The Up & Under 11.16.07: Wrestling With Shame

Oh, except for that when she asked me a few weeks ago what my column was about that I responded with an absurdly vague response resembling the following: “It’s a pop culture column and I can pretty much write about whatever I want.” When she pushed harder for that week’s topic, the best I could do was “it’s about Michael Vick and what the NFL’s responsibility is in terms of policing its players’ off-field activities”. This is not a joke. That’s really what I came up with.

Now dozens of things started to run through my head: do I now have to fabricate a thousand word column on Michael Vick? Is there a way for me to create a fake backlog of columns about random stuff? How long can I keep putting off saying the name of the website I write for clearly?

Classy, right?

Yeah, not so much.

Since that day I have been struggling with what the real question should have been: why was I so embarrassed to tell a woman I was seeing that I was a wrestling fan? Furthermore, shouldn’t I have been more proud to say that not only was I a fan, but that I was a part of the writing staff for the biggest independent wrestling site on the internet? I wasn’t quite at the crossroads yet, but I knew that the longer I saw her and the more serious it got, the sooner she would have to find out my “dirty little secret”.

So what’s the best way to tell a beautiful woman, whose only real issue with you is that you’re three years younger than her, that you’re a wrestling fan without reinforcing her already strong belief that you’re “young”? Yeah, I came up with nothing, too.

The truth is that there is no good way. Professional wrestling will always carry the stigma of juvenility, no matter how advanced the medium becomes. I watch primarily Ring of Honor, whose product is almost night-and-day when compared to the current offerings of World Wrestling Entertainment and Total Nonstop Action. In style, in substance, in appearance, ROH barely resembles what is currently being shown by the nationally televised companies. The two are similar in the same way that Seinfeld and The Sopranos are similar: they’re both television shows, and that’s pretty much where the comparison ends. But that difference between what I watch and what she imagines I watch only matters if you’re already versed in the product, just as someone who doesn’t watch TV wouldn’t make the distinction between any two shows.

Sometimes when Amy and I are out for dinner or a drink, she’ll talk about her day at work. She’ll talk about ‘buffers’ and ‘triple boxes’ and ‘chyrons’ and I’ll smile politely and nod, but I only have so deep an understanding of what’s really being talked about. I don’t understand the terminology, and she can’t imagine not understanding it. Similarly, I can’t envision not knowing what a ‘Northern Lights Suplex’ is, while to her it would simply be gibberish. Maybe there is hope for me in that comparison; that we all have parts of our lives with their own languages. Perhaps Amy will understand that I feel about wrestling the way she feels about the news.

This wasn’t exactly an easy thing to hide, by the way. Explaining my weekend trip to Detroit and Chicago for Ring of Honor in mid-September was a stretch, but reasonable enough (“I’m visiting one friend and then we’re driving to Chicago to see another friend…”). The bookcase full of DVDs in the corner of my apartment was a bit harder (“Eh, don’t worry about it, the good movies are over here…”). Even eventually admitting I was a fan wasn’t that big of a deal (“Yeah, I’m a fan, but hey, I won’t make you watch any if you don’t judge me for liking it…”), even if I had to mortgage a fair amount of my self respect in the process.

What was my problem? I’ve been a wrestling fan for twenty years. I’ve been to more wrestling shows than most people have been to concerts. I’ve seen some of the best matches and most important moments in wrestling history unfold before me. Hell, I was there when Steve Austin cut the very first “Austin 3:16” promo. Why couldn’t I just proclaim at the top of my lungs (or at least at a reasonable volume) that I was a wrestling fan and a wrestling writer and that would be that? What on earth was the problem?

The problem was that even after all of this time, I still have only so good an explanation to non-fans for why I love wrestling so much that it would make me sit down and write a weekly column, let alone edit two others.

Years ago, on the old Wrestleline site, I read an article by Steve Harper that remains to this day one of my favorite pieces of wrestling commentary. In a fifteen hundred word essay entitled “A Thumb to the Mind’s Eye”, Harper discusses the notion of professional wrestling as an art form. He talks about how wrestling connects with its audience at such a deep level because it’s a form of “high art”, intended to discuss the human condition rather than teach right and wrong. His contention that wrestling is simply another way to tell archetypal stories in the same way that dozens of other performance art forms have over the centuries is completed with a simple, but eloquent summation: “Hamlet only looks like it’s about Denmark. It’s really about you.”

I don’t want to crib Harper’s work any more than is necessary, but suffice to say that I have ever since used his art form explanation to convince everyone from my friends to my parents to my ex-girlfriend why it is that I enjoy watching wrestling as much as I do. Sure, some of them have continued to think wrestling is stupid or juvenile or mindlessly violent, but just as many have been willing to listen, with a select few even becoming fans themselves.

Part of my usual diatribe on the matter involves the fact that breaking any art form down to its most basic elements can make it appear less advanced. If you look at opera as fat people in Viking costumes singing to each other, then it looks stupid. If you view ballet as anorexic women dancing around silently on their tip-toes, then it too will appear silly. When your view of professional wrestling is that of grown men groping each other in tights and hitting each other in the head with chairs, then I would admit, that would seem stupid to me too.

The difference is that I can see it beyond that simplicity to see the layers and nuance that are a part of a good professional wrestling match or angle. I’ll freely admit that I don’t see it in either opera or ballet, but I admire those who can see beyond the surface in those realms and accept the dramatic conventions enough to glimpse the bigger picture. Understanding wrestling, at the core, is about being able to accept the necessary conventions, like why grabbing the bottom rope would have anything to do with breaking up a submission or why a three count (as opposed to a five count) is necessary for a pinfall. The answer is “because that’s the way it is”, and some people just can’t (or won’t) accept that answer.

Clearly I’m off track. Where was I?

Oh, yeah, trying to figure out how to tell a sexy blonde that I write about wrestling.

I’ve still got nothing.

Except that I have finally figured out why I keep getting off topic. This column only looks like it’s about Amy. It’s really about me.

Whether or not Amy would understand my love of wrestling is almost irrelevant when the real issue is that even after twenty years watching the product and almost a year writing about it every week, there is still a part of me that struggles with what that means. Do I still watch wrestling because I like it, or because I’m used to liking it? Do I write about wrestling every week because I like wrestling or because I like writing? Given the choice, would I rather go to a wrestling show or have dinner with Amy?

Those questions are a part of what makes wrestling such an incredible art form. I couldn’t possibly find myself asking such existential and introspective questions if wrestling were just a silly television show. This very discussion belies the truth in Harper’s art form theory; wrestling, like the works of William Shakespeare or Mark Twain or Arthur Miller, is timeless in that it helps us look into ourselves, and not just because of what is happening on the page or the stage or in the ring.

Though I can’t answer two of those questions just yet, I can tell you that I’m pretty sure I’d take Amy out to dinner over going to a wrestling show.