Once upon a time, back in the days of Hulkamania, I was a young wrestling fan. I used to watch the syndicated WWF shows and Georgia Championship wrestling on TBS back in the days before there was an internet. I always kind of knew it was fake back then, but it was still something fun to watch. In the early 90's, as I started to work a lot more, I sort of drifted away from it(and none too soon, as I missed a great deal of terrible wrestling in the post Hulkamania years), though I do have memories of watching at least one really impressive show with Jushin Thunder Liger, and also of the 1991 Royal Rumble, which I watched with Mat and Butch Bacon.
In the mid-90's, I took a job working on the midnight shift at an alarm company. Most of the guys working with me were a few years younger, and they turned me on to a lot of different things that I'd missed. One of those things was a tape of a wrestling match. I wasn't expecting much. My memories of wrestling were limited to the stuff I'd watched as a kid, and as a result, I wasn't quite prepared for Mick Foley, the Undertaker, and the glorious orgy of violence and destruction that was their Hell In A Cell match at King Of The Ring 1998. By the time I finished watching the tape, I was sucked right back in. Luckily, my co-workers had tapes to offer, and I was instantly a fan again. It was a good time to be a fan, too.
1998-2001 was the last really great period for the business, with three separate promotions still operating. WWE, WCW, and ECW combined to offer 10 hours of wrestling every week plus pay-per-views, and it was a time when Stone Cold Steve Austin, The Rock, Mick Foley, De-Generation X, the NWO, and Goldberg were all ruling the business. Unfortunately, this period also coincided with my finally getting onto the webbernet, and I became a huge internet smark. A smark, for those who don't know, is someone who watches the show as a fan(mark), but also scours the internet for all the news ahead of time for the shows so that he knows what's coming(smart). It's a combination of two wrestling terms; smart and mark. For quite a long time, I was a smark. While there were three companies, that was fine. But in 2001, Vince McMahon managed to drive WCW and ECW out of business, and we were left with one decent but horribly overexposed product.
From 2001 until late in 2005, I was at my highest period of smarkness. I watched every week, but with the jaundiced eye of someone who knew what was coming and who knew deep in his heart that he could book the shows better than the people getting fabulously overpaid to do it. In fact, if you go back through the archives, particularly in 2004 and 2005, you'll see a lot of bitching by me along just those exact lines.
However, at the end of 2005, personal matters interfered in my life, and I sort of drifted away from being a smark. I still used to read the news sometimes, but I'd sort of stopped watching the product for the most part, save for the monthly PPVs that had become about the only true social event in my life. Wrestling became more important to me as a chance to see some of my friends, hang out, sort of watch the show, and just have a good time. I never even really thought about the fact that I'd given up being a smart fan until three events in the past couple of weeks made me realize it.
The first two events were the return of Chris Jericho to WWE after a nearly two-year absence and the signing of Booker T by TNA. These were nice surprises to me, and had I been smarking it up, I would have been well aware in advance that these things were happening, rather than finding out about them just before they happened.
The third thing occurred this past Sunday night on the TNA Turning Point PPV. Just as the main event was about to begin, everything got a little strange. A bit of background; the main event was scheduled to be Kurt Angle, A.J. Styles, and Tomko against Samoa Joe and the newly reunited team of Kevin Nash and Scott Hall. Hall has a history of alcohol issues and no-showing shows, and on Sunday, he was a no-show also. While I was watching, I genuinely wondered if Hall was legitimately ill or if we were getting worked, as opposed to knowing it. Strangely, it made it better for me, particularly after Samoa Joe cut a nasty
promo(ignore the british guy, enjoy the vitriol by Joe) on Hall and Nash, and by extension, the TNA management. And not being a smark anymore, I wasn't aware until I actually made an effort to look for news on it that Joe was actually shooting(not working scripted) on Nash and Hall. Joe's promo was the highlight of a pretty entertaining show.
After the show, I went and looked at some of the news sites that I used to go to and was amazed that I'm apparently stupid for enjoying the product as much as I have been lately. If the dirt sites are to be believed, both WWE and TNA are putting out terrible product right now. I admit, WWE hasn't been amazing lately, but I guess I must just be a dumb mark.
I'm enjoying the product a lot more than I have in years.
Labels: wrestling
