Ignorance is Bliss

When I was growing up, and I got a little too nosey for my mother's liking, I was always told that ignorance is bliss. My mother may have died nearly twenty years ago, but the past few days I've found myself thinking about what she used to tell me.

And I found myself thinking that this simple little saying perhaps has a great deal of relevance in the professional wrestling world of today.

Some of you may have noticed that in recent times I've changed my writing style a little. I used to write as if I thought I knew it all about the wrestling industry. I was slowly turning into one of those smart marks, the kind of people who seemingly know everything about everything.

Now my style has changed. Whenever I review a show, I try to write from a fan's viewpoint. I don't watch a match to pick up on every little mistake that is made. Accentuate the positives, as the old saying goes.

But lately I've been thinking back to the good old days, when I used to watch British wrestling on a Saturday afternoon before the football scores, and when I first took an active interest in the American scene, when we first got Sky in 1989, and watched with great interest, wondering just whose hair Brutus The Barber was going to cut next, and how long Mr. Perfect could keep his winning streak going.

Back then, the Internet hadn't been heard by of the majority of the world. Back then, there wasn't a million web sites dedicated to bringing you the latest backstage goings on in the mighty WWF. The only information we got was from magazines. The WWF Magazine did a hell of a job in telling us about the latest feuds, and sheets like Pro Wrestling Illustrated brought us news from around the world.

We didn't care if wrestler A refused to job to wrestler B, because we didn't know about this. We didn't know that wrestler A was thinking of jumping ship from one big company to another because he thought he wasn't being paid enough.

We watched the shows. We watched the stars. We enjoyed ourselves, because we were fans.

And then, in one stroke, we suddenly became smart. The wrestling world realised that it couldn't go on fooling us any more. They invited us backstage to see just what was going on. The era when good guys couldn't travel with bad guys was over.

While it was obvious that the wrestling world couldn't continue to tell the world that the outcomes of matches and angles wasn't predetermined, I look back now and think that this truly was the end of an era. The fact that we now seemingly know how the wrestling industry works seems to make it a little bit less enjoyable. It was just like those shows where the masked magician showed you how he did his magic tricks. After this, tell me how busy David Copperfield has been in the past couple of years.

The time when we, the wrestling fans, can look at the happenings in a wrestling show with a sense of wonder are sadly no more. Where once we would watch a wrestler just because he was a good worker, now we seemingly wait for him to fail, and when he blows a move, we all crowd around him and cry "you fucked up!"

Maybe it's just because I'm getting older, the hair is thinning on top, and my beard is getting a few grey hairs in it, and I'm harking back to the long lost days of my youth. As far as wrestling goes, I really do think that ignorance really was bliss.