My first wrestling message board had two members.
It met on Sunday mornings in a church classroom. Drew and I would take whatever portion of Sunday School could be safely diverted from spiritual formation and use it to discuss what had happened the night before on WCW Saturday Night.
Our other source was the Apter mags. They arrived late enough that a pay-per-view result was outdated by the time we read it, and every photograph seemed to have been taken half a second after the important thing happened. They were still wonderful. They gave us rankings, rumors, blood, and the impression that Bill Apter personally knew every wrestler in America.
Drew and I talked about wrestling (or “rasslin” to us Appalachian Americans) over store brand Nilla wafers and Country Time lemonade until his mom made him stop watching after he attempted to DDT his brother after soccer practice one day.
At the time, I considered this a terrible injustice. Looking back, maybe Drew was the smart one.
He got out early. He missed the Fingerpoke of Doom, the invasion, the anonymous general manager, Twitter, and at least four separate civil wars over whether a match was cinema. He made one questionable booking decision with his brother and his mother shut down the territory before the losses piled up. He left the business with no farewell tour, no podcast, and only one known injury angle.
Back then we watched wrestling first and talked about it later. Somewhere in the years since, those two things changed places.
Our family did not own a computer until I was already in junior high. It was beige, enormous, and sat on the bar in our kitchen. Our neighbor Everett gave it to us to help me with school work. Everett smelled like cigar smoke and always called me “Sport.” I’m pretty sure that man never learned my name.
Getting online back then required the phone line and a sequence of electronic shrieks that suggested the machine was either connecting to the world or reporting us to NORAD.
The internet was slow enough for wonder to load from the top of the screen to the bottom.
At first, it gave me facts. Wrestlers’ real names were a particular fascination. This was also how I discovered that Arn Anderson and Ole Anderson were not related. Arn was Martin Anthony Lunde. Ole was Alan Robert Rogowski. They were not brothers. They were not cousins. They were not even Andersons.
I had already accepted that wrestling matches were predetermined. I had not agreed to genealogical fraud.
Martin Lunde sounded like a man who prepared tax returns. Alan Rogowski sounded like the fellow who would make sure Martin had saved his receipts. These two men had somehow become Minnesota relatives, formed the spine of the Four Horsemen, and spent years looking as though they might come to your house and repossess the television while you were watching them on it. I found all of this deeply unsettling.
I checked 1Wrestling and ProWrestling.com whenever the phone line was free. I read news, rumors, results from shows I could not watch, and interviews with wrestlers I had only seen in magazine photographs. The internet did not make wrestling smaller or more cynical for me then. It made wrestling impossibly large. The television show ended. The browser kept going.
Eventually I found wrestling sims like TNM7 and Extreme Warfare before e-fedding took over all my attention. Those of you who’s back is a little achy right now remember those gloriously embarrassing segments of the internet.
My wrestler was “The Factor” Ben Evans. I came up with the name while eating at Bob Evans, which is true and perhaps explains why he sounded less like a dangerous wrestler than a district manager sent in to improve breakfast-shift morale.
The whole thing could have gone differently if we had eaten at Cracker Barrel that night. I might have spent my adolescence writing promos for “Old Country” Jed Barrel, whose finishing move was the Triangle Peg Game and whose entrance took place between two rocking chairs and a display of Gaither Vocal Band cassettes.
Ben Evans probably still exists on a server somewhere. He is frozen in primitive HTML, arms crossed in front of a graphic made with a trial version of Paint Shop Pro, waiting for the president of an imaginary wrestling company to post the card for Thursday Night Carnage. Every generation leaves ruins behind. Mine left guestbooks, broken image links, and several thousand words explaining why a fictional man named after a family restaurant deserved a fictional title shot.
From e-feds I moved into internet message boards. This may have been the internet’s best wrestling era. The rooms were smaller. You recognized the names. People had avatars, signatures, reputations, running jokes, and strongly held opinions about wrestlers whose matches had to be acquired on fourth-generation videotape.
Those boards expanded my wrestling world again. Other posters pointed me toward Japanese wrestling, lucha libre, independent promotions, and whole decades of history that cable television had never mentioned. An unfamiliar name in one thread could occupy the next two weeks of my life. I went looking for matches. I came back to talk about them.
We argued then, too. Nostalgia should not be allowed to work security. Some of the arguments were every bit as ridiculous as what happens now, only they unfolded over three days because everyone had to log off and let a parent use the phone. Still, the same people kept returning to the same rooms. An argument had a history, and a username eventually became a person.
Then the rooms became faster, larger, and impossible to leave.
Twitter gave every wrestling fan a live microphone. Podcasts gave every disagreement theme music. YouTube gave it a red arrow and a thumbnail of a man reacting as though he had been bitten by a raccoon while taking trash to the dumpster. Discord built a twenty-four-hour fellowship hall where nobody ever stacks the chairs and the meeting is never adjourned.
There are now more voices discussing professional wrestling than there were members of the nWo, and only a few fewer than there are members of the Anoa’i family waiting on a call from Stamford.
At any given moment, one corner of the internet is arguing that flips do not belong in wrestling, while another insists a headlock is a proper finishing move if applied by a sufficiently grim man from 1974 or a Japanese man in 2026. Both sides believe they are defending the business from each other. Neither side has considered going outside.
Some of those voices are smart, funny, and generous. Some belong to friends.
One of them belongs to me. I am neither smart, nor funny.
I have written columns, posted reactions, joined servers, left servers, returned to servers, and explained to strangers why their opinion about a pretend fight was factually and perhaps morally incorrect. I am not standing outside this problem with a clipboard. I brought snacks.
Nobody took wrestling away from me. I slowly converted my enjoyment of wrestling into the discussion of wrestling, one post at a time.
The show became raw material. I stopped watching simply to see what happened. I watched to determine what I thought about what happened, how strongly I thought about it, whether someone else had already thought it incorrectly, and what I might think about that. A match could not merely be good. It had to withstand the conversation waiting for it after the bell.
Eventually even that conversation could not wait.
Wrestling became a two-screen project. The match plays on the television. The glowing orb at my fingertips carries the parallel broadcast: instant reviews, promotion wars, ratings talk, bad-faith clips, good jokes, terrible jokes, and people reaching final judgment while the referee is still checking the boots.
My eyes move between the two. I miss the setup to a finish because someone posted something foolish. Then I complain that the finish did not work. Some nights I remember the argument better than the match. Some nights the argument is the only part I remember.
I have tried to reel myself in. I have muted words, thinned follow lists, left Discords, deleted apps, and put the phone in another room. I have retired from wrestling discourse roughly as many times as Terry Funk retired from wrestling, and with the same understanding that nobody should take the announcement literally.
The returns always begin innocently. I will check one result. I will see what people thought about one segment. I will correct one thing that is obviously wrong. Forty minutes later I am reading two strangers argue about whether a lack of star-ratings is somehow a sign of racism.
Then I wonder why wrestling no longer relaxes me.
There is an obvious irony in writing a column about this. Pro wrestling has too much commentary, so I have responded by preparing additional commentary. I am standing in the noise asking everyone to quiet down so they can hear my thoughts about the noise. I could have closed the laptop. Instead, I gave the problem a headline.
That is funny because it is ridiculous. It also hurts a little.
I am a man in his forties trying to decide whether I am tired of wrestling or merely tired from carrying its conversation around all day. Wrestling has been with me for most of my life. I can mark years by the version of it I was watching, the room where I watched it, and the people I could not wait to tell about it. WCW Saturday Night. Nitro. The first computer. The Factor. The message boards. The podcasts. The trips. The columns. Each one is wrestling, but each one is also a house I lived in for a while.
The possibility of losing that feels heavier than a television hobby ought to feel. I loved wrestling with the indiscriminate force available to a kid who had not yet been asked to divide himself among a wife, a daughter, a church, a house, and the weather radar. Wrestling got every available fiber because most of those fibers had not yet been assigned.
Maybe this is the life cycle of a man growing out of something he once loved with all of himself. The fibers get reassigned. My wife and daughter have claimed a large share. A church takes another. Several apparently belong to standing at the back window during a thunderstorm and announcing the movement of the red part of the radar to anyone within earshot.
That would be a normal story. It does not feel normal while it is happening.
The conversation around wrestling has grown too heated, too bitter, and sometimes too dumb for the amount of my life I have handed it. Most of the people in that conversation began where I did. They loved wrestling and wanted somebody to talk to. I cannot make them the villains without lying about myself.
I don’t have a solution. There will be no closing list of seven ways to reclaim the joy, mostly because I would turn the list into a post, monitor the replies, and ruin dinner. There may not be a solution. The thing I loved is still on television. I keep catching myself watching the screen in my hand.
I can still see that Sunday School room. Drew and I had no star ratings, quarter-hour numbers, screenshots, clips, or vocabulary for discourse. We had whatever happened on WCW the night before and a few minutes before an adult noticed we were not discussing the lesson.
Drew’s mom ended his wrestling career because he tried to DDT his brother. Maybe Drew really was the smart one. He got out before wrestling became a place a person could spend all day without watching any wrestling at all.
I wonder if there is this much discourse in the NCIS internet community, or if those people simply watch the mystery solved and simply go to bed.
Anyway, I’ll see you in the Discord later tonight.