Passion For The Business: Pro Wrestling From A True Fan's Perspective

 What’s the earliest memory you have about wrestling?

You may or may not like wrestling, but it seems to me that everybody would have at least one instance in their life when they wrapped their arms around somebody’s neck and put someone in a tight if not playful headlock. Or maybe you were running towards someone and you put your arm out and cloths lined someone to the ground. Be it with a sibling, a friend, or an enemy.

I guess I would have to say one of my earliest memories pertaining to wrestling occurred when I was around 10 or 11 years old. I was in Sunday school, of all places, learning about the Bible. I remember that daily lesson being about brothers Cain and Able. Being that we were so young, they had illustrations of pictures to go along with the lesson. I remember seeing a picture of Able, holding up his finest animals as a gesture of a sacrifice to GOD.

Meanwhile in the background, his brother Cain angrily stood, holding a big stick and ready to whoop his brothers butt.

Now I know that what happened between the brothers could actually be considered murder, that thought simply just didn’t enter my mind at the time.

Instead I remember thinking “man, that looks like me and my brothers”.

Not that I’ve ever had any homicidal thoughts about snuffing out my brothers, but when your growing up with 3 other brothers around the same age, you can almost always count on a fight breaking out on a daily basis.

Not long after that, we were exposed to our first wrestling match courtesy of the NWA.

I remember seeing a young brute who went by the name of Lex Luger taking on a much smaller flamboyant Ric Flair.

Being that it was so long ago, I’m a little hazy on who actually won the fight. However, I do remember an instance when Luger lifted Flair up high over his head. He walked around the ring holding Flair up, bench pressing him up and down before finally slamming him hard onto the mat.

“Wow, this is awesome” I remember saying. We were instantly hooked.

It didn’t take us long to convert our basement into a miniature wrestling ring.

There we started learning and practicing every move we could think of. Body slams, back breakers, neck breakers, choke slams, cloths lines, drop kicks, leg drops, figure four leg locks, boston crab, moonsaults, suplexs, full nelsons, flying elbows, bear hugs, sleeper holds, etc, etc…

Pile drivers and DDTs were off limits, as we deemed them too risky to maneuver. The power bomb wasn’t a known move to us at the time, as that would probably have been prohibited as well.

It didn’t take long for the neighborhood kids to get in on the act.

Before long, we were staging all out wrestling matches.

At this particular time of our lives, we were being raised by our then 50 some year old grandmother. She would often work daytime double shifts to support us, leaving us unsupervised and free to do whatever we damn well wanted to.

And boy did we ever take advantage.

It wasn’t uncommon that we would have 10 to 15 people crammed into our basement to get in on the action.

We really went all out with it too.

We had our own referees, our own ring announcers, our own fans. How ridiculous is that?

The ring consisted of thick foam rubber mats put together to give us just the right amount of space to maneuver in, surrounded by walls on 2 sides, and 3 sets of strong sturdy rope to enclose the other 2 sides.

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