Somewhere along the line, a lot of us decided we were supposed to grow out of the things we loved.
You hit your twenties, maybe your thirties, and suddenly the world expects you to put away the toys. Stop arguing about comic book canon. Stop staying up until midnight watching wrestling from Korakuen Hall. Stop getting excited when Apple announces a slightly better rectangle that costs roughly the price of a used riding mower.
You’re supposed to become serious.
Responsible.
The kind of person who says things like, “I don’t really watch wrestling anymore,” even though you absolutely watched three matches from All Japan at 1:30 in the morning last Tuesday.
And I’m here to say something that took me a long time to realize.
It’s okay to be a nerd.
Honestly.
When I was a kid, being a nerd meant you liked stuff too much.
You liked Star Wars too much.
You knew the names of the Ninja Turtles.
You could tell someone the every member of the Hart family before you could drive a car.
You cared about things that other people thought were silly.
Now, if we’re being honest, wrestling fans were always the nerds of the sports world.
Football fans talk about blitz packages.
Basketball fans talk about pick-and-roll spacing.
Wrestling fans will sit down and explain the booking philosophy of Giant Baba in the early 1990s while referencing three different Tokyo Dome crowds and something Dave Meltzer wrote in the Observer in 1994.
We’re not casual people.
We’re specialists.
Take lucha libre.
Most normal human beings can watch a lucha match and say, “Wow, those guys flip a lot.”
A lucha nerd will start explaining that what you just saw was a tornillo followed by a tope con giro, and that the reason it worked is because the rudo base timed the catch perfectly.
We will say this out loud.
In public.
Sometimes at family gatherings.
Joshi fans are even worse.
If you know, you know.
A normal person might watch a women’s wrestling match and say, “That was really good.”
A joshi nerd will explain that the match had strong AJW influence, the selling felt very Manami Toyota, and the finish reminded them of a match from a Tokyo Dome show in the mid-90s that only exists now as a third-generation VHS rip someone uploaded to the internet in 2007.
And somehow we’re proud of this.
As we should be.
Puroresu nerds might be the final boss.
These are the people who will watch a match where two men politely slap each other in the chest for fifteen minutes and say things like, “Look at the storytelling.”
And the wild thing is, they’re not wrong.
Because once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
You start noticing the rhythm.
The escalation.
The way the crowd slowly realizes something special is happening.
Suddenly you’re sitting there at midnight watching Misawa and Kobashi from 2003 like you’re studying ancient scripture.
The funny thing is, nerd culture used to be niche.
Now it’s basically the entire economy.
Marvel movies dominate the box office.
Comic conventions fill football stadiums.
People wait in line overnight to buy the newest iPhone like it’s a religious pilgrimage.
The difference is that some people pretend they’re not nerds.
But if you’ve ever argued online about which streaming service has the best interface, congratulations.
You’re one of us.
And honestly, there’s something kind of beautiful about it.
Because being a nerd just means you still know how to care.
You still get excited.
You still feel that little spark when something you love shows up on the screen.
You know the feeling.
The first time a wrestling theme hits and you realize this match is about to rule.
The moment a comic panel lands just right.
The second Apple shows a new product and you lean forward a little and say, “Okay… that’s actually pretty cool.”
That feeling doesn’t disappear when you grow up.
You just get better at pretending you don’t have it.
But here’s the truth.
Life is heavy sometimes.
Bills show up.
Jobs get stressful.
Children get sick.
The world gets loud and strange and complicated.
And in the middle of all that, there is something quietly wonderful about sitting down and watching a guy in a mask do a moonsault.
Or reading a comic book about cosmic gods.
Or getting irrationally excited about a new piece of technology that does basically the same thing as the last one but slightly faster.
These things remind us how to play again.
And grown ups don’t get enough of that.
I’ve come to think of nerd culture the way I think about a good diner.
You walk in, and everyone is welcome.
Doesn’t matter if you’re the person who has every issue of Fantastic Four bagged and boarded or the person who just wandered in because someone said this match between two Japanese wrestlers from 1993 was really good.
Pull up a chair.
There’s room.
And the truth is, wrestling has always understood this better than anything else.
Wrestling is ridiculous.
It’s theatrical.
It’s larger than life.
It’s a world where a guy can wear a dragon mask, or a cowboy hat, or come to the ring dressed like a demon, and somehow it all makes sense.
So if you’re the kind of person who knows the difference between a hurricanrana and a frankensteiner…
If you have strong opinions about All Japan versus New Japan in the 1990s…
If you still get excited when the lights go out and the music hits…
I’ve got good news.
You didn’t fail to grow up.
You just kept your imagination.
And in a world that spends most of its time trying to squeeze the joy out of things, that’s not something to apologize for.
That’s something to hold onto.
Because sometimes the most honest thing a grown adult can do is sit down, watch a wrestling match, and say with complete sincerity,
Man… that ruled.