I'm Posting a Multipart Series Because "Cry For Help" Sounds Too Dramatic

I love pretty much everything about wrestling. At every level, wrestling to me is about as perfect a platonic ideal as I can point to of the word "passion." Wrestling is a storytelling medium unlike any other. That's not hyperbole. Pro wrestling is still pretty much incomparable to anything else in the modern day, and just marinate for a second on how rare a thing that is. In a world of imitators, there's nothing else like it.

Wrestling shows are joyful, ridiculous celebrations of a really bizarre thing. Like, in the objective sense. Wrestling is just a weird thing from the perspective of, like… thoughts.  That's not what fighting looks like! Ropes don't work like that! It's a fake sport where people with poor to sometimes very good acting ability with a similarly various assortment of physiques roll around and play fight like superheroes. Sometimes a man in a mask jumps off of something. Folding chairs are nature's Swiss Army Knife. Wearing a referee shirt gives you glaucoma and narcolepsy. There are no bad ideas. Wrestling starts from a place of "yes."

It's a totally open forum where any idea is allowed. Sometimes you get a guy who dons a nylon armband that looks like a snake and cobra strikes his opponents; sometimes you get an evil Canadian Mountie; sometimes you get a spooky undead wizard undertaker whose soul resides in an urn carried by his assistant named Paul Bearer; sometimes you get Friar Ferguson.

Yeah, they can't all be winners. I hated the Mountie.

Sometimes a prison warden kidnaps the Chihuahua of a crazy person named Al Snow who talks to a (female) mannequin head he carries with him at all times he named "Head." A few episodes later, that prison warden invites the crazy person to a hotel to apologize over dinner and reunite the crazy person with his dog. Then after the commercial the prison warden (named "The Big Bossman," by the way) reveals to Al Snow that Al had thought was a normal dinner was actually Al Snow's Chihuahua. He had been eating his own dog the entire time and only realized when Bossman mentioned the dish had a lot of pepper in it. "Pepper" was the name of Al Snow's Chihuahua.

Then they settle it at the pay-per-view in a steel cage match, except the steel cage is surrounded by another, bigger cage that for this match they call a "kennel," but which is commonly referred to as "an unnecessary cage." They tried to distract from the monstrosity by filling it with pit bulls. To win the match, you had to escape both cages. They tried to make it look harrowing, but the dogs were all like tranqued up and scared and mostly just barfed and shitted and barfed and ate they barf and doed a sex. 

That match was called The Kennel from Hell Match. They only did one of those matches. The reason why not is because it sucked. Some website called The Wrestling Section rated the Kennel from Hell Match the 19th worst wrestling match of all time. So heads up about the website called "The Wrestling Section": I think website is all written by AI and algorithms because the Kennel from Hell Match has never been the 19th anything.

This isn't the most exciting picture I could find of the match, but it is the clearest.

It is all very, very silly, is what I mean. We all know. We are all well aware.

But you know what else? Throughout that whole entire trainwreck remained earnest. They maintained sincere, unflinching commitment to the bit. It's an art form about embracing anything, no matter how bizarre or eclectic or silly. As long as you think it could move people, you are always free to try. Anything can be a match. Any belt can feel the most important for three seconds. Anyone could tell a story between those ropes if they wanted to. And more people should.

When you're in front of people, you're always portraying someone else, but it's a little different addressing a crowd as "it's just my actual personality dialed up to 11," or "guy who's tough," or "guy who's strong," or "guy who's just happy to be here." But where it seems like other genres are stagnating and becoming more safe, stale, and formulaic, wrestling is richer and more diverse than ever. It's just nice that among the jocks and the tough guys there's a place for "guy who cooks dogs," too.

So over the next number of days which will probably end up being too low but also seem way too high, I want to talk about some of the wrestlers I think are pushing the medium of wrestling through their characters. I'll get it out of the way now that anyone who steps into the ring to work has my utmost respect. If somebody doesn't get mentioned, it's not a mark against them at all. There are just so many all-time greats.  I know. I'm going to leave a ton out and, believe me, it's going to haunt me way, way longer than it's going to haunt you. If anything, it's the finite nature of time and the ever-present looming specter of mortality that's inconveniencing us. Just be nice if you leave a comment, okay?