Smoke Break Psychology: What I Put Aside at Crown Jewel

Let me start by explaining my state of mind Saturday.

No kid for the weekend. No errands to run. No reason to leave the house. Just me, my wife, and 24 hours with nowhere we had to be.

So I ate 150 milligrams of edibles and smoked about 4 grams of marijuana, give or take.

This is how I watched Crown Jewel.

I’m not here to weigh in on whether following through with this show in Saudi Arabia was the right or wrong decision. I’m also not here to review the show.

Why?

You know what you did and didn’t like. You don’t need me to tell you whether you enjoyed yourself. We can watch the same match, see the same finish, hear the same promo, and walk away feeling completely different about it.

That’s part of being a wrestling fan. Sometimes the discussion afterward lasts longer than the thing we watched.

But that’s not the discussion I want to have here.

What I want to do is tell you what I saw from a different perspective.

Sometimes we need to find beauty in an ugly world.

And beauty is what I saw.

Not in a match or a move. Not with a story told in the ring, but with a story told by the crowd.

Look around. Politics divide us. Religion divides us. War gives us another reason to draw a line and decide who belongs on which side of it.

Or at least that’s how we talk about one another.

East versus West. Christian versus Muslim. Us versus them.

Entire populations get reduced to a flag, a government, a religion, or the worst thing somebody associated with them has ever done. Then we act like we know something about people we’ve never met.

I’m not above it. I live in the same world, hear the same arguments, and get caught up in my own bullshit like anybody else.

That was some of the baggage I brought to watching a wrestling show in Saudi Arabia. Whether I meant to or not.

Then the entrance music hit.

And the crowd sang.

They chanted. They cheered. They roared.

The longer I watched, the more my attention shifted away from what was happening between the ropes and toward the people surrounding them.

Look at this crowd.

Not as a backdrop. Not as evidence for whatever argument you already wanted to make about the show.

Look at the people enjoying themselves.

I saw fans who knew the music. Fans waiting for their favorites. Fans getting caught up in the same ridiculous thing that has kept me coming back for years.

And sitting on my couch, considerably higher than necessary, I recognized that joy.

I knew what it felt like to hear the opening notes of an entrance theme and react before I’d even thought about it. To bite on a near fall even though I should probably know better by now. To get pulled into a moment and forget, briefly, that I’m watching people pretend to fight over a belt.

I knew that feeling.

For all the distance between my couch and those seats, that part felt familiar.

Now, I don’t know what every person in that building believes. I don’t know their politics. I don’t know their relationship with religion. I don’t know what kind of day they had before they got there or what was waiting for them when they went home.

Maybe some needed a break from something heavy. Maybe some just wanted to see their favorite wrestler and buy a shirt.

They don’t all need the same story for the moment to matter.

In my first instinct, I wanted to say they put everything aside. All the conflict. All the division. All the reasons the world hands us to resent one another.

But I don’t actually know that.

I know what I put aside.

For a little while, I stopped viewing the crowd through the arguments surrounding the event. I stopped thinking about the people in those seats primarily in relation to a country, a government, or a religion.

I saw other wrestling fans.

That sounds small when I write it down.

It didn’t feel small watching it.

Because we spend so much time being told how different we are that recognizing something familiar in somebody else can catch you off guard.

Their excitement made sense to me. Their reactions made sense to me. I didn’t need somebody to explain why they cared. I was sitting there caring about the same thing.

I saw connection.

A common interest and a shared passion bringing different people into the same moment.

Was that unification? That’s what it felt like to me. Not the kind that fixes anything on its own. Not some declaration that everybody suddenly understands everybody else.

Just people enjoying something together, without every difference between them needing to be the most important thing in the room.

And no, a hot crowd doesn’t answer the ethical questions about the event.

Appreciating the people in the seats isn’t the same as endorsing everyone responsible for putting them there. You can question the business, the location, and the decisions behind a show without making the audience disappear into that argument.

Those people still get to be people.

They get to have a favorite wrestler. They get to sing too loud. They get to be excited about something I might think is stupid, just like I get to be excited about something they might think is stupid.

They get to enjoy a night of wrestling without having to represent an entire part of the world for the rest of us.

Maybe that’s the part that stuck with me most.

The whole backdrop invites the kind of over-the-top action-movie thinking we’ve all seen before. Good guys. Bad guys. A whole country treated like a character with one motive.

Then you watch a crowd lose its mind over an entrance, and that version feels pretty damn inadequate.

There’s more life in the room than that.

Wrestling is a flawed art. Sometimes it’s beautiful. Sometimes it’s embarrassing. Sometimes it asks you to ignore so much nonsense that you wonder why you’re still watching.

Then a match, a moment, or a crowd reminds you.

I’m flawed, too. My perspective comes with blind spots, contradictions, and, in this particular case, a substantial amount of marijuana.

You don’t have to see what I saw. I’m not handing you a new opinion you’re obligated to agree with.

I just wanted to give this part of the show some room.

Because when I think back on Crown Jewel, I’ll remember watching people halfway around the world sing along to music I knew, cheer for wrestlers I knew, and find joy in this flawed art we happen to share.

For a little while, the distance felt smaller.

In an ugly world, I thought that was beautiful.

Be excellent to each other.

New columns drop after the smoke clears.

Follow me on X: @thatdonniesb

Current listening to:
God Body (Wu Tang)
Mother (IDLES)
Bad Indian (Dead Pioneers)
Never Alone (The Interrupters)
She’s My Ride Home (Blue October)
To Love a Boy (Maya Hawke)
Bankrobber (The Clash)
In the Minds of Evil (Deicide)
Limb of Leviticus (Archspire)
The Serpent of Midguard (Mental Cruelty)
A Child and His Lawnmower (Dead Kennedys)
Flying Whale (Gojira)