Backyard Wrestling: A Positive Thing
By John Pitroff
Backyard wrestling is a topic that hasn’t been covered in a long time. I haven’t seen a kid jumping off a trampoline onto a flaming table in years, and it’s about time. Seriously, I miss seeing a teenager give his best friend a powerbomb onto the ground in the middle of a field. Even though you don’t hear that much about backyard wrestling anymore it is still relevant. A lot has been said about it, but it has mostly been negative up to this point.
Seriously, I have never read anything positive written on backyard wrestling. I guess that is why I am here. Backyard wrestling is cool. Backyard wrestling is fun. Backyard wrestling is not all negative. I’m not saying backyard is necessarily a totally good thing, but attempt to see the positive in it. I’d take a backyard wrestling match over an A-Train match any day of the week.
Backyard wresting used to be a much bigger deal. It has toned down since WWE put up that “Don’t Try This At Home” nonsense at the beginning of all their DVDs. Just kidding, that didn’t work at all. Does WWE really think that backyard wrestling fans buy WWE DVDs? No, of course not, they download them for free online. When will WWE ever learn? However, the fact remains that backyard wrestling is not as popular as it used to be and there are reasons for that.
The reason you don’t see as many specials on backyard wrestling like you did in 1999 and 2000 is because wrestling was bigger then and people love to nitpick and create trouble in order to be heard. You don’t hear it so much anymore because wrestling isn’t as popular. People are generally haters and never want to see anything do good, especially something as lowbrow as pro wrestling. So, when wrestling was at its biggest, they picked out the most hardcore group of backyard wrestlers and showed them doing the worst things to each other. Why? Because it was a topic that would create controversy and make them money. That is what the news media does.
These shows attempted to prove how WWF didn’t care about kids because they “let” backyard wrestling happen. The fact is that the news shows were the ones using kids to make money. Talk about not caring about the kids of the world! Screw 20/20, Dateline, and 60 Minutes. Once these shows realized that wrestling wasn’t as popular, they started to not cover it anymore. Coincidence? I think not.
I wish there was a less biased approach to the coverage I have seen on backyard wrestling. Anyone talking or writing about backyard wrestling feels as though they have some stake in it. I can see backyard wrestling as positive, because my thoughts on it won’t get me fired from WWE or TNA since I don’t work for them (sign me!). All of these pros have to speak badly about it because that is what is expected of them. Not me. I have always enjoyed backyard wrestling, in all aspects. Think about this; how much commentary on backyard wrestling comes from those who know nothing about it?
You can’t blame backyard wrestling on WWE or TNA. Perhaps CZW, but no kid watches that garbage. There is no “blame” to be placed. If you stop seeing it as all negative, someone being “responsible” is irrelevant. Can you blame the NFL for football leagues, can you blame MLB for kids wanting to hit a ball with a stick? It is the choice of the kids and the parents. This isn’t about WWE. Daddy WWE doesn’t exist. It comes down to the fact that parents need to get off of it and learn how to raise their children.
I realize a lot of these people are just terrible parents who don’t know anything about anything and they just let their kids do whatever they want. But, that isn’t the fault of WWE, Vince McMahon, or pro wrestling at all. My parents let me backyard wrestle, while at the same time being great parents. They were smart enough to realize that I was smart enough to realize I am not an idiot.
I never hid it from them nor did I ever try to lie about what I was doing. Actually, my dad watched my first match. He liked seeing his son perform, even if it was in his own backyard and even if my friend did jump through his card table. My mom helped me build a ring in the backyard. She came up with the idea of using garden hoses as ring ropes. I never had a match in there, but I was the one kid in school with a wrestling ring in his backyard! I loved that thing! I think back to it and it is a great memory. It is possible to be the parent of a backyard wrestler while at the same time being responsible and smart about it.
Backyard wrestling is something very personal to me. It is something that is in my heart. It was part of my childhood, my teenagehood (this should be a word), and if the owner of that backyard wrestling company I talked to on Craigslist is still down, it will be part of my adulthood. Coming from personal experience, I have nothing bad to say about it. Perhaps I could say that my matches could have had better storytelling, but I was young. It was still better than anything A-Train ever did. In addition, it is hard to have a well thought out match when two fruit crates are involved.
When I was a teenager, I ordered two videos of backyard wrestling. My first reason was because they were more entertaining than WCW was at the time, and my second was that I loved seeing kids that were my age at the time jumping off of roofs, hitting each other with boards, throwing each other into ladders, and even blading!
What is better than seeing kids with a dream attempting to make it happen?! I love that sort of desire, that sort of passion. I love to see people who really want it, and any teenager willing to cut himself with a razor blade on the forehead and bleed profusely so that his family and friends can find some form of entertainment is the man in my book!
Why do people want to ruin the dreams of the kids? It’s no wonder there haven’t been any really captivating wrestlers to come along in a while. Their love was stifled when they were children to protect adults. Slashing a child’s dreams because a few parents and WWF didn’t want to get blamed…so sad. I guess pro wrestling doesn’t want kids to have that joy, because it gives them a bad name and they might get some of the blame.
The argument WWE throws out about being a professional and being trained is all nonsense, because wrestling results in injury either way. You can take as many falls as you want “the right way” but let me tell you, there is nothing natural about falling flat onto your back to entertain some people at an old Chinese restaurant. You can train for months and months and still get injured every few weeks. You can be wrestling for years and still get injured all the time. Just ask Batista. Or Edge. Or Kurt Angle. Or Ken Kenn…Anderson. Or Randy Orton. Or John Cena. Or Triple H.
In addition, when I wrestled professionally, I personally felt as though I wasn’t ready to have my first match, but others felt I was. I saw people with minimal training get in the ring and perform. So, what is left of the “these guys are pros and have had training” argument? About the same amount of worth the title belt I made for my backyard company had to the world.
Backyard wrestling has provided me with hours of entertainment in life. Now, it is not as good as the pros, but neither are the pickup basketball games that I play during the summer. Of course it is not as good. If these kids were any good, WWE would sign them and then misuse them for a few months until TNA picked them up to misuse them. But, we all have to start somewhere.
A large percentage of wrestlers today grew up wrestling in some way or another. Most wrestlers were at some point a fan. I’m not saying all, but at some point these wrestlers saw it on TV and were enthralled and thus wanted to get into it themselves. Jeff Hardy was a big backyard wrestler. Fellow wrestlers that I trained with also told me that they had been backyard wrestlers before they ever stepped foot in an actual ring.
Mick Foley, one of my top three favorite wrestlers of all time, always talked out against the more hardcore forms of backyard wrestling. But, it is how he got discovered. Sure, he put in years of training and wrestling outdoors in front of handfuls of people to make it, but doesn’t he have to thank backyard wrestling for giving him that initial start?
Both in backyard and pro wrestling, I knew what I was getting into when I wrestled. I knew I could get injured. But, I also can get hit by a car anytime I walk outside. You have to take a risk in life to have fun. Perhaps I could have sat inside my house watching wrestling tapes over and over instead of wrestling. Well, I did that, too. Wrestling was my life at that point. And, I wanted to do it. I was in middle school and high school and they didn’t have a place to train anywhere near my house. I think they should provide pro wrestling in high school. Seriously, I would have been the man in high school if they had that.
How much worse is this than pee wee football, really? I know they are wearing pads because they aren’t as tough as wrestlers, but how bad is that parents willingly and on purpose put their kids into a sport where the main idea is to hit another kid as hard as they can? The bigger the hit, the bigger the father’s ego gets as he watches it. At least wrestlers “fake” it. Any kid that sees his idols on TV wants to do what they do. Children being put in beauty pageants is far worse than any backyard match I have ever seen.
One of my main questions is does it come down to WWE not really wanting to see kids wrestle, or does it come down to the fact that it gives wrestling a bad name and can get the higher ups sued? WWE needs to man up and come out and say that backyard wrestling is not their fault. They also need to say it’s not that big of a deal.
I really doubt Vince McMahon actually cares about the lives of these idiots jumping off of roofs. If he did care, he would have noticed me and I would have been signed by now. I guess the point is that these wrestlers don’t want to see kids get hurt. But, who are they to say anything, really? They are the ones wrestling every week, while telling the dreamers not to wrestle. I understand that they are “trained” but again…who ever is really trained enough.
Parents need to be smarter, society needs to let kids be kids, and people need to realize that backyard wrestling is a lot like other youth sports. Except the kids get to book the shows themselves. It gives them entrepreneur skills! Lighten up, enjoy the show, and have some fun in life. We are all young and dumb, some of us just have the scars to prove it! And, WWE needs to take a stance and let the world know that they didn’t create backyard wrestling. They created a love for wrestling, and that is nothing that deserves fault.