Wrestling Lab goes online

Hello everybody and welcome to my new blog - Wrestling Laboratory

It's the Friday before Wrestlemania XXXI and I'll talk about that later on, but we all know Roman Reigns will probably get the title from Brock Lesner, even though many people hate the idea, Sting is expected to bash Triple H's ribs in with a bat and Daniel Bryan could make people start caring for the IC belt again... Well at least that's what I've been reading on many other posts, blogs, reports.

Now I have to say that until September 2013 I've completely forgotten about WWE - sounds crazy, right? But it got me hooked again.

It's been in the late nighties, right in the middle of the Monday night wars, when WCW was winning, that I stopped following pro-wrestling all together.

So how it all started:

I started watching pro wrestling in 1987 with my parents. Being a child in a "communist state" I started growing up with 4 TV channels (and two of them were foreign which I didn't understand, but liked the cartoons a lot). They were all public and "serious" TV, none of them showing anything like wrestling.

But in 1987 we got cable and the variety of channels grew up to 12!!! Among them there was the Euro sport that aired some catch-as-you-catch-can shows from Britain. It was time of Bud Spencer slapstick comedy (I guess most US readers have never heard of the Italian spaghetti western stars Bud Spencer and Terence Hill, but they're huge in Europe... there's no real equivalent for them in the US movie roster). So I loved first pro wrestling I saw... and when WWF started airing (on 3 of those 12 channels) I got hooked even if I still haven't understood a word of the commentary.

It was the era of Hulkamania, Macho Madness and Ultimate Warriors. Andre the Giant and the Heart Attack were the talk of the town and Jake the Snake made many of us realize - yes, there are people that do have snakes as pets (something unheard off in Yugoslavia).

The number of channels airing WWF got reduced to 1 (in German, which I started understanding by then) and no other promotion was shown, until TNT in Europe started showing Monday Nitro. I loved TNT for the great classical movies and now I got to see pro-wrestling on it - and in English (which I preferred over German) as a foreign language - NICE! At the same time Euro sport started showing WSW (I think it was New Japan... with great matches such as: Pegasus Kid a.k.a. Chris Benoit vs. Jushin Thunder Liger or Scott Norton vs. Big Van Vader).

But who were these guys? I didn't know them... oh, wait, there was that heel Ric Flair that fought Macho Man at one of the wrestlemanias... never did figure out why he was talked about so much.

Well, now I figured out there were several pro-wrestling promotions and that the one I got to see on TNT is featuring more and more characters I got to miss in the WW(still)F. There was Okerlund, there was Heenan, and there were wrestles like Scott Hall and Kevin Nash coming in (it was the beginning of the Outsider era). Naturally Hulk Hogan and Macho Man were already there, and the Warrior came in and Bret Heart (nope, I never heard of the Montreal Screw job until September 2013)... so I started following WCW for some time and lost all interest in wrestling quite soon  (as each show ended with some stupid gang take over the set and no matched ended except with interference).

So missing out on the attitude era and returning to wrestling after Wrestlemania XXIX was a huge leap into the WWE universe (first I had to read why the name changed).

Getting to know new characters and looking at them as a grown up this time, reconnecting to the childhood nostalgia, I found it an interesting world indeed.

Why would anybody like John Cena was beyond me and I really enjoyed the fact that the crowd went down the middle on him.

One of the stars I could understand and like  although he was supposed to be a heel, though, was Bray Wyatt. And when I tuned into Wrestlemania XXX and saw Hogan opening it - good old days were back! I even saw Undertaker got beaten for the first time at Wrestlemania - so I didn't really miss much. I still saw some of his early wrestlemanias where he started setting up the streak and now I saw the streak broken - by Lesnar, which did seem convincing.

And with all I've learned and experienced in life since I was a kid and looking at wrestling with completely new eyes and most importantly - catching up on lost years (not living them but getting all the info in at once) with a critical distance to the events, made me whole different kind of a wrestling fan.

Best wishes, Borut