Five terms that remind me of the awesomeness (and utter stupidity) of professional wrestling

April 6, 2010


1. Toryumon
2. Hurricanrana
3. Breaking Kayfabe
4. Tiger Driver ‘91
5. Fire Pro

I used to love this stuff. Would study it like some study roto-league baseball. Was a local expert in the art of Japanese wrestling, technical submissions and the WWF Intercontinental belt. Could not be swayed from thinking Dean Malenko was under-appreciated and deserved a better push.

Sometimes, I miss it – not for the pomp and storylines as much as for the technical and behind-the-scenes aspects of it all: the classification of terms, the organization of skills, the characters fitting together and moving around like party members in a game of Final Fantasy.

Other times, I take a look at that sentence I just wrote and realize how big of a dork I really am.

Tags: The Top..., Wrestling |

5 Comments

Kerry Von Erich’s wooden leg

October 14, 2009


One of my favorite jokes is the one about how Kerry Von Erich – professional wrestling’s Texas Tornado – died in a brush fire when his wooden leg started on fire.

Oh, you’ve never heard that one?

No. Probably not. It was what we call an “inside joke.” It’s based almost exclusively on the experiences, thoughts and interactions between three people – my friends John and Doug, and me.

I could explain it, but it wouldn’t be worth it. I could recall how the Von Erichs as a family were cursed – most of them went into wrestling, and nearly all of them died young. I could mention how Kerry Von Erich really did have a wooden leg, and that a drug overdose didn’t seem like a cool enough cursed death, though the prospect of wrestling with one leg seemed amazing and, obviously, pretty funny. I could describe how it was late, and we were waiting for the doors at FuncoLand to open so we could start selling Playstation 2 systems at midnight, and Doug’s sense of humor has often bordered on the absurd.

Even after all of that, you wouldn’t get it.

So all I can say is, “Sorry.”

“It’s an inside joke.”

Tags: Friends, Wrestling |

2 Comments

If you smell….

April 21, 2008


Tonight. A three-way ladder match for the WWE Presidential Nomination!

In this corner, hailing from Arizona, weighing in at a sprightly and fit 180 pounds and sporting a POW/MIA flag draped over his shoulders like James Brown, Lieutenant John “Cactus Flats” McCain!

And in this corner, weighing in with a message of hope, understanding and amazing oratory skills, in his first three-way ladder match, “The Phenom” Barack Hussein Obama. “IF YOU SMELLLLLL WHAT BARACK IS COOKIN!”

Finally, entering the ring at a weight of Mind Your Own Business, the former valet of World Presidential Champion Slick Willy, from New York or Arkansas or wherever suits her best, The Pantsuit®* Hillary Rodham Clinton!

Let’s get it on!

* bell rings *

Ahem…

I’m sorry if I’m having trouble understanding this, but, well, I just don’t understand this.

The night before one of the most important primaries in my lifetime, and both candidates are squaring off in the square circle? On a WWE program?

It’s not that I don’t commend them for reaching out to the non-CNN crowd, and it’s not that I don’t understand how crucial it is to grab votes from a traditionally Republican crowd (at least for Hillary and Barack – McCain seems to be thrown in for equal time). It’s just that I find it hard to take this seriously.

2:1 odds that McMahon does a run-in, locks Hillary into a Stone Cold Stunner and helps McCain out of the ring.

This can’t end well.

(Yes, I know they won’t be there in person. Let me dream, please.)

*Registered trademark of Todd Epp.

Tags: Politics, Wrestling |

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Remembering the Crippler

June 25, 2007


We all had false teenage idols – people we unnecessarily looked up to, regardless of how important they really were in our lives, revered for odd reasons that were really never questioned. They were just there. They were unreasonable loves, like a particular television show or silly band, nearly embarrassing but there nonetheless.

But just because those people or things were frivolous, it didn’t mean they were stupid. They are part of growing up. And they stick with you forever and ever, regardless of how you’ve passed them by.

Today, one of those people that I had passed by passed away.

I have made no secret of my former love of professional wrestling. And I will make no secret now that, regardless of how obnoxious it has become and how I no longer follow it, professional wrestling still holds a strong spot in my heart. It can still be a common topic among friends, a nostalgic look back through history, through an escape that was part athletics, part pure drama.

Through all of that, though, I have still held a longing respect for one wrestler – for Chris Benoit, a wrestler that transcended the petty angles and boring fake-fighting. He wrestled for the pure sport of it, for the acrobatic delight of the fans, a good guy through and through. He was never as heralded as the talkers or the brawlers. But he was a special talent – a man that could make other people better through in ring style and teaching.

He was better than the sport, I always thought – stuck in a wrestling landscape that didn’t quite appreciate him as much as they should have, a landscape that was built through edgier and edgier stories, larger and larger breasts and less and less pure technical talent. He was old school before it was cool to be old school. He was fluid. He made everything look easy. He made professional wrestling look less like the childish melodrama it has become and more like the carefully staged production it once was.

I latched onto Chris Benoit – a smart beacon in a room full of fakes, a wrestler I could still seem intelligent in liking. He was the braniac’s wrestler, the technical artist’s wrestler, the hardcore fan’s wrestler. He was not a fan favorite. He was not selling tickets. But he was putting a full night of work in every night, all night, making his opponents seem like a million bucks and letting the glory wash over in the locker-room.

And now, he’s gone. Found dead in his home with his wife and son. As of now, no one knows how. But everyone who loved watching him is mourning. Amazingly, it happened on the night he was about to be crowned ECW champion – the last American title he had never held.

It was over three years ago when Chris Benoit finally, for the first time, undisputed, held up the World Wrestling Entertainment championship title. He was met in the ring with his longtime friend – the now also deceased Eddie Guerrero. That night, my two favorite wrestlers – two brilliant workers that defined the “smark” generation, that made us all forget for a few minutes the bullshit, the planned run-ins, the over exaggerated bravado, the scene struggling to stay afloat, weighed down under its own over-the-top brashness – held the two Championship Titles for their respective shows.

And that was the last time I ever followed wrestling. I lost interest. The moment I wanted to see had been shown, like watching the final episode of a television drama. Everything after that was contrary to the happy ending I had envisioned.

Especially this.

I’ve taken heat before for my current views on wrestling. I’ve been called out for considering the sport to be long passed, a “stage I grew out of.” I’ve effectively alienated and insulted my friends that still watch wrestling.

But keep this in mind. While I never really follow wrestling anymore, I still respect some aspects of it. I respect a hard fought lucha match, a smart storyline, a technical masterpiece and a tape of Japanese NOAH-style stiff suplexes. Most of all, I still respect Chris Benoit and his legend; his 22 year career, built brick by brick, layer by layer until he was at the peak of his sport, the best actor in a long running play.

Without Chris Benoit, I would have had nothing to watch. One by one, my favorite characters came and went, became monsters and then were rendered ineffective. Except Benoit. He was always there, still working hard, still rising above the steroid rumors and womanizing and sloppy wrestling to be the greatest technical wrestler that had ever entered the squared circle.

Sure, I haven’t missed him much over the past three years. But whenever I throw my Best of Chris Benoit in Japan tape into the VCR, or come across his name on the Internet, or think of how I played hours – DAYS – worth of WCW No Mercy on Nintendo 64, until my thumbs bled and my eyes rolled back in their sockets, rest assured he’ll be missed.

Tags: Sports, Television, Wrestling |

4 Comments

Thanks Puroresu Power!

March 25, 2006


I’ve been writing about books, about music, and about my personal thoughts. I’ve touched on abortion, on intelligent design, and on public broadcasting. I’ve posted about sports, and I’ve received numerous hits on the pictures I have linked on this site.

But I write two things about wrestling, and the entire world knows about me.

Thanks to this article, a clarification on my stance on professional wrestling, I’ve received an alarming number of hits over the last couple of days. Thanks to Puroresu Power, a rather well known (in wrestling circles) site dedicated to the art of Japanese wrestling/mixed martial arts, I’ve been selected as the “Link of the Day” for 3/25/06. The column is being billed: “A former pro-wrestling fan explains why he’s given up on the business.”

This is funny because, well, I’ve received some comments saying “I don’t blame you,” though I also received a comment by some anonymous visitor saying “you should get yourself checked.” I apparently insulted this guy’s entire existence, and forced him to adopt my opinion.

A look at the referring sites that have sent me traffic:

puroresupower.com 9:04 pm
puroresupower.com 8:51 pm
puroresupower.com 8:50 pm
puroresupower.com 8:46 pm
puroresupower.com 8:42 pm
puroresupower.com 8:41 pm
puroresupower.com 8:40 pm
puroresupower.com 8:37 pm
puroresupower.com 8:26 pm
puroresupower.com 8:26 pm
puroresupower.com 8:22 pm
puroresupower.com 8:21 pm
puroresupower.com 8:16 pm
puroresupower.com 8:16 pm
puroresupower.com 8:00 pm
puroresupower.com 7:57 pm
puroresupower.com 7:55 pm
puroresupower.com 7:50 pm
puroresupower.com 7:43 pm
puroresupower.com 7:41 pm
puroresupower.com 7:40 pm
pro-wrestling.com 7:34 pm
puroresupower.com 7:33 pm
puroresupower.com 7:27 pm
puroresupower.com 7:25 pm
puroresupower.com 7:21 pm
puroresupower.com 7:17 pm
puroresupower.com 7:10 pm
puroresupower.com 6:59 pm
puroresupower.com 6:53 pm
puroresupower.com 6:41 pm
puroresupower.com 6:35 pm
dakotawarcollege.blogspot.com 6:27 pm
puroresupower.com 6:25 pm
puroresupower.com 6:23 pm
puroresupower.com 6:22 pm

That’s a visitor from Puroresu Power nearly every five minutes, with one from pro-wrestling.com (which I think is an admin site for Puroresu Power – I was not allowed access to the link but searched around to find it had the same “link of the day” and the same articles) and one from Dakota War College (Thanks PP!)

Now I can’t even find out how I was found as the “Link of the Day” – there have been so many hits from puroresupower.com that it’s pushed any original tracking off of the list. According to my lifetime referrers, puroresupower.com has already sent me more hits than Todd Epp’s SD Watch did during the past year!

A lot of this traffic is because there’s an idea that I’m denouncing mainstream professional wrestling. That’s not really the case. I’m just saying that the entire genre has, as I put it, “done me wrong,” by which I mean it suckered me into taking it way too seriously – more seriously than anyone I knew. Now I’ve seen the light and understand it for what it is: a television show and marketing product.

Again, I’ll say that I don’t hate wrestling. I never meant this to be some “change and I’ll come back” manifesto. I don’t care what wrestling does anymore. I don’t like it, and my views have more to do with me growing apart from the genre than it does with the product becoming horrible, though the product becoming horrible certainly didn’t help. I made some rebuttal arguments in the comments to the original article, and hopefully I’ve made myself clear.

Anyway, thanks to Puroresu Power for giving me some extra traffic, regardless of how long the new viewers ever stick around.

I’ve found a new hot-button topic. Forget abortion rights, the Iraq war, and political corruption – just give me an old Boston Crab and an elbow off of the turnbuckle and we’ll get those comments flowing in.

Tags: Meta, Wrestling |

1 Comment

More complete thoughts on professional wrestling

March 20, 2006


Okay. Let’s get some things straight.

I am not on the anti-wrestling bandwagon. I still have a warm spot in my heart for certain aspects of the sports-entertainment world – I still use a vast section of the vocabulary, and I’m still enamored with a tightly wrestled technical battle along the lines of Benoit vs. Angle.

I don’t hate wrestling. But I will say that professional wrestling, a hobby that I put a considerable amount of time into, has done me wrong. Really done me wrong. I was always a fan of lucha libre, of puroresu, of the Super J Cup Tournament and of Bret Hart, Chris Benoit, and Chris Jericho. I turned my nose up at the more lowbrow humor, the punchy-kicky superstar matches, and the intelligence insulting.

I hated the sexism and xenophobia that is still prevalent in professional wrestling. I hated the poo-poo humor that permeated any “humorous” skit or angle. I truly was insulted when an 80-year old woman gave birth to a hand, when female wrestlers were relegated to mud wrestling, and when a seven-foot “monster” performed an act of necrophilia.

Wrestling requires some reality suspension. Obviously. I just can’t do it anymore because, well, there has to be a little continuity involved. For some reason the entire genre turned me off. I’m not saying this to sound conceited, to sound as if one kind of reality suspension – clay figures going to the moon and eating cheese in a spacecraft flown by a dog, for example – is better than another (the fact that grown men wait until they’re in an arena full of people to settle their differences by flopping around on the mat comes to mind).

The thing is, I used to be able to suspend reality for a few hours while watching wrestling. But that is when the storylines where still fresh. When the art of wrestling was still followed. Three things ultimately ruined professional wrestling for me.

1. The downfall of the independent circuit. I used to love watching ECW. I also loved watching the mid-card level personalities in the WCW and WWF. I loved watching them because they were different – they were doing things that you couldn’t see in Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Undertaker. They were wrestling. And to me, it was fresh.

Eventually, I realized that what they were doing wasn’t interesting – it was the fact that I hadn’t seen it before that made it stand out. Once it became commonplace, I tired of it. I gave it up. That’s about the time that the great wrestlers started getting relegated to punchy-kicky type matches and started being involved with storylines that were designed to give them personalities – personalities that they didn’t have.

2. I got too involved backstage. I, like Kerrie mentioned, used to make changes (with a red pen) in The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Professional Wrestling. It was horribly inaccurate. It was outdated within a week of its publishing date, and it was incorrect throughout anyway. I knew what was going to happen before it happened, thanks to the Internet. I over analyzed Pay-Per-View events. I had actual interest in whether or not a wrestler’s comments were “shoot” (real life comments) as opposed to scripted.

There were no surprises left for me. And even when surprises tried to manifest themselves, I was always disappointed. I thought way too much about programs that were designed to make you think as little as possible. It’s like analyzing the backstage antics of ER, and then trying to figure out if a patient’s comments were in some way directed at George Clooney’s departure nearly ten years ago.

3. I realized that a figure-four leg lock doesn’t really hurt (unless it’s applied incorrectly). Thank you, Owen, for reminding me of this.

A lot of the glamour of wrestling disappeared when I started watching American wrestling exclusively. Gone from my repertoire were the stiff forearms of Mitsuharu Misawa. Forgotten were the neck drops of ECW’s Taz. Lost were the suicide moonsaults of Toryumon’s Dragon Kid. Instead, I watched move after move that did nothing to convince me that they were even painful.

Chris Benoit and Kurt Angle were still putting on wrestling clinics – using moves that borrowed heavily from the laws of physics, leverage, and balance. The rest of the league was flopping around and using half-assed fists to swing past their opponent’s head. Wrestling is more ballet than boxing, and I always knew that. But I don’t like ballet. And really, I don’t like boxing. So why was I watching it so much?

I say all of this because I don’t want it to seem like I’m on some high and mighty pedestal, throwing stones at the people – of which many of my close friends are included – that still watch wrestling. I have no problem with professional wrestling. I’ll always feel a little warmth in my heart for a soundly contested suplex-fest. It’s just that I personally can’t take it seriously anymore.

No, that’s the wrong way to put it. A person who takes professional wrestling seriously is in more trouble than they ay think. What I mean is that I can’t bring myself to watch it. Things have gone so far off course that I don’t think I’d ever be able to come back. The main event companies are boring retreads of what I used to watch, which ultimately was a boring retread of what ECW did in the mid 90’s. The indie leagues are trying to hard to be successful, a feat that can really only be completed by creating a league that is nearly identical to the WWE.

I’ve lost the heart for wrestling. I’m not sad about it at all. I’ve filled that empty space with things that I find more personally fulfilling. But far be it for me to completely write it off. Currently, the product is only a fraction as interesting as it used to be, and at some point in the past few years I must have grown apart from whatever it was that led me to enjoy it in the first place. I still think wrestling is lame now. I’m wrestling free, but I’m not forgetting my roots. I can still hold my own with the rest of you wrestling fans – almost as if it’s ingrained in my DNA. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it, or even admit it.

I hope that explains my position a little better.

And yes, I promise — no more ‘rasslin.

For now.

Tags: Wrestling |

13 Comments

Nacho Libre

March 19, 2006


Yeah, I used to watch professional wrestling. And not just during my youth – I watched it very closely up until about two years ago. I’m not proud of it. In fact, I’m a little ashamed. It took a wrestling sabbatical to realize that yes, wrestling is pretty lame. Sorry, friends – it is.

These thoughts of shame were compounded when I was flipping channels the other day. Without cable, I was wrestling free. I never even ran across it anymore. But now that the WWE has started showing Saturday Night Main Events again I’m finding professional wrestling being beamed into my house through the antenna instead of the cable cord. We’ve got wrestling on free television.

I stopped on the show last night to see Shane McMahon, the son of WWE leader Vince McMahon, grappling with Shawn Michaels, a former multiple-time WWE Champion. And even though I had seen Shane wrestle before numerous times, it took the clarity that came from stepping back from the product to understand that a match like this, to put it in a family-friendly way, is utter bull-poop.

Seriously? This scrawny wimp is actually supposed to be getting a decent fight from a former champion? Reality is suspended in wrestling, I realize, but stuff like this insults whatever intelligence the average viewing public still has. But this is just how it is now. Professional wrestling outfits have gotten lazy with their product, their storylines, and their overall effectiveness to sell merchandise (which, ultimately, is the only reason they’re still around).

With all of this said, I can’t help but love the idea of a tongue-in-cheek movie about wrestling. No, nothing like the horrible Ready to Rumble. Something with a little star power. Something with, say, Jack Black.

Enter Nacho Libre, starring Jack Black. A priest who moonlights as a Lucha Libre star.

Awesome.

Thanks to Dave at I stared straight into the sun for the link. Also, a big “hooray!” that he’s putting out posts more consistently. We missed you, DWiddy!

Tags: Wrestling |

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