A Column by an Old & Weird Wrestling Fan
By John Pitroff
Whether or not you can tell by the columns I write about pro wrestling, in only a few months I will be 25 years old. I realize most of the time I sound like a fifteen your old mark, but that is beside the point. Complaining about champions, groaning about talent, and acting as if I could write better storylines than the WWE writers is something I need to get over. I’ve been doing that since I was 15. My life character has grown less than the AJ Styles character has grown since the beginning of TNA. It will be soon time for my heel turn
But, with age comes thought, and I have started thinking about a lot of things lately. What is going on with my life, what have I done of consequence, what more could I have done, where am I going, what will the rest of my life consist of? Why do my wrestling columns always seem to be more about life than wrestling? Why do the beginnings of my columns always ask so many questions, and why do I even ask about why I ask so many questions? I guess it isn’t a bad thing I ask questions. WWF forgot to ask questions when they gave the Phantasio character the green light to appear on national television. What am I saying? That character was awesome, and I’m sort of angry I never got to see more of him. He seemed to just disappear. Disregard that lame joke and please continue reading.
Is wrestling going to be part of all that is to come? One reaches an age where they first feel like an adult, and I have reached it this last year of my life. One question that just came to my mind about this whole adult process is one in which I am not so sure I want to directly confront. Like Vince McMahon to Steve Austin circa 1998. Here it is: Am I now that old weird adult wrestling fan? I must be. What other adult spends hours every week writing two columns about wrestling just for the fun of it? Old? Yes. Weird. For sure. Wrestling fan? Of course. As Ron Simmons would say before his recent retirement: “Damn.”
I never wanted to be that adult wrestling fan alone at shows going insane because it is all I have left. Hell, I already have been doing that my entire life. But, at least before I had the excuse of, “I was young and stupid, we have all been there.” Bringing signs to independent wrestling and house shows is something I need to stop, regardless of age. At what point does growing up become relevant here? At what point does it just become creepy to be a wrestling fan? At what point do I realize that when I beg Hulk Hogan to stop stepping foot in the ring to wrestle, that perhaps I should stop marking out when does. Who needs to grow up Hulk Hogan, or me? Hogan growing up? How much older can that man get?
Don’t get me wrong, wrestling fans of all sizes, shapes, colors are cool to me. As I mentioned in a previous column, wrestling fans are just people, and just as diverse a group. Somehow I likened fans of wrestling to Snickers (don’t ask me how, I have no clue). Bite size, King size, regular size, fun size. The fact is that I have just come around to the idea of older, adult wrestling fans. Just like I have only recently enjoyed the King size Snickers. Age teaches you things…
Sometimes one forgets to learn from the words in his own columns, because I was still myself living with the stigma that older wrestling fans need to do something better with their lives. I have to admit, I’m still having trouble understanding these adult Star Trek dorks, although I am sure they feel the same way about me. They like shows and movies about humans flying around in spaceships, I like watching shows where 80 year old women give birth to hands. The is a schism here, and we have to attempt to understand one another. Let’s understand that we will most likely never understand each other. Understand? Me either. Star Trek and wrestling fans do have something in common, and no, it is not the fact that they don’t have sex that often. William Shatner recently was a guest host on Raw…we might be more alike than at first glance.
Only recently have I opened my mind to the fact that these adult wrestling fans are just as cool as the rest of the wrestling fans of the world. I used to think they were totally out of their minds, needed to grow up, and needed to find some sort of hobby to fill up their day. Now that I think about it, all of this is still true, but it is these things that make them as cool as they are.
Aren’t the same things true of any wrestling fan, regardless of their age? Those are things you hear as a wrestling fan, no matter your age: “You are crazy, grow up, get a life and find a hobby!” Perhaps the fact that are out of their minds, refuse to grow up, and need a hobby to fill up their day is the fact that makes them cool in the first place. As far as that hobby goes…why not just start to collect wrestling action figures? Is it sad at the age of 25 I still play with those things, and I just had a dream about them last night? No, seriously, I did. No need to interpret that dream, I already know what it means: YOU NEED TO GET OUT MORE JOHN! When you are a wrestling fan and someone tells you to get a hobby, I’m pretty sure they didn’t want you to find a hobby that involved pro wrestling. Then again, anything that can get an adult to play around with toy action figures has some sort of magical power that only Phantasio could recognize.
It is relevant here to compare adult wrestling fans to adult fans of sports. Couldn‘t a lot of these “negative“ aspects of being an adult wrestling fan pertain just as much to being an adult fan of the NFL, if not even more so? Perhaps the NFL fans are worse. Don’t they need to stop acting insane, grow up, and find a hobby just as bad as even the most die hard fifty year old wrestling fanatic? Seriously, being already terribly overweight, getting drunk on beer, eating wings, going to games in freezing temperatures with your shirts off exposing your fat bellies with letters painted on them is going a bit far as a fan. Wait a minute, what am I saying? That is awesome! Where is that type of dedication, wrestling fans? I always like to think of wrestling fans as the most dedicated, most insane, most fun group of fans that exist, but c’mon, boys, man up, we aren’t going to games dressed up as dogs barking uncontrollably! What happened to your Spirit (squad) wrestling fans?!
The thing I like about older fans is that they still find awe in something that they loved as a kid. They don’t blockage that type of emotion because it is youthful, because it is playful, because it is downright fun. Not enough people know how to have fun, and many a reason for that is because they are too scared by the judgments of other adults. Seriously who doesn’t like running up escalators the wrong way? But, then, who does it as an adult? Why not? Societal judgments. And, who doesn’t enjoy a good wrestling show? But, who talks about it? The same amount of people that run up escalators the wrong way. The next person that shows up to the office next Tuesday and brings up the previous nights Raw at a board meeting deserves a raise. The next adult to build a wrestling ring in the backyard or to hire Doink The Clown for their child’s birthday party deserves some adulation.
It has come to the point where I am that adult wrestling fan, whether or not I want to admit it. It took a long time for me to come out of the wrestling closet and admit my love of wrestling. Things felt a lot better once I could be honest about my love of wrestling. Recently, I have been living with the fact that now I am an adult. In addition, I am still a wrestling fan. I know most wrestling fans aren’t that smart, but let’s put this together. I am an adult. I am a wrestling fan. That means that I am an adult wrestling fan.
Perhaps this is my coming out as an adult wrestling fan. Yeah, I’m an adult. Yeah, I love pro wrestling. Yeah, I get what is going on. Yeah, I still like it nonetheless. Yeah, I say yeah a lot. No, I’m not stupid or ignorant. And, no I don’t live in a trailer park, although I wouldn’t mind getting a place with Duke “The Dumpster” Droese.
There are cooler older wrestling fans, those dudes that never lost the passion. The ones that go to shows and yell and scream and become a kid again. The ones I used to think of as weird. I guess it is tough to judge someone when you become the thing you were judging. Perhaps it is tough for an outsider to understand because they just see an adult watching men in spandex rolling around with one another and having too much fun while watching it. See, I told you we would never understand one another.
Growing up is a fun thing to do. And, everything looks different in retrospect. It is easy to judge wrestling fans as insane madmen who need to do with more with their lives, especially when they are no longer kids. But, when you come to the point where you are now an adult, and still a wrestling fan, you must confront the fact that you have now become what you used to laugh at and were never able to understand. Next time, before I go judging away more Judge Jeff Jones with Mike Awesome, I will look attempt to look in retrospect first. I will attempt to put myself in the wrestling boots of another. I apologize for this abrupt ending, but my wrestling figurines are on my mind and I need to go book a match.