Breaking a Routine: A Loss of Love For Pro Wrestling?

(Photo by Peter Kramer/Getty Images)

It's crazy what happens when you get older.

Things happen, such as your family starting to treat you as an adult, being able to move on to bigger and better things like college, having to get a job, and even outgrowing certain things you never dreamed you would live without.

I was one of what seemed like a billion kids a decade ago that watched every second of every minute of every hour of every RAW, SmackDown!, and Heat, never missing a second to make a food run or go to the bathroom.

If there were Pay Per Views my parents wouldn't let me order, I would make the sacrifice of watching a fuzzy and scrambled picture just so I can hear Good Ol' J.R. yell, "DID YOU SEE THAT?!?!" when I clearly did not.

I would buy every action figure, and spend sometimes months or even years creating custom sets, shows, and rivalries, thinking that I was about as good at creating shows as the creative team was.

The years continued to roll by. 2000. 2001. 2002. 2003.

When it came down to 2004, instead of losing touch with wrestling like about a half a billion of those aforementioned kids did, I continued to plow on, becoming an even bigger fan than before.

I'll just say this to give you an example: During that time period between '03 and '04 my family had moved and we lost our cable TV service for a year.

Instead of just sticking with SmackDown!, which was/is on broadcast TV, I pleaded and begged my uncle to tape RAW every week and give me the tapes the next day so I never miss a show.

My VHS tapes eventually stacked up to the ceiling (since I would never tape over a show), and I decided that instead of praying that they don't fall down on me while I slept, I would get a DVD Recorder and convert them all to something a bit more compact.

That means I spent two months of my free time watching every show over again while the conversion took place, even making sure not to record the commercials.

This continued until we moved in 2006 and I fortunately got cable, making the idea of taping the shows ridiculous to most.

But I still continued to tape them anyway. Not SmackDown!, but just RAW, every single week. Granted, the show quality was pretty bad at this time, but I just felt that it was my routine to do this, and I had to continue.

It was something I never thought would change.

That is, until 2007.

I really don't know what happened. I don't even have a date for it. But one week I missed the show for one reason or another and decided that I was actually allowed to miss it without the sky falling and crushing me.

It was a small thing, but something that would open a huge hole.

Eventually I ran out of those recordable DVDs, and instead of running to the store to buy more like I would have in previous months, I decided that it was even okay to watch the show without recording it.

Then it was the length of the shows that I grew weary about next.

Maybe I'd watch the first half of the show, then decide to record the second half while I do something more productive like sleep or go on the computer.

After that, I'd continue to do the same thing with watching, followed by recording what I don't watch. However, after recording it, I started to either skip through most of what I recorded, or would just flat-out forget to even watch it.

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