Hulk Hogan was.  And Andre the Giant and Rowdy Rodey Piper and The Macho Man.  I knew who Jimmy Hart was and who Lou Albano was.  And at some point on Saturday mornings, I watched (off and on) the wrestling cartoon that was on.

But for ten or fifteen years, I stopped watching wrestling.   As far as I knew, they didn't do it anymore.  They didn't show it on TV.   And I didn't care.

I started watching wrestling again a year ago.  I was in my hotel room while working on the road.  I wanted to write.  I wanted background noise... something mindless... something I wouldn't start watching.  I flipped the channels with the remote.  No, MTV would annoy the crap out of me.  Sit coms would bug me to death.  Wrestling!  Ha! I could turn on wrestling because I'd never watch that.  It'd be background noise.  It wouldn't bug me.

For weeks, on Mondays, I'd turn on WCW Nitro and just have it as background noise.  Now and then, I'd look up from my laptop, from whatever story I was working on, and see what was happening, then back to the story.  But as time went by, the amount of time I paused to see what was going on went longer and longer.  I got involved in the little rivalries and in the characters.  And soon, I was hooked.   I wasn't writing during wrestling, I was writing during the commercials. 

It's like a big, sweaty, testosterone-laden soap opera.  And I'm still hooked.  And I find myself thinking, Gee, I wanna be a wrestler!   Again.  Like when I was a kid.  Only now, much like being a writer, I have a better idea of what it might take to get into it.  I know I need to get into shape.  If I really want to be a wrestler, I need to go to one of the wrestling schools.  I may or may not try once all is said and done, but I'm working on the getting into shape thing.  If nothing else, wrestling's been good for that... motivating me to get my butt in gear and do what I know I need to do for my health.

I take a lot of flack for watching wrestling from my sweetie.   My god!  That is so fake!  They'd never fly across the ring like that because someone hit them like that.  It's impossible!  They're breaking laws of physics!  That couldn't really have hurt the other guy, he didn't really touch him!  And Boo and I have tried to explain that the point of wrestling really isn't to hurt people, but to entertain the crowd.  No, it isn't a real sport, but yes, they are athletes.  But my sweetie just rolls his eyes and wonders, again, why I watch it.  He's forbidden me to let any kids we might have in the future watch wrestling.

All I can do is shrug. I suppose I'll send any potential future kid to his or her room while I watch wrestling, then.  Same thing I'd do if I wanted to watch smut.

But, as long as it still entertains me, I'm probably going to keep watching wrestling.  And hiding my wrestling magazines the way I hide my smut books when someone comes to look over my shoulder.