A brief intro

I've been a wrestling (the "fake" kind) fan on and off my entire life. I'm not even entirely sure why. It's just something I got into when I was maybe 3 years old and never truly got out of. I very vividly remember watching 3 or 4 hours of wrestling EVERY Saturday morning during the hours most kids watched cartoons. There was Wrestling Challenge, then WWF Superstars of Wrestling, then some cruddy WCW show, then it was time to go out and play. The amazing thing is these shows were extremely unexciting in retrospect. It was mostly established stars wrestling no name "jobbers" and not very much was done to advance the soap opera like storylines that I could never get enough of.

As I got a little older, I'd save the money I made doing chores around the house and occasionally get my mother to let me purchase one of the WWF's then quarterly pay per views. It was a BIG event to do that back then. You had to go down to the cable company, pick up a special box to hook up to your tv just for that night, then take it back in the morning. And despite the fact that it is certainly a conventionally "dorky" thing to be into (probably moreso now), my stepdad was cool enough to take me to whatever live shows WWF ran close to us, including Raw once around 1996 (the salad days of their next big crop of stars like The Rock, Triple H and Stone Cold Steve Austin)

ANYWAY, at some point in like 2006, after a lengthy absence from having anything to do with wrestling, I gradually got back into it again. It started with checking out some old late 80's pay per views for nostalgia purposes. Then I decided to order the Royal Rumble, because that was always my favorite of their shows. Then it was Wrestlemania. Then I started dabbling in the WWE's weekly shows again. That was when it started getting out of control again. Now, I can fully admit to being obsessed again. I watch all WWE and TNA (a veeeeeery distant second to WWE in terms of mainstream popularity) programming and regularly attend shows run by a variety of other "indie" organizations (which is made tremendously simple now that I live a mere 10 minute walk from the old ECW arena).

Since then, I've always toyed with the idea of doing a wrestling blog, but I certainly don't think I'm clever enough to distinguish myself from the other dorks who write long detailed blogs about the business using nerdy mark terms like "workrate" or "pop".

But then the idea for the gimmick behind this blog hit me. And yes, I can freely admit it is a total gimmick. I'm going to watch every Pay Per View event the WWF has ever run, and write about them as I go. This seems right for a multitude of reasons. One is that it will be like taking a walk through my 26 year old life. Wrestlemania 1, the very first pro wrestling pay per view, aired on March 31, 1985. I was 1 year and 24 days old at the time. This gave me the idea that maybe as I go through these, it will trigger some personal reflections of growing up, since I essentially grew up along with that particular company.

So here goes nothing. Obviously the first couple years will go by without too many entries since less than 5 ppv's a year ran until the early 90's. If I can, I'll try to keep it interesting by approaching these in different ways. Maybe I'll even have some guest writers if I watch a certain show with someone else. So yeah...let's do this. Someone bring out the Fink for some ring intros.

Note: I'm putting no time frame on how often I'll be able to watch these. Realistically, working around my job and everything else, it will probably be just a couple shows a month. We'll see.