WrestleMania 28: It Is More Than Just the Biggest Wrestling Show of the Year

As a die-hard wrestling fan, WrestleMania is a holiday.

It is marked on my calendar as soon as it is announced and the anticipation builds and builds as the months go by.

As a die-hard, mark, member of the Internet wrestling community, whatever you want to call me, sometimes I get so caught up in the wrestling aspect of the show that I sometimes lose sight of everything that surrounds it.

I have my gripes about some of the ways WWE handles things inside the ring and on television, but when it comes to putting on an event like WrestleMania, there isn't much to complain about. They just seem to do everything right.

Twenty years ago, WrestleMania was simply the biggest wrestling show of the year.

Now, it is a week-long event surrounded by community events and festivals among other forms of pageantry.

It was known as the Super Bowl of wrestling purely, based off the enormity of the event itself. Now, the Super Bowl's week-long hype and overtaking of a city is only rivaled by the likes of WrestleMania.

WWE does so many things throughout the course of the week that you almost forget that this is all for a wrestling show.

I fancy myself as a bit of a wrestling historian—an amateur one, but a historian nonetheless.

From my perspective, it's amazing to see how far this business has come. From bingo halls and National Guard armories to 70,000-seat stadiums and taking over entire cities for a week.

And we're not talking a small town in middle America. We're talking about some of the biggest cities in the U.S.

I don't want this to turn into a PSA for all of the good things WWE does, because they are definitely capable of doing things wrong, especially when it comes to booking and creating new stars.

But it's hard to knock what they pull off with this mega event. You can tell that time and money was spent to make sure the fans get a great presentation.

I realize reading challenges and other things of that nature are not catered to us adult fans, but it's pretty cool to see such a festive atmosphere for what is at the end of the day simply a wrestling show.

It's become so big that the entire wrestling business tries to capitalize off the shear number of wrestling fans attending the event.

Just look at Ring of Honor, for example. ROH is nowhere near wrong for doing a show in the same city as WrestleMania. They're actually very smart for it. but it just goes to show the scale of a show like WrestleMania.

The event itself aside, the logistics of the show is off the charts. They bring in millions of dollars to the respective economy, thousands of people into the city who travel from around the world.

At the end of the day, seeing the buzz that is created for the wrestling business, it makes me proud to say that I am fan.