Coming Down The Aisle..

Ladies and gentle/wild-men of the “Bored Wrestling Fan” community, welcome to my very first article here in the land of the strange, crazy and indeed wacky. Please let me begin this by stating how awesome it is to be here and how sweet it really is to be back writing about professional wrestling again! Oh wrasslin’ journalism, how I have missed thee!

I’ve basically been given free reign to chatter away to my hearts content about all things wrestling, which is perhaps the most fantastic welcome email I could have received by “the boss” (I’m very sure he walks just like Vince McMahon into the office every morning), ThinkSoJoe. So, with that said – feel free to thank that man for inflic…erm…bringing me onto your computer screens each week. You can thank him in anyway you see fit, likely by screaming at him in a voice akin to Paul Heyman, “WHO’S THE RAMBLING SCOTSMAN WITH THE GRAMMATICAL SKILLS OF A 4 YEAR OLD!?”.

It’s plainly obvious why I am here and why I have managed to stumble, with the help of the lovely Drowgoddess, blind drunk into the land of BWF; yours truly simply loves professional wrestling. I have done since I was a very small boy and will continue to do so until I’m a very small old man. It’s always hard for me to convey or put across my true passion for what all those men and women do each and every night. I’ve penned many an article for many a website regarding my thanks for the countless hours of fantastic entertainment they have given me over the years. The sacrifice and dedication to performance is evidently appreciated by millions, with me amongst those millions. I love wrestling for the drama, the spectacle, the over-the-top hammy acting and the head-in-hands moments where you’re failing to believe what you’ve just witnessed. It has made me laugh, it has made me cry. One thing it has never really failed to do however, is fail to entertain me.

I’ve long pondered why I am so enraptured by this unique form of scripted theatre. In the many years I’ve followed the grap-game, there have been many people I know who have moved on from it’s clutches. “Grown out of it” or grown bored of it, the numbers aren’t exactly sparse. In my circle of friends, I’d go so far as to say that 90% of them now view professional wrestling as “something for kids” or “entertainment for morons”. They don’t mean anything harsh by these statements but they seem to be missing the point of why I’m still heavily into it – it’s more than entertainment to me. I enjoy thinking about what might go on backstage. Where the storylines come from and how they’re put together is a topic which has long kept me awake at night, basking in the afterglow of another Pay-Per-View conclusion. Sure, I know ABSOLUTELY NOTHING that goes on when the lights go down and the show’s over, but it doesn’t stop me from daydreaming about it.

The above may seem like a pretty wacked-out piece of nonsense to a number of you. I appreciate that there are those and such as those who merely wish to watch the show week-to-week, never thinking of what goes on behind the curtain. Afterall, what’s wrong with that? If you’re getting what entertainment you need out of the product then by all means treat it how you wish to treat it. One thing nobody should ever do however, is tell another fan how to go about enjoying the same product. This is partly what makes pro wrestling such an exclusive commodity however. How many people do you know who watch…say…CSI and when they switch the TV off, they wonder for hours how the show is put together, what the cast are like as real people and will eagerly debate with others on whether or not William Petersen as “Gil Grissom” is protecting his spot and keeping the minor characters in their place, hogging the limelight all for himself?

Now we all know that if this does happen, it’s a very rare occurrence. Most fans of most TV shows are happy to tune in, enjoy and then tune out, getting on with the rest of their day/evening. Not so in the wrestling world. It’s one of those entertainment mediums which has it’s content scrutinised relentlessly by a huge number of it’s fanbase each and every day of the year.

The internet itself has become so renowned that the fans who like wrestling AND use the web are now referred to as the “IWC” or “Internet Wrestling Community”. There’s a negative stigma attached to this too, wherein fans who surf the net to talk about wrestling are perceived as fat nerds who just want to pick holes in what happened on Monday Night RAW. Now I’m extremely sure there are those of that ilk among us but, y’know, some of us just want to chat to fellow fans about what’s going down, where the promotion could possibly take the stories from here and wax lyrical regarding Velvet Sky’s entrance sequence.

Personally, and I’m sure I’m not alone here, this reputation irritates me. It’s not that many wrestlers and creative team members of the various wrestling companies have bias against opinionated forum-users that gets to me. It’s a large portion of the vast number of wrestling-based message boards userbase that gets to me. The very same userbase which I myself am a part of. There does seem to be so much negativity around, to the point that sometimes you find yourself wondering why most of these people even watch the shows anymore. What pleasure can be gained out of watching any entertainment medium you find ridiculous, seething over it and then venting your self-made frustrations to others over the internet? Surely to heck some of these folks need to relax and if wrestling isn’t as good to them as it was back during the “Attitude” era, they should just stick to YouTube clips, videotape libraries and memories?

Having said all that, I beg of you – please do not get me wrong. There are many things which happen on wrestling shows which perplex me to absolute unholy hell. Do these things ruin my day? No. Do these happenings destroy my enjoyment of the show as a whole? No. I wouldn’t watch it for one minute longer if they did! I guess I do understand where some of the bitching comes from but, like I said, it impresses me how some of these people beat the product up and yet still find the time to tune in. It’s simply something I may never understand.

If you’re still awake, I must thank you for taking the time to peruse through my article. I really hope it’s apparent how passionate I am about the weird and wacky world of pro wrestling. As much as I know about it, I like humbling myself by saying that I know next to nothing about it, really. I know what I think, what I’ve read and heard, which is possibly not actually what happens in the day-to-day running of World Wrestling Entertainment or Total Non-Stop Action Wrestling.

I’d really like to hear from you regarding the content of this column. Any opinions, questions or corrections you can think of, I’m more than happy to read them all. I just love talking to others about wrestling! That’s why I’m here! I’d also just like to thank ThinkSoJoe, Drowgoddess and each and every one of you for welcoming me here with such open arms. It’s great to be a part of the family! You can send all correspondence to jamiekennedy@live.com

I look forward to it! TAKE IT HOME!