Embarrassed by wrestling

[Richard]

Me and a mate grew up on a rough council estate and would do our own backyard wrestling shows in his Mam's garden, you would think the fact we were both huge wrestling fans we would be lambasted for it when the the local chavvy kids found out, completely the opposite. At one point we incorporated said chavs into our shows as characters, it was a bit weird and other worldly looking back, we used this lad called Josh who went by the name ''Simba'' once who insisted on being powerbombed through my mate's Mam's plastic B&M garden table from one of the panel fences, he was the cock of the estate so we wasn't going to decline, of course all of this filtered into high school and everyone knew what we were up to out of school hours, I guess we were the lucky ones looking back. 

 

Only times I've been made to feel less than a human being is when my Step Dad would catch me watching it, he'd sometimes sit on my bed with me and engage in interest, but the usual questions or snide comments would suffice ''He didn't even hit him there'' ''Look he slapped his leg!'' ''Gay this''. So yeah, cheers Dad. 

[Harry Wiseau]

The worst one for me was in a music class in school in 1990. that Christmas I'd been enrolled in the WWF Fanclub as a present and I don't know if any of you were in said Fan Club but if you were you'll remember that as part of the membership pack was a cassette about 10 minutes long of various wrestlers theme tunes. Aaaaanyway, it was my first year of senior school and in the first music lesson we were told that we could for the first few weeks bring in music to play in class while, so excited at the possibility of impressing my new classmates I took the WWF tape with me and gave it to the teacher. The lesson started and she staretd playing cassettes by everyone, just a song or two off each one, I seem to remember Unbelievable by EMF and Size of a Cow being amongst the songs played but I may be wrong, then she said "and this is Harry's tape" followed by a few seconds of silence in which I suddenly realised that this might not have been such a good idea then the "shooba shooba shoobafwaaaa" introduction to Superfly Jimmy Snukas theme tune started, by the third "shooba" everyone in the class was looking at me and if not laughing at least sniggering. I could feel how red my face was, through nerves I started laughing but I didn't manage to calm any of them down, it was such a horrible feeling, if my balls had dropped by this point they would have rapidly gone back inside to hide. Two minutes of that followed by two minutes of Jake the Snakes really rather dull theme tune followed with laughs and sniggers continuing throughout "it's ok" I thought not quite holding back tears but really wishing I'd been hit by a bus instead of making it to school that day "it's the Ultimate Warriors theme next, that'll get everyone on my side even if they don't like wrestling" then at the end of Jake the Snake she said "thank you for that Harry, here's Felicity fuckwits Iron Maiden cassette she has brought in for us" 

 

it was horrible. horrible, horrible, horrible, I can still see their faces now, i'll be on my deathbed wired to machines and drips and that will be the image that comes back to me before I finally am allowed to expire from this cruel, cruel life.

[FourHorsemanAA]

I honestly never gave a shit i was into wrestling and will happily tell everyone if they asked what I did the night previous etc. When you love metal and love wrestling, both come hand in hand for looks, questions and snide comments. Probably dont go a week in work without someone going you still like that fake shite. But fuck it, i tell them 'no, i love it'

[Pinc]

I've never seen the Dr Heiny skit in full because me Da walked in while it was on and fuck watching that utter madness in his company.

 

I remember ficking to a different channel for ages and checking back to see if it was finished just to see Vince all giddy shouting "oh yeah how's that JR?!" and stuff like that. It seemed to go on for about two weeks.

[cobra_gordo]

Most of the lads at work know I watch it and that I used to do commentary and I've never had any stick over it although I don't shout it from the rooftops. They know I've got next Monday off because I'll be up watching Mania but I won't be running in to discuss the results on the Tuesday.

 

I am slightly embarrassed about wearing wrestling shirts but that's because the designs are generally shit and not what a grown man should be wearing. I got my third ever wrestling shirt for my birthday, the Samoa Joe one because it's subtle enough for folk to not ask what it is. Think someone on here (Raid maybe?) once mentioned wearing the Sami Zayn shirt in public and got asked "Is that a ska band?" and had to reply it was wrestling. Don't think I'm quite confident enough to answer in that situation.

[JakeRobertsParoleOfficer]

The worst one for me was in a music class in school in 1990. that Christmas I'd been enrolled in the WWF Fanclub as a present and I don't know if any of you were in said Fan Club but if you were you'll remember that as part of the membership pack was a cassette about 10 minutes long of various wrestlers theme tunes. Aaaaanyway, it was my first year of senior school and in the first music lesson we were told that we could for the first few weeks bring in music to play in class while, so excited at the possibility of impressing my new classmates I took the WWF tape with me and gave it to the teacher. The lesson started and she staretd playing cassettes by everyone, just a song or two off each one, I seem to remember Unbelievable by EMF and Size of a Cow being amongst the songs played but I may be wrong, then she said "and this is Harry's tape" followed by a few seconds of silence in which I suddenly realised that this might not have been such a good idea then the "shooba shooba shoobafwaaaa" introduction to Superfly Jimmy Snukas theme tune started, by the third "shooba" everyone in the class was looking at me and if not laughing at least sniggering. I could feel how red my face was, through nerves I started laughing but I didn't manage to calm any of them down, it was such a horrible feeling, if my balls had dropped by this point they would have rapidly gone back inside to hide. Two minutes of that followed by two minutes of Jake the Snakes really rather dull theme tune followed with laughs and sniggers continuing throughout "it's ok" I thought not quite holding back tears but really wishing I'd been hit by a bus instead of making it to school that day "it's the Ultimate Warriors theme next, that'll get everyone on my side even if they don't like wrestling" then at the end of Jake the Snake she said "thank you for that Harry, here's Felicity fuckwits Iron Maiden cassette she has brought in for us"

 

it was horrible. horrible, horrible, horrible, I can still see their faces now, i'll be on my deathbed wired to machines and drips and that will be the image that comes back to me before I finally am allowed to expire from this cruel, cruel life.

That genuinely made me laugh out loud.

 

Imagine if itd been afew years later and the first track had been HBK's sexyboy (him singing version)

[WyattSheepMask]

Made me laugh too, great stuff Harry.

 

You'd have got away with it if the teacher hadn't named & shamed you.

Also, someone needs to be repacked or brought into NXT as Felicity Fuckwit immediately

[Tiki]

So there's me, visiting "friends of the family" (a family I've never met before) for two weeks, staying at their place in Canada.

 

It's a Monday night so I slide off to the living room and watch Raw to myself.

 

How great did I feel when a lad in this family, not a wrestling fan, came to watch with us moments before Eugene came out... I never thought I could be that embarrassed by stuff other people do.

[mikehoncho]

Can't say I've been bothered by my wrestling fixation, & I'm happy to stand up as a middle-aged bloke & talk about it with anyone who gives a care for a moment.

[WyattSheepMask]

I don't broadcast that I'm a fan, but I don't shy away from it either.

Someone I work with randomly asked me if I watched because she had just started watching it after starting to go out with someone. We talk about here and there but if she never asked me I'd have never said anything.

The wife isn't bothered by it in the slightest. She has her tv shows that she watches (The Vampire Diaries, The Blacklist et al), I have my wrestling, comic books etc. I've never made her sit down and watch The Definative Ric Flair Collection or anything like that.

I'll wear a wrestling tshirt every now & again just doing the day to day stuff, but more likely if I'm going to a show or a gig. I'm not ashamed to wear them or anything, at least it says something about me as opposed to wearing whatever is trendy. I've always been a jeans & tshirt type of guy

[Bus Surfer]

I've just changed jobs and am currently going through a 18 week training course. I've had The Monday and Tuesday after Mania booked off for the past month so was a little alarmed this morning to find they'd penciled me in for a face 2 face session on the 3rd of April. The email said the dates were pretty rigid unless you had an extremely valid reason for not attending...

 

Ashamed to say, I was prepared to lie at all costs, although thankfully, they never enquired what I was doing and found me another session.

[Au]

I've always been pretty open about it. Other than the usual jokes made during secondary school, I've rarely encountered any real embarrassment but I do know a lot of other fans. My real life social group is full of them and we all go to a ton of indy shows together.

 

However, there is one time when I felt bloody awful about it. Me and my ex had broken up but were still living together. She'd met another guy on a night out pretty soon afterwards and I vividly remember going to ask her what she wanted for dinner one day and catching a snippet of a conversation whilst she was on the phone to her mum; "Well, he does still like wrestling but at least he just thinks it's a laugh! ... Yeah, he doesn't take it seriously at all!" which suggested to me that my interest in wrestling was such a problem that it bothered her parents to the extent that her mum had brought it up as a good reason we were no longer together. This is a girl who used to watch wrestling with me and my housemates in uni all the time, came to shows with us when WWE toured, even watched ECW One Night Stand without me when I was on holiday with some friends yet apparently agreed with her parents that me taking a passionate interest in men pretending to fight each other was black mark against me.

 

So worried was I about other girls finding this to be an issue that when I started dating someone else later that year and we had the conversation about embarrassing things you don't want to admit to but should get out of the way early on in the relationship, I falteringly admitted to being a wrestling fan and her response was "Oh, is that all?! Mine is that I cheated on my first boyfriend... but I've felt guilty about it ever since."

[Devon Malcolm]

I'm not embarrassed by wrestling.

 

Wrestling fans, on the other hand....

[Roy]

I used to be a big wrestling fan in the early 90s but my interest waned by 1993. By 1994, I’d occasionally catch WCW on ITV (I didn’t have Sky) and by about 1996 I was pretty sure watching wrestling at 14 years old is a bit lame. I was more interesting in girls and football. In early 1997 we got Cable & Wireless and had access to the Sky channels. I randomly caught a replay of WrestleMania XIII in early 1997 and that Bret Hart v Steve Austin match and my interest in wrestling was awoken. Part of the appeal was to see what had happened to some of the characters that I had grown up with a few years prior. Who stayed in WWF? Who went to WCW? Is Ultimate Warrior dead? These were questions I’d wanted to find the answers to.

 

This was difficult though – we didn’t have the internet at that point and all of my now 15 year old friends thought wrestling was lame. So I started buying wrestling magazines where I could. I vividly remember going to a particular newsagent near the church I went to and casually browsing PWI’s 1997 Year in Review, The Wrestler, Wrestle America, WWF Raw and so forth that were stacked on the shelf just before the top along with the mainstream sports titles. I’d always envisage a situation where someone I know would walk in and I pretend to be reading a football magazine instead, but thankfully that situation never arose.

 

The shopkeeper at this newsagent – a nice elderly Indian bloke – would comment on the magazines that I purchased. He’d cheerfully call me “ahh, wrestling!” every month I’d go in there because we once shared a conversation about it. He thought it was boxing and didn’t really have a concept of what wrestling is. Anyways – one day after church I went down to the shop but there was a bit of a queue that stretched to the narrow area where the magazine rack was. His wife was on the till instead of him and she was pretty slow. I bided my time and eyed up the newer mags – PWI, Power Slam, WCW Magazine – whilst being conscious that I didn’t want to reach for them too early, lest my secret wrestling fandom be exposed in front of people I may know. When church-going folk think you’re uncool, that’s really saying something.

 

So when the time was right, I made my move and reached for the latest issue of Power Slam. I’m sure as everyone who read the magazine during the attitude era of before the proliferation of the internet can attest to, Power Slam was a great read and the sort of thing you would look forward to every month. Just as I had grasped the issue, I shriek from the till turned everybody’s collective heads in the queue and indeed the shop squarely to me. “HEY! NO! YOU CAN’T TAKE THAT! THAT’S NOT FOR YOU. I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING” said the wife of the nice elderly Indian bloke. I turned in horror as the entire shop was now watching me. “THAT’S FOR ADULTS ONLY.” Evidently, she thought I was reaching for the top shelf magazines. In my barely dropped voice, I squeaked out in defiance “No, it’s wrestling! Your husband calls me wrestling” as I showed her the cover of Power Slam, which had an obviously semi-clad wrestler on the front. I joined the back of the queue and waited in line until it was my turn to pay, utterly embarrassed and wanting the ground to swallow me up. I would have rather the entire shop thought I was a porn baron instead. She offered no apology when I got to the counter, I offered another iteration of my point that I buy wrestling magazines.

 

Was a good issue of Power Slam though.

[Astro Hollywood]

The worst one for me was in a music class in school in 1990. that Christmas I'd been enrolled in the WWF Fanclub as a present and I don't know if any of you were in said Fan Club but if you were you'll remember that as part of the membership pack was a cassette about 10 minutes long of various wrestlers theme tunes. Aaaaanyway, it was my first year of senior school and in the first music lesson we were told that we could for the first few weeks bring in music to play in class while, so excited at the possibility of impressing my new classmates I took the WWF tape with me and gave it to the teacher. The lesson started and she staretd playing cassettes by everyone, just a song or two off each one, I seem to remember Unbelievable by EMF and Size of a Cow being amongst the songs played but I may be wrong, then she said "and this is Harry's tape" followed by a few seconds of silence in which I suddenly realised that this might not have been such a good idea then the "shooba shooba shoobafwaaaa" introduction to Superfly Jimmy Snukas theme tune started, by the third "shooba" everyone in the class was looking at me and if not laughing at least sniggering. I could feel how red my face was, through nerves I started laughing but I didn't manage to calm any of them down, it was such a horrible feeling, if my balls had dropped by this point they would have rapidly gone back inside to hide. Two minutes of that followed by two minutes of Jake the Snakes really rather dull theme tune followed with laughs and sniggers continuing throughout "it's ok" I thought not quite holding back tears but really wishing I'd been hit by a bus instead of making it to school that day "it's the Ultimate Warriors theme next, that'll get everyone on my side even if they don't like wrestling" then at the end of Jake the Snake she said "thank you for that Harry, here's Felicity fuckwits Iron Maiden cassette she has brought in for us" 

 

it was horrible. horrible, horrible, horrible, I can still see their faces now, i'll be on my deathbed wired to machines and drips and that will be the image that comes back to me before I finally am allowed to expire from this cruel, cruel life.

 

I could barely make it through this post, like some Vietnam burn-out listening to another poor sap talk about taking a flamethrower to an orphanage while having flashbacks about all the shooting I'd done out there myself. It wasn't wrestling with me, but very similar. We had a 'music festival' every year in seniors, where every class in years 7-9 would have to perform two songs on stage. By perform, I mean sing, and dance. In front of each other.

 

One song was chosen by the school -- something traditional, and usually sang with a racist accent, like "daylight come" -- that we'd all have to do, while the other was picked by each individual class. The previous year, our free pick was Surfin' USA, to which we mimed air guitars like cool Americans. Another group had picked Elton John's Sacrifice, and their stunning choreography saw them cross themselves -- "spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch" -- on every utterance of the word sacrifice itself. It's said a lot of times. There was a lot of crossing.

 

Anyway, selections were put forward in music class, where, I hate to break it to you, despite my status on here as board-hunk, I was not one of the cool kids. The football lads with curtain haircuts, and the smoke-smelling girls who went out with them, could barely see the likes of me from atop the social ladder. I was almost subterranean, with my curly, Eddie Large hair, fat, Eddie Large physique, and textbooks covered in posters of sweaty men ripped out of the Apter mags. And by now, the carefree air-guitaring by all of previous years music festivals had given way to detached cool and eye-rollling now that the pubes were kicking in.

 

The casettes containing the perspective tracks were pushed into an old tape-deck on a fat amp. I'd brought one in, hopeful of being picked. "This one would be funny," I remember thinking, almost as much into comedy as I was wrestling. But then the first girl, Emma, stuck her tape on, and stayed up the front of the class, by the tape recorder as it played, like some DJ at Ministry of Sound, where one would take the entire kudos for a good selection. Or the blame for a shit one. She stayed all the way to the end. Heads nodded in approval. Curtain haircuts swayed to the beat.

 

It was the early 90's, and cool kids were into stuff that was suggestive of being grown up; of sex and drugs, and things your parents would hate. Stuff they probably played in the nightclubs the lads had almost certainly never been into. EMF, and bands like the Lemonheads. I think Emma's tape was The Shamen. Someone else stuck Guns n Roses in. The world's most dangerous band. Then it was my turn. Up to the front I went, suddenly surer I'd ever been of anything that this was a terrible idea; trudging like I was walking the Green Mile. I pressed play.

 

 

I rode that fucker out right to the end of the track, nervously pacing and trying to look cool by half-sitting on the edge of the teacher's desk. Every face wore a "what the fuck is this?" Scorn and sneers. For three long minutes. And far beyond.

 

I can't remember what we performed that year. But it definitely wasn't a satirical rap featuring a rubber puppet of Roy Hattersley.

 

I learned nothing. The next year, I hijacked an entire drama lesson to 'perform' Python's Every Sperm is Sacred, including the props I'd made of giant, cardboard sperms and a jar of fake cum. You can take a good guess at how it went down.