There are two things about which I can write endlessly with minimal effort: 1.) Professional wrestling and 2.) Things I hate. So I’ve decided to kill two birds with one stone in this first article with my first target: I hate pro wrestling fans.
Wait. Let me back up a bit. I love pro wrestling. I love it without irony or cynicism or shame. And I have loved it my entire life, since my older brother was already watching it by the time I was born, making it easy for me to hop right on board and never look back. But, aside from a brief period during which it was cool to watch it, which us wrestling fans refer to as “The Attitude Era,” when Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Rock were on top of the world, it’s been very difficult to come by other wrestling fans. And on the rare occasion that it does happen, it’s usually a nightmare scenario.
There are three types of pro wrestling fans that you are likely to find at an event. The first is the little kid. They have only started to run rampant in recent years – they’ve been a trend about as long as most of them have been alive, mostly because Vince McMahon realized that wrestling wasn’t cool anymore and he needed to create new fans, so he is currently marketing toward little kids. Hence John Cena and Rey Mysterio. The little kids are annoying, but all little kids are annoying and, hey, I used to root for Hulk Hogan and The Ultimate Warrior when I was young, so I have little room to talk (though I also liked Randy Savage, so that’s gotta count for something). They’re not my targets right now by a long shot.
The second type is the moron. Oh, there are plenty of these. Bad guy wrestlers, known as “heels,” make a lot of general statements about the people in the audience being the lowest forms of human life, or something to that effect, and the reason it works and is somewhat valid is because a typical pro wrestling audience is filled with Walmart’s finest regular shoppers. These are the kind of people you don’t even want to be near for fear that others will lump you in with them. They are obese, smelly, stupid (not just casually dumb, but actually offensively idiotic), obscene creatures who often fall under the “redneck” description.
When heel wrestlers act like cowards or say something to provoke the crowd, these people get legitimately angry and hurl curse words at them. In addition, they will actually argue that someone is a bad wrestler, not because of their skill in the ring or on the microphone, but because they got beaten by an opponent… in a scripted match. And therein lies the problem – these fans somehow missed the memo of Vince McMahon saying (basically) in the early 90s, “Hey, we know we’re not fooling anyone into thinking this stuff’s real. But it’s fun, scripted entertainment, just like you would go to see in a theater. You just have to go with the charade and suspend your disbelief.” In other words, these people actually may think it’s all 100% real. However, though they are the ones who are most responsible for the image that pro wrestling has to non-fans, even these people are not the ones who have currently raised my ire.
My wrath falls on the third type of fan, which is the geek, and my problems with them extend beyond pro wrestling. They make up the Internet wrestling community, which, in case you didn’t know, is very large. And this allows many of them to be closet fans. Make no mistake – most of these fans are fairly smart people and they are far more likely to root for people with real talent than the other types of fans, but it doesn’t matter if they won’t even admit to liking the product. I had a roommate who refused to admit to liking wrestling until he saw me watching Raw in the living room a few times and confessed to it like it was some big secret. No wonder everyone thinks wrestling fans are morons – the smart ones are all cowards.
It doesn’t take too much thought to figure out why wrestling draws weak personalities. Wrestling puts very over-the-top, clearly defined battles of good versus evil under a spotlight. Through these battles, there is a system of logic and justice in which, sooner or later, good always wins – through physicality, no less. For someone who is a target of bullies and is often made to feel powerless, wrestling is the ultimate fantasy (especially since women don’t often factor into it, which is great for geeks, haha).
But while I understand geeky mentality, I don’t like spineless losers. Worse yet, because wrestling creates an illusion that fools people to some degree, these people get to feel smart because they know some of the inner workings, thanks to what gets published on the internet about backstage happenings. Geeky wrestling fans have an extremely annoying need to show how much they know at all times and to try and predict every single thing that’s going to happen just to make themselves feel important. I recently watched an event out in public, and one dweeb just HAD to say, “What was that?” after even the slightest sloppy move or botch, as if everyone else needed it pointed out to him or her. Wrestlers are human. We get that they’re not perfect. Shut up.
I suppose I would be better at ignoring geeky wrestling fans if it weren’t for the fact that they are the types of people who allow themselves to be defined by the fact that they are geeks. That’s the larger problem at work here – being one-note because society suggests that you have to do so. I know quite a few people, some of whom are even friends of mine, who are compelled to be obsessed with anything that has even the slightest geeky connotation to it.
Let me clarify: I am considered a geek because I happen to like comic books a lot and I also play video games, and those are two things that society has determined to be “geeky.” But that’s where it stops for me. Other things that fall under that category do nothing for me. Such is not the case for most geeks. Most geeks indulge in ALL things geeky. Most geeks enjoy anime, comics, video games, collectible card games, Dungeons & Dragons, anything with zombies, bad science fiction, parkour, etc. etc. There is a world of difference between this type of geek and me, and I have almost as hard a time getting along with them as I would a big, dumb jock.
I hate people who are one-note, and act under an archetype that society has created for them. Geeks aren’t the only ones who do this. I could (and probably will, at some point) rant for a while on “modern male” stereotypes who just buy into every beer or shaving razor commercial they see as if it were a documentary, or hipsters, or whoever else, because there are plenty of these people. Being an original individual is WAY harder and, oddly enough, less likely to get a woman to have sex with you (but that’s a whole different story).
Thus the people who are supposed to be my companions in my pro wrestling fandom – the “in-the-know” fans – are mostly too annoying with which to deal, and too big of cowards to actually aid in my life-long defense of the pro wrestling industry. I can’t tell you how much I hate hearing people immediately saying “It’s fake,” as if that’s news to me.
But these same people don’t bat an eye at suspending disbelief toward other scripted forms of entertainment. They don’t scoff at Shakespeare or even Star Wars, which is all far more scripted than a typical wrestling show, much of which is at least improvised. All the same, these people ignorantly think that a wrestling ring feels like a trampoline, when, in fact, it’s mostly made of wooden boards. So yeah, wrestlers are really athletic, have grueling travel schedules, get injured constantly, and mostly die before the age of 50 thanks to the drug addictions they develop just trying to get through their job – all with no medical or insurance benefits, mind you. Every other country seems to realize this better than America: pro wrestling is pretty well respected in Canada, Mexico, Japan, and even England, to a certain degree. They respect it because smart fans are able to see the craft that goes into a well-told wrestling storyline (don’t get me wrong, wrestling can be idiotic, too, but only because the writers have to appeal to their fan base), but there are still countless people who think they’re smarter than us wrestling fans because, apparently, we think it’s all real.
And what spineless little geek is going to tell them they’re wrong?
Chris "Mr. Enigma" Arney
MisterEnigmaOO@gmail.com
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