Psykohurricane: My history with pro wrestling (part one)

This is a column I’ve really wanted to write since I started contributing to this site, but other news stories kept coming up, so I postponed it for a while. Now, I finally have time to do it.

In this column, I’ll give you more insight into how I started watching wrestling, my experiences with the product over the years, and why I think the way I do about modern wrestling. This will be a two-part column because I’ve been a fan for almost 35 years, and it would be hard to fit everything into one piece.

Let’s start from the beginning. I started watching wrestling in 1988, just before WrestleMania 4. My dad was watching WWE, or WWF at the time, on TV, and I wandered into the living room. I remember seeing Hogan doing an interview on the Brother Love Show, and I was instantly hooked.

Back then, at least in Montreal, we didn’t get a lot of wrestling on TV. It was either WWF Superstars, which played on four different stations at various times, or the AWA on TSN, so the choice was very limited. But I watched everything. I would watch the WWF show multiple times on Saturday and the AWA show whenever it aired on TSN. My dad would also record the Saturday Night Main Event specials, and we would watch them in the morning. To say I was hooked would be an understatement. What made wrestling so attractive to me was that all the wrestlers looked like human superheroes and supervillains. Even when I look back at that era, I see how tough the wrestlers looked—guys you wouldn’t want to mess with. That’s why I still love that era of wrestling more than modern wrestling.

Anyway, to get back on track, I watched everything as a kid. We didn’t have PPV capabilities in my area, so I had to wait until the Coliseum Video releases arrived at my local video store before I could see those shows. I would rent almost all the compilations, even the AWA ones.

Then came WrestleMania 6. While I wasn’t able to see it live, I did get to watch it on closed-circuit TV. The problem was that my dad didn’t know I had vertigo and bought tickets for my mom and me in the nosebleed section. For most of the show, I was terrified and couldn’t really enjoy it until the main event. For 30 minutes, I completely forgot about my fear of heights and cheered my head off for Warrior because I was more of a Warrior fan than a Hogan fan.

Then, the AWA folded, and TSN replaced the show with WCW, and I started getting hooked on that product. Yes, in 1991, WCW was pretty much a carbon copy of WWF but with a smaller budget, but I didn’t care. They had wrestlers I didn’t know or hadn’t seen before, and I got into it just as much as I did with WWF. And while we couldn’t get the PPVs, I still watched those shows every week.

In 1992, we finally got PPV capabilities, and by March of 1993, my dad decided to get the cable box so we could order PPVs. My first experience with PPV was technically WCW Japan Supershow 3. I say “technically” because while I ordered it, I only managed to see one match because of a snowstorm that knocked out our signal during the show. So my first real PPV experience was WrestleMania 9. While it wasn’t the greatest show, I still liked it, and it still holds a place in my heart.

Finally, I’ll end with this: WCW was off the air on TSN by early 1993, and while I couldn’t watch the product for a while, I followed it through the Apter mags and ordered the PPVs. Eventually, we got TBS with our cable provider, so I was able to follow WCW on TV again. We also got a network that aired WCW Worldwide, so I went from not being able to watch WCW to getting a lot of their programming. This was a blessing for me since I had become a bigger fan of WCW than WWF by that point. I still liked WWF, mostly because they were the only brand touring in Canada at the time, but WCW had become my brand.

That’s part one of my story. In the second part, I’ll talk about my experience during the Monday Night Wars, which was really different from how you guys in the States experienced it, and I’ll bring it up to today.