The Dying Breeds

I get like this all of the time. Every now and again people come up and tell me "You know wrestling's fake right?" or "You know it's all pre-planned" and whatnot. And I sit there shaking my head and smiling because I know it is "pre-planned" and all of that jazz but...you know something? If you told me that...a few years ago...ok, more than a few years ago...I would have laughed in your face.

I grew up in the 1990s, before AOL, before AIM, before Al Gore created the internets, which we now know are a series of tubes. Anyways, I grew up before all of that...I had no prior knowledge...I was, I guess you can say, gullible? Young? Etcetera. But that's not the point of this article.

I have to spill the beans on myself here, you take it what you will...wrestling, to me, was just as real as the air I breathed when I started yelling and cheering for what I believed was true. Grant it, I was in the era of the Undertaker, Repo Man, and Knuckleball Schwartz...I knew the Undertaker wasn't really dead....I knew the Repo Man wasn't really a garbage man...and I knew Knuckleball Schwartz was...just...weird. But I knew it was all real, I knew that there was something real about every promo, every fight, every feud. I thought it was for reals.

But, just like Santa Claus...the Easter Bunny...and the hot, hot, HOT Tooth Fairy that I imagined in my dreams, I had to be told...and being told wasn't fun. Denial, laughing, and a lot of "psh"-es. But, after a while, it all came together. I started, since now the internet was up and running for good and stumbled across the spoilers, that (more than anyone telling me it was fake) was the last straw for me...and, yes, I am now a believer that wrestling is SCRIPTED but not fake.

But the point of this post is simple, we live in a society where...not only are the stories scripted...but they are done severely poor. Back in the LATE eighties EARLY nineties, the stories were BELIEVABLE, which made me...and a few others...believe that there was something really going on between two rivals, that they really hated each other, and so on and so forth. Those were the days.

But, like I said, we are in a dying breed. Because of the poor writing staff and the poor character development, and...just like Chris Jericho said in his book...the birth and expansion of the internet, there won't be many people...if any, that will believe what I believed back in the day.

My youth rocked!