How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Wrestling Again
A 38 year-old novelty song by a one-hit wonder saved my love of professional wrestling.
First, a quick background: wrestling has always been the hobby for me. My earliest memory is Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat scaring off Jake “The Snake” Roberts with a “komodo dragon” that I’m pretty sure was a baby alligator with its mouth taped shut. I remember running away and hiding when Andre the Giant ripped Hulk Hogan’s shirt and tore his crucifix off, causing his chest to bleed in the process. I remember sitting on my grandfather’s lap for the War Games where Sid Vicious annihilated Brian Pillman. I can recall dates from my childhood because it will line up with whatever was going on in wrestling at the time - wrestling is woven into the fabric of my life.
I watched it all from Hulkamania to the Monday Night Wars to Ruthless Aggression to the guest host era of Monday Night Raw. Wrestling was my constant. I based my schedule as a working adult around wrestling. This blog originally launched in 2009 and though it was never making bank, it achieved a mild level of success and I treated it like a full-time job. Perhaps this is ego but I think I could’ve been one of those guys making a living podcasting about wrestling had I stuck with it. Speaking of money, I shudder to think of the dollar figure that has been spent on wrestling in my lifetime - spoiler: it’s more than what I have in the bank right now!
I don’t tell you this to show off my credentials or tell you I’m a bigger fan than you are, but to really put an exclamation point on the next part of this story: a few years ago, I cut wrestling out of my life. For quite a few years before that, it started feeling like a chore to watch; this ritual I was forcing upon myself because “well I’ve seen every episode of Monday Night Raw, I can’t stop now.” But then I did miss a Raw… and you know what happened? Nothing. Then I missed a few more. Still nothing. Turns out, me watching wrestling wasn’t like Desmond resetting the clock in Lost (timely reference), the world didn’t end because I skipped a few Raws. And then I just left it behind. It would be silly to say that I “outgrew” it because I was in my 30s at this point, but it felt like that. It felt like a piece of my childhood was gone.
I won’t get into the weeds of what exactly led up to me leaving wrestling behind, there will be plenty of posts that get into that in the future, but I don’t think it will come as a particular shock to any wrestling viewer: WWE sucks, treats their audience with contempt, and I was sick of having my intelligence insulted and being mocked for caring about this thing I’ve spent my entire life watching.
I’d pop in here and there - you gotta watch WrestleMania, right? It’s like the Super Bowl, even if you don’t care about football, you somehow wind up watching it somewhere. I still follow a lot of wrestling fans on Twitter, so I’d see what was going on and think “yep, still sucks” and move on with my day and other hobbies. I really love horror movies, going to concerts, occasionally pick up a controller to play a video game, go to bar trivia - you’d be amazed how easy it is to just move on from wrestling and find other things to do.
Friends, both online and offline, would say “oh you gotta check out this company” or “New Japan is really hot right now,” or “you’d LOVE Lucha Underground.” I’m not ignorant to other wrestling - I was always a casual ROH fan, I used to do tape trading in the 90s, I was a die-hard ECW fan, I obsessively switched channels during the Monday Night War, but WWE was my team. Everyone has a team. For most people, it’s their local sports team, but I was never a big sports guy - WWE was my team through thick and thin. Without them being my tether to the industry as a whole, I just wasn’t interested. It wasn’t a lack of trying, Lucha Underground was cool! I watched it here and there, enjoyed it, but felt nothing. I’d watch ROH, I enjoyed ROH, I paid money to go to multiple ROH shows… but felt nothing.
Then AEW came around and immediately made a splash, felt like the first real competition to WWE since WCW closed, signed some of my favorite wrestlers, and were putting on a show filled with great wrestling and compelling storylines.
I still felt nothing. Yeah, you thought this would be the part where I fangirled over AEW, didn’t you? We’ll get there!
I watched AEW when it launched and it was fine but I just couldn’t feel anything. I even bought a PPV because “alright I’ll check out an exploding ring barbed wire death match,” and then that wound up being the biggest embarrassment in the company’s history. Yeah, the love was gone - WWE smothered it with a pillow and there was nothing any company could do to rekindle that flame and I was at peace with that. The best I could hope to get out of wrestling at my age was the occasional analysis, “hmmm yes, good program and booking. I posit that these two professional wrestlers could increase business for their respective companies.” That was the best I could do: jaded critic who can’t find any joy in the thing he once centered his entire life around.
In 2021, six years after I pretty much divorced myself from wrestling, rumors began circulating that CM Punk was coming back. Punk’s departure from WWE in 2014 was one of the final nails in the wrestling coffin for me and it was clear it was never going to get better. So when I heard one of my favorites may be headed to AEW after years of swearing off wrestling, I thought I’d give AEW another shot.
It wasn’t CM Punk that reignited my love wrestling though, it was Italian pop act Baltimora.
Months before Punk would return, I started watching Dynamite and feeling nothing. Then a week or two would go by and I found myself getting mildly invested. I can’t remember what episode of Dynamite it was, I can’t even remember the match, but when Jurassic Express walked into the arena - with Jungle Boy riding on Luchasaurus’s shoulders and the 1985 one-hit wonder “Tarzan Boy” by Baltimora blaring - I felt something I hadn’t felt in over a decade while watching wrestling: joy. Pure joy.
It is everything wrestling should be: over-the-top, fun, and something people like us just “get” when we see it. Imagine trying to explain this to another adult who has never watched wrestling, “okay so Luke Perry’s son. Yeah the guy from 90210. So Luke Perry’s son, he’s like Tarzan kinda and he rides his dinosaur to the ring who is also a wrestler. No he’s not in that inflatable T-Rex costume, it’s just like a mask. So Luke Perry’s son is Tarzan and rides a masked dinosaur to the ring and this goofy novelty song is playing but the crowd is singing along and then they fight two other dudes. Yes I know it’s fake but it’s awesome, I swear.” They would have you committed.
But we get it. And I still got it. And that kid watching Jake the Snake was still in there. You know that feeling you get when you know you’ve solved a puzzle but you still have a bunch of steps to go through to make it all fall into place? That’s what Jack Perry and “Tarzan Boy” did for me that night and I’ve been a die-hard AEW fan ever since. Much like how I could get into the weeds on the many things that led me to me leaving WWE behind, I could go on all day about the things that I love about AEW - including that CM Punk return… that’ll be an interesting series of posts someday too.
It wasn’t that WWE was my team or my tether, it was the joy. That feeling. That thing we just “get” whether we’re 40 people at an indy show or 1 of 80,103 at a WrestleMania. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that coming out of the nightmare of covid ran parallel with rediscovering wrestling, but that’s also when we learned that wrestling just isn’t wrestling without its audience. And when wrestling finds that exact balance of highs and lows to give an audience exactly the thrill they needed? There’s just nothing else like it in entertainment. Even people with more money than we can even fathom like The Rock and John Cena will slum it with us schlubby wrestling fans to get those goosebumps.
And yeah, a grown man riding his dinosaur while a goofy 80s song plays is the kind of thing that gives me goosebumps. Welcome back, wrestling fans.