2017 Pro Wrestling Thread

We'll see where they're gonna go with it next week at least.

 

So Cena-Nakamura and Styles-Owens for the U.S. title on a regular edition of Smackdown? Is it sweeps week or something?

 

Is Cena actually gonna be around till Mania though or is he going back to Rockywood?

 

Couple of questions.

1. How did you get into wrestling?
2. Do you remember the first “big” main event match that you’ve watched?

 

1. My great uncle (essentially like a grandfather to me) took me to WWF and AWA (yes, AWA) events at the Brown County Veterans Memorial Arena. Sat in the crowd through marathon tapings of Superstars and Wrestling Challenge episodes where you'd end up seeing a wrestler 3 times, and got to see Hogan vs. One Man Gang in the blue steel cage. On the AWA side of things, sat in the front row with nothing but a steel barricade separating me from Larry Zbyszko, Curt Hennig, Nick Bockwinkel, Greg Gagne, and Scott Hall. Oh and a brash kid with long blond hair ... Shawn Michaels ... teaming up with Marty Jannetty as the Midnight Rockers.

2. First "big" main event I watched on PPV was Hogan-Andre at a closed circuit TV event. Also remember watching the Mega-Powers vs. Andre-DiBiase match at the first Summerslam where Elizabeth removed her skirt ... a thrill for my 11-year-old self.

 

1. I just always remember watching the WWF on TV as a kid, even before the Hogan era. There was a regional cable channel in Philadelphia called Prism that broadcast Phillies, Flyers and Sixers games, as well as WWF house shows from the Spectrum. We got that channel, so I can remember watching champion Bob Backlund feud with Big John Studd and wondering how he was going to subdue this 6-foot-10 monster.
A few years later MSG launched its own channel and would show those same house shows. Sometimes live. 12-year-old me would run home at 7 p.m. on a random Wednesday in June to catch two or three hours of wrestling. That was mostly during the Hogan/Savage era.
Oddly, I never went to a show in person until I was in college and some friends and I went to a Nitro and a couple of Thunders.

2. Whenever the WWF put that year's Wrestlemania out on tape in its early years, it was a big deal. First one of those I remember watching was Hogan-Andre at WM 3.
The next year, I figured out how to tweak the old style push-button cable box to get a steady picture through the snow. Watched most of the WM 4 tournament, including the Savage-Dibiase final, that way while hanging out in my sister's bedroom. At the same time I was running downstairs to watch Flair-Sting on the inaugural Clash of the Champions on TBS. I'd never really paid a lot of attention to the NWA, so I had no idea who Sting was, but I remember watching most of that match and being enthralled.
The year after that, my uncle bought WM 5 and invited us over to watch it. So the first big main event I got to see live and unscrambled was Hogan-Savage in the Mega Powers match.

 

I wouldn't mind seeing Cena vs. Nakamura.

 

Oh, it should be a tremendous match.
I just found it funny that Cena returned with a feud against a Bulgarian, is trying to go for the title against an Indian, and has to go through a Japanese guy to get there. Maybe they can put him in a handicap match against Nikolai Volkoff and the Iron Sheik to keep the theme going through the fall.

 

1. The kids in my class started becoming Hulkamaniacs right around the first WM, and Mr. T was red-hot. I kept trying to find the WWF on my TV, and couldn't until one day, I found World Class on my UHF channel.

I didn't know it was scripted, thought it was real, and saw a bout that was the Midnight Express against another tag team, then the Midnights won when Cornette interfered, and I was stunned that a manager, and one running around with a tennis racquet at that, interfered and caused the other team to lose because the ref didn't see it. I thought for sure it would be on ESPN, or some sports news, or at least my local paper because, hell, it was a really controversial ending. but of course, it wasn't.

Few months later, I finally found WWF programming.

2. Kinda hard to say, because for the most part, WWF had squash matches on, and my parents as hell wasn't going to take me to a closed-circuit TV place. But I remember the buildup to WM2 with Bundy squashing Hogan, and Piper challenging T to the boxing match. Didn't watch, of course, but, in a funny coincidence, my paper had a story on it the next day with a local reaction piece at a closed circuit venue, with a pic of Hogan booting Bundy off the cage.

The first "big" match that I saw where I knew fully what all the angles were was the SNME match with Hogan and JYD against the Funks, which also featured a Bulldogs title defense and Roberts DDTing Steamboat on the floor. I was spending the night at a friend's place, and him and his brothers were all excited about staying up to watch. For me, 11:30 was way past my bedtime at home, and I was tired anyways, so
I wasn't too enthusiastic at first. Sure enough, my friend and his brothers fell asleep, after the Hogan match and I stayed up for the entire thing and told them what happened the next morning.

 

Hah. No.2 was the same way for me. When my local video store put out the WM video, it would be gone for days because people kept renting it. At that time, renting a video was still a big deal for my parents, because we'd just gotten a VCR in '86 and it was a real novelty. They didn't want to encourage me to watch wrestling, so allowing me to rent a wrestling video was a special treat. As I got older, I'd save my money for wrestling video rentals, and my parents would get annoyed every time.

Likewise, by WM5, I tried to tweak around with the cable box, and the UHF channel, where I could hear the feed, but it came through scrambled, and was hard to watch. My parents would be, like, "why are you watching this, you can't even see it." But I didn't care.

My freshman year in college, a friend on my floor had a family member tape WM8 and ship it overnight to him, so a bunch of us got to watch it that Monday afternoon. First time I saw a Wrestlemania unscrambled without knowing who won in advance. Fun memory.

 

Fixed that for you.

 

There are 1.3 billion people in Canada?