Watching wrestling for the first time

[ReturnOfTheMack]

I remember watching WOS at my grandparents when I was young. I'd guess around 1985ish.

[Your Fight Site]

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How old were you when you first started watching wrestling?

I’d say about 9. I started watching it in primary school in the late ‘90s (I left primary school in 2000). I’d caught an episode of WCW Worldwide on Channel 5, first match I saw was Sting versus someone, and was just immediately enamoured by a face painted guy picking up and dropping another guy in what looked like a boxing ring.

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What's your first wrestling memory?

Guess I just covered it above! Although I think I knew of Hulk Hogan before I started watching wrestling. I seem to remember watching Thunder in Paradise at a really young age, so I’d have watched Hogan before I knew he was a professional wrestler.

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For the younger fans, how much 80's and early 90's stuff have you seen?

Not a lot of ‘80s stuff other than video packages and that Silvervision intro. More ‘90s stuff as I watched back WCW, and had a load of WCW videos. Again, I’d say the majority of the ‘90s WWF I’ve seen would have again been through video packages (DX tank rolling into WCW, any one?)

[Grecian]

How old were you when you watched your first wrestling match?

Add me to the WOS gang back in the mid-80s. My grandparents watched it and all I knew was that if we were round at theirs and it was on, there was no point speaking to my Grandad. I didn't quite get the appeal of it, it just seemed to be a lot of fat guys in pants slapping each other with rows of old ladies watching. I didn't take much notice, but I liked Mark Rollerball Rocco, on the basis of his name alone.

What's your first wrestling memory?

When I was 10, my Gran had a brain hemorrage which nearly killed her (seriously, she had the last rites read to her in hospital, only to make a Cena-esque comeback and was discharged six weeks later back home). As she was bedridden, my Grandad got Sky and the very first WWF wrestling I ever saw was the Survivor Series in 1990. Even at that age, I was into darker, gothic stuff and as soon as I saw Undertaker, that was it. I made my grandparents tape every WWF show and watched them religiously. As a slight addendum, my Gran passed away a couple of years ago, leaving my Grandad as my sole surviving grandparent (he's 86 now). He still watches WWE now, even if he does cite Dolph Ziggler as his favourite at the moment. I've probably got him to thank for my lifelong fandom (my Grandad, not Dolph).

How much 80s and 90s stuff have you seen?

Whilst technically I've seen most of it the first time it was on, I do revisit quite regularly. I tend to rewatch stuff in the lead up to PPVs, in the run-up to the Rumble, I'll rewatch Flair in 92, or Mania VI or X in Mania season. I keep meaning to watch the old NWA and WCW PPVs but never seem to quite find time to do it. When I got the Network, the first matches I went and rewatched was Bret vs Bulldog at Wembley and Hogan vs Warrior for Mania 6.

[W35ty]

My first time watching wrestling was 1994 Royal Rumble. Owen kicking Bret's leg didn't mean much to me because i'd missed the build up for the turn but it turned out to be the best feud.

My first memory though is my friends at primary school were talking about WM 9 and that Bret had no chance against a sumo wrestler.

I don't watch wrestling now.

[garynysmon]

I have a vague memory of watching World of Sport with my Grandad, but having only been born in 1984 I can't have been very old even at the end of the show's run. 

I think I was aware of the WWF even before I even watched any of the product myself, kids starting to talk about it at school and swap cards etc. My first recollection was, while staying at my cousin's house, a Demolition promo and a Randy Savage (I think) match which I gather would have to have been on a WWF Superstars episode from 1990. 

We didn't get Sky until 1993 so was dependant on tapes and WCW on ITV until then. I'd record the shows and watch them with my Grandad, who was known as the Wrestling/Boxing fan in the family. 

My interest didn't wane much even though friends at school started dropping Wrestling like a bad habit by late 93 and early 94. It was only when I went to university in 2002 and lost access to Sky etc that I got out of the habit and am not sure I've ever watched avidly on a weekly basis since then.

There have obviously been peaks that have grabbed my interest but week to week? Not really. 

As regards older stuff, I've seen every WWF and most WCW PPV's between 1984 and 2002 or so. After 2002 it all starts turning into a blur and I couldn't tell you what year anything happened.

[Supremo]

I was aware of it, and I remember having some WCW toys as a super young kid, but I didn't really pay any attention until we were flicking through the channels one afternoon and Royal Rumble 1996 came on. I was ten years old. Shawn super-kicking Diesel out of the ring was enough to hook me and my brother, so we started following Raw weekly. A big bunch of the kids in my family then stayed up to watch Wrestlemania 12 live. Everyone bar me fell asleep almost immediately. I was completely hooked though. Piper and Goldust smashing fuck out of each other blew my mind. There was no coming back.

[returner82]

I'm 36 now (born in 1982), and I remember vaguely stuff like seeing Big Daddy and Kendo Nagasaki on World of Sport (specifically the time when Kendo got his mask ripped off by Mark Rocco) because my dad called my mom in to see it when she was making some food in the kitchen (they'd watched for years). I picked up the Hulk Hogan and Iron Sheik thumb wrestlers from a cheap shop as well, so knew those two. My dad borrowed a video copy of WrestleMania VI from a workmate, so watched at least the main event because I knew who Hogan was and was disappointed he lost and couldn't really grasp that the other guy was a good guy even though they were both fighting.

 

Where I really consider myself to have become a fan was in March/April 1991. We had Sky TV installed at our house and I spent all day studying the satellite listings of the thicker TV book, seeing what cartoon shows I liked were on and when. My main thing at the time was Teenage Mutant Ninja/Hero Turtles, which was on the DJ Kat Show. I knew it would be on at half four in the afternoon, so was pretty disappointed when the installation only finished at five to five, meaning I only got to see the last few minutes of the season four episode "Splinter Vanishes", which featured the character Leatherhead, who I knew of from the action figure range but hadn't seen in an episode on the BBC yet, which was pretty exciting.

 

Later that day I had access to the remote when my folks were away from the TV and found Prime Time Wrestling on one of the sports channels, probably Eurosport. It was the episode from the gym with the Nasty Boys and the WBF guys, with Bobby Heenan challenging one of the black bodybuilders to a posedown and feigning an injury when he was clearly outclassed. Between that and the matches and the presentation I got it straight away and saw the appeal, whether it suffered claims of being fake or set up.

 

Prime Time led to Superstars led to Challenge led to the repeat of WrestleMania VII led to UK Rampage led to WCW Worldwide led to seeing All Star Promotions shows at the Prince of Wales Theatre in Cannock. The love of it was pretty thorough as far as anything I could access until the Montreal screw job, which sullied my interest in it. Still watched, but getting the internet made it easier to read about the shows instead of watching them. Where it really became something I wasn't into was about 2002 or 2003, probably when the WWF became WWE. Pretty much always watched WrestleMania until the streak ended, but even then my heart wasn't into it.

 

Today I read and post things on here, Scott Keith's site, one or two other recap sites, and listen to Cornette's podcast and check out a few shoot interview channels on YouTube. I keep a subscription to the Network to check out older stuff (mostly pre-2000).

[BomberPat]

Earliest wrestling memories were, aside from Hogan being a ubiquitous media presence, of the Road Warriors, I had an LOD pin badge I bought at a village craft fair - I can't have been watching wrestling long when I found it, so I don't even know if I'd seen an LOD match at that point.
I was a big video game nerd, and this would have been shortly after Mortal Kombat was released on the Mega Drive, and the live-action motion capture in that really blew me away, and made me really excited to think that the characters in this fighting game were real people - when the guy who played Sub Zero showed up on Gamesmaster, in full costume, that was the coolest thing in the world to me. So I think I was naturally drawn towards wrestling, and particularly the characters that looked most like they were that sort of video game character - the LOD, later Bull Nakano and Luna, and obvious character/physical types like Yokozuna. If I'd seen Glacier and Mortis back then I'd have shat. Beat 'em ups, wrestling and Power Rangers, that was my early '90s trinity.

As much as I got really into wrestling back then, I can't have watched it all that consistently - while my brother got somewhat into it with me, and we used to invent characters (mostly blatant rip-offs of WWF or video game characters) and play at wrestling, my older brother and my parents hated it, and I can't really picture when I'd have been able to get in front of the TV to actually watch it. The few distinct memories of watching it back then were of the Bret Hart/Jerry Lawler feud and, later, my favourite wrestlers being Duke Droese and the 123 Kid. Around the time I stopped watching I can remember hating Goldust's vignettes - though whether they were videos hyping his debut, or just promos he was doing later, I don't recall.

I must have seen the 1996 Royal Rumble match, as - of all things - I remembered the Headhunters. Watching it back years later, they're only in there for about a minute apiece, but in my head they had been a big deal - one of the characters my brother and I had invented was an identical twin sumo tag team, and I think in my memory I'd conflated the Headhunters and Yokozuna as one and the same, and had this idea that one brother had been eliminated, but got back in, and the referees didn't know which one to kick out, and it was a big thing. It was probably just that Yoko was in there and I wasn't paying attention.

The latest memory I can think of from that first run of watching wrestling would be Bret Hart getting superkicked while he was in a wheelchair. I must have stopped watching around then. I have a feeling my older brother finally convinced me it was all fake and gay, and I moved on, though I don't remember being particularly upset about it, I probably just got into something else instead. As far as I can remember, I didn't have any friends at school that watched it, so without other kids talking about it or playing at it, there wouldn't have been much keeping me interested. 

 

Fast-forward to 2000, my family have moved to Jersey, new school, new life, new friends. The demo disc of Official Playstation Magazine one month features WWF Smackdown. I play it, and get really into it. I end up buying the game and it becomes my gateway drug back into wrestling. Half the school are into it, so it's easy to follow - I only know the characters in the game, but people try and explain to me what's going on, who everyone is, how it works. A month or two down the line, I find the WWF on Sky, and watch. It's a highlight show, just after King of the Ring 2000, and I'm disappointed that the only wrestler I recognise from the game is Val Venis, and he doesn't look anything like the game version. Who's this Kurt Angle scrub? What's a Rikishi? Whatever, I check in again a little later. I like The Undertaker, but don't believe it's the same guy I was watching when I was a kid - he looks completely different and, besides, he must be ancient now. Summerslam 2000 ends up being the first PPV I watch, and I'm absolutely hooked.
I want to consume as much wrestling as I possibly can - I buy every magazine, every book, every video I can get my hands on, I borrow tapes from friends, I buy more video games, I read Mick Foley's book, which introduces me to ECW, to deathmatches, to Japan, and everything I find leads me to something more. I end up e-fedding, playing TNM7, tape trading, waiting half an hour for a grainy 30 second clip of a Hayabusa match to download, everything I can manage to scratch that itch. To this day, it gives me a little bit of a buzz to find something genuinely new - obscurities, novelties, older footage than I thought existed, matches I never knew made tape, whatever, just anything  that can bring back that sense of discovery.

 

These days, I have less time to watch wrestling, but it probably plays a larger role in my life than it ever has. I try to attend at least one indie show a month, a lot of my background viewing when I'm at home will be just to put on an old show, and I've been refereeing and helping book a promotion for the past six years, so it's taken over my life in a lot of ways, and that booking part of my brain is something I find difficult to switch off. I find myself so out of touch with music, movies and TV these days that I often joke with friends still more heavily involved in the local music scene that, since I stopped DJing, wrestling has just eaten that part of my brain.

In spite of all that, I've never been less interested in what WWE are doing. I haven't watched their TV in years, and aside from Evolution, haven't watched a PPV in months. I enjoy NXT, but even then, I don't get the feeling that I need to watch every episode any more, and I barely keep up with the results of RAW or Smackdown. 

[RoryFice]

Cheers for all the responses guys!

I still can't help but think whether a purely modern fan would see some of the 80s and 90s WWE network content as a treasure trove of what's to me the "classic" stuff from my own childhood, or simply very dated wrestling in comparison with the 21st century product. I'd hope the former but I'm not sure.

[BomberPat]

A cop-out answer, but it depends on the fan. When I got back into it in 2000, I'd gladly watch anything, because it was all new to me. 

My ex-girlfriend had never watched wrestling before we got together, remembered it from the Attitude Era and kids at her school liking it and hated it, but I got her into it by finding some stuff she'd like - firstly CHIKARA, then the 1992 Royal Rumble, and some bits and pieces of classic Joshi, and she started watching WWE shows with me.
She ended up doing odd jobs, working the merch table etc, at CIWW shows, and some of the guys would tease her for not getting some of their references to '90s wrestling, so she ended up trying to watch every PPV on the Network in chronological order to fill in the blanks. No idea how far she got, but she ended up - despite having started watching wrestling in 2010/11 - with Jimmy Valiant and Roddy Piper as two of her favourite wrestlers. 

On the other hand, we had a lad who started training with us at 16, who's now wrestling in Tennessee. His knowledge of wrestling was limited solely to modern day WWE, and the odd thing he'd read about online, so mostly any NJPW matches that made waves. He was absolutely fixated on becoming a wrestler, with working in WWE his only goal, yet had no curiosity whatsoever to seek out anything beyond that which he'd already seen. He's the sort of person who should have seen the Network as a treasure trove, but it seemingly meant nothing to him.

[Grecian]

On 12/12/2018 at 11:25 PM, RoryFice said:

Cheers for all the responses guys!

I still can't help but think whether a purely modern fan would see some of the 80s and 90s WWE network content as a treasure trove of what's to me the "classic" stuff from my own childhood, or simply very dated wrestling in comparison with the 21st century product. I'd hope the former but I'm not sure.

My niece is 18 and loves WWE, Seth Rollins and Dean Ambrose in particular. She has no interest in any of the older WWE or non-WWE content on the Network. I did get her to watch Bret vs Bulldog and the Taker / Mankind HIAC but she's not actively gone back and sought out any more 'old' stuff to watch at all. Saying that, though, she considers anything prior to 2011 to be old school.

[eugenespeed]

I can't remember not watching it. World of Sport was on every Saturday so I can't give you an age. 

First memory is I remember King Ben vs his son, but I can't remember his son's name. 

[dex316]

First memory is buying Ultimate Warrior and Greg Valentine figures at a car boot sale (are those still a thing?) in the early 90s. I would have been 6 or 7 probably. I don't know if I'd seen any wrestling at that point, or if I just thought they looked cool. It was these ones:

I remember on the last day of term kids were allowed to take toys in to school. I wanted to take my wrestling figures. We didn't have a lot of money, so my mum made me a ring ouf of cardboard, toilet roll and pipe cleaners. She is really artsy and it looked great. Until I turned up at school and some other kid had the proper WWF Hasbro ring. Guess who everyone wanted to play with...

I can't really remember the first time I watched it, but like a few others, I only got into it properly when we got Sky - in November 1999. I'd just turned 14. We'd gone on holiday that summer to Lanzarote and the hotel there had Sky so I'd seen a few bits and pieces (it was around the build up to Summerslam 99). And I'd tried to follow the WCW shows on a Friday night on 5. As soon as we got Sky I started watching the highlights shows until I found Raw and Smackdown and we were off to the races. Apart from a 6 month break in 2011 and 3 months this summer I've been a solid viewer ever since.

I've gone back and watched quite a lot of shows from the 96-99 era but not much from before that - just a few early Wrestlemanias, Summerslam 92 etc. When I first got in to wrestling I really didn't like the earlier stuff and thought it was slow and boring, but as I've got older (I'm 33) I've started to appreciate it more. But I just don't have time to go back and watch older stuff with what feels like 100+ hours of new product every week. Sigh.

[Fatty Facesitter]

On 12/9/2018 at 10:56 PM, RoryFice said:

Questions for the UKFFers:

How old were you when you first started watching wrestling?

What's your first wrestling memory?

For the younger fans, how much 80's and early 90's stuff have you seen?

First caught a broadcast when I was around 9/10 - it would have been while watching Cartoon Network up to 9pm before it would switch over to TNT and Nitro would come on. I have a really vague recollection of someone who looked like Sid Vicious wrestling a jobber and asking my Mother Facesitter what this was. Her words wer “it’s a bit like fighting, but they don’t do it properly.” Which to be fair was quite accurate!

I became a “full time” fan from 2000 so I didn’t catch a lot of the 80’s/90’s retro bits until much later, probably mid to late 00’s when YouTube made it much more accessible. I often wonder what younger fans who started watching in this decade think when they look back at some of the Attitude Era type stuff now - I imagine they’ll look at it totally differently to how we viewed things that were historical for our generation, especially when so many of the Attitude Era performers are still revered and in some respects a key part of the WWE fabric, i.e everyone still bangs on about The Rock, Stone Cold etc, and guys like Undertaker, Triple H etc have still been going part time for a few years extra. 

[Otto Dem Wanz]

23 hours ago, eugenespeed said:

I can't remember not watching it. World of Sport was on every Saturday so I can't give you an age. 

First memory is I remember King Ben vs his son, but I can't remember his son's name. 

Prince Ben?