Phony wrestling: We figured out a big ruse at like age 13
I’ve been a bad dad, I realized the other day. I had never shown my boys the grand days of world-wide phony-baloney wrestling.
This isn’t that glitzy crap that’s on today. It was the WWF, the World Wrestling Federation. The glory days of absurdly impossible maneuvers and shocking stereotype characters.
I haven’t seen one of these “matches” in decades, but phony-baloney wresting came up the other day, and my older son and I watched a few WWF “bouts.”
Aside from everything else, it’s moments like this when I realize what a great person he is to hang out with. We were cracking up. Snorting in amazement. He would shake his head and sputter, “This is ridiculous!” as Ivan Putzski delivered his Polish Hammer or Mr. Fuji (my god, the stereotypes) accidentally tossed salt into his partner’s eyes. How a dirty trick backfired! We roared while the announcers calmly described the improbability of one of the Wild Samoans (!) futilely trying to keep super-strong Tony Atlas in a full nelson–not happening!
Watching these zoomed me back into the past. We would tune in on our little TVs and absorb the spectacle. It couldn’t be real… but, I mean, look how seriously all these adults were taking it. The referee counting, counting… we didn’t know what he was counting, but he was always counting something. Those announcers narrating it all if it were a real athletic event, talking about the combatants’ strategies and how they had dealt with similarly difficult situations in past “bouts.” The juiced-up crowd exhorting Tito Santana, dazed on the concrete apron, to rise again or throwing debris at the Lumberjacks when Chief Jay Strongbow’s (!) tag team partner betrayed him.
Think about it: So many adults were in on the joke–almost like Santa Claus. I told my son we would sit in our dim carpeted rec rooms as tweens and there was this sliver of time when we debated whether it was all real. He laughed, and I did too, because these videos are so absurd, but it seemed real for a simple reason: Because everyone surrounding it was taking it so seriously!
The ref. The suit-wearing announcers. The crowd.
We had no Internet, and we leaped off our battered couches doing atomic elbow drops ourselves, thinking, maybe, just maybe…
But then we wised up. I think we were 13.
We realized that just because a bunch of nuts yell and scream and a few well-dressed people talk with a straight face that that didn’t make it all true. Damn, Jimmy Superfly Snuka was just a really athletic actor. Damn, there was no Santa.
We learned this stuff well before we learned to drive. It wasn’t that hard to recognize that it was easy to create a broad facade of falsehood, and as kids you could enjoy it, no harm done–but adults believing in the charade of Rowdy Roddy Piper?… well, they were friggin’ crazy!
We knew before we could drive how simple it was for people to play it straight in a big lie. Calling bs?: That’s solid knowledge that you would think would carry us all the way through life.
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An entire article on this and no mention of the Iron Shiek, The Macho Man, Brutus Beefcake, or the Junkyard Dog??? Man, I bet you were a Bob Backlund fan.
No Haystack Calhoun, Gorilla Monsoon, or Sgt Slaughter?!? And how dare your previous commentor denegrate the name of Bob Backlund. That man was a saint…until I turned 13 and he became just a weird semi-athletic actor.