My dad took me and one of my best friends (and his Dad, too) to Wrestlemania 2 back when I was in elementary school. One of the coolest live events I’ve ever been to - and one of my fondest memories of hanging out with my Dad and the of sacrifices he made to do stuff with me.
Eventually, I outgrew the enjoyment of professional wrestling, although I will stop channel-surfing for a couple minutes if I glimpse a match in my cable TV travels, just to check it out. Call it nostalgia.
I think pro wrestling lost its innocence with the revelation that it was creating a culture in which drug abuse was widespread. If you look at the number of pro wrestlers who have died in recent years, you find a lot of heart attacks and such, clearly brought about by abuse of either steroids or prescription painkillers or worse.
You might shrug and say something to the effect of “Well, shit, how is that different from baseball?” It’s not, really, in my mind. I think baseball lost its innocence in pretty much the same way. The difference, to me, is that baseball is an unfaked competitive sport. Still, we see athletes in both wrestling and baseball juicing for pretty much the same reasons. With wrestling, though, it seems to me to be even more pointless to use performance enhancers for something that’s scripted.
To me, it’s symptomatic of the sickness within pro wrestling - it has to constantly top itself. Kids probably would think the stuff that I watched when I was a kid was boring - I doubt Ivan Putski delivering a Polish Hammer or Hulk Hogan delivering his finishing leg drop would elicit anything but a yawn. Now we’ve got people yawning at matches where people dive from 10’ ladders or fall from the top of steel cages through the floor of the ring. How do you continually top that?
You don’t. Eventually, you come to the conclusion that the guys can’t get bigger without performance enhancers, the matches aren’t going to get more violent without bringing in firearms and the pyrotechnics can’t get more intense without incinerating the audience. And you reinvent your business in a different way. Or you keep doing what you’re doing and you end up with guys like Davey Boy Smith, Eddie Guerrero and Rick Rude dying in their 30s and 40s from drug-related health problems.
Putting aside the notion of wrestling being fake for a bit, is it not evident that wrestling of the WWE variety has jumped the shark?