How to Enjoy Wrestling

Today, my friends, I’m going to give you some advice, a lesson if you will. It’s something I’ve learned since I quit working in the wrestling business, and it’s a piece of advice that you, the ordinary wrestling fan, can use.

I’m going to tell you all how you can really enjoy watching the noble art of professional wrestling. It’s really quite a simple piece of advice, and I’m surprised that I never discovered this before.

So what is this piece of advice, this wondrous piece of knowledge that I’m about to impart on you? It’s this - if you want to enjoy professional wrestling, never become friends with a wrestler.

There, I’ve got if off my chest. Now I’m going to tell you how I reached this conclusion.

For four years, I hanged around with some of Britain’s finest professional wrestlers. I travelled around the country, and watched a lot of wrestling in the company of wrestlers.

Now, before I go any further, I must say that for the most part I enjoyed these times. For the most part.

You see, internet smart marks and website writers take a lot of flak for the way they talk about wrestling, for the way that they dissect and over analyse every detail, going over every aspect of everything that happens with a fine tooth comb.

But believe me, as far as this goes, they’ve got nothing on the wrestlers.

Many is the time where I would watch an edition of Raw or Smackdown, and I would comment on a particular wrestler I liked, only for my view to be shot down. It didn’t matter that I was viewing things from a fan’s perspective, it only seemed to matter that I wasn’t viewing it from a wrestler’s viewpoint. My views would be criticised because I would often miss fine, minute, often microscopic technical aspects of a wrestler’s performance. “Julian, will you stop being a punter!” was the cry I heard with great regularity.


So it was during these years that I began to look at things from a wrestler’s viewpoint. I began to look for the chinks in the armour, forgetting that the reason I began watching wrestling in the first place was that I found it to be very entertaining.

So, six months ago, I stopped hanging around with wrestlers. While I kept in touch with a few of them via e-mail, I stopped entering into debates about the merits of a certain wrestler’s performance, and sat down in front of my television to try and re-capture what I had lost.

It took me a while, but I’m now at a point where I’m actually enjoying watching wrestling again. I can sit on my sofa and enjoy a match for what it is, not looking for every tiny error in a match, and not giving a damn about what was going on backstage. I no longer have to put up with wrestlers telling me that I shouldn’t like someone just because they had a slight technical flaw in their game.

People say that wrestling fans can be over critical towards the business. But they’ve got nothing on the wrestlers as far as this is concerned.