'Twas twenty years ago this month (Friday, 20th October, 2005 at 8:10PM to be specific) that the fifth or sixth worst thing that could happen to a young man happened to me: I became a fan of professional wrestling. I was flipping channels and alighted upon USPN broadcasting WWE Friday Night SmackDown! - the opening bout of the night was a newly heel Booker T challenging his old WCW rival Chris Benoit for the WWE United States Championship. Now we're all adults here living in the year 2025 so we can all agree that Booker T always kinda sucked, but this Chris Benoit guy was obviously something special. The premise of two half-naked adult men in spandex pretending to fight held no absurdity for him. In fact, pro-wrestling was the only real thing in the world to Chris Benoit; the one thing he valued above all else in the whole of God's creation was LARPing as himself while slapping other men in the moobs, so much so that he'd routinely put himself through absurd amounts of punishment to sell his art to the audience. A healthy way to live? Absolutely not. But as with all fictions, the crux of it succeeding or not lay in the commitment to the bit.

During this match, Chris Benoit would perform a running dive from the ring through the ropes to tackle Booker T in what is known as a tope suicida by the people who invented it or the delightfully bluntly translated “suicide dive” in English. Even as far back as twenty years ago this was a fairly routine spot that you'd see once a show on average. Chris Benoit would perform this move with such gusto that he would skim off of Booker's T's waiting arms and flip upside-down, crashing into the metal lip of the commentary table behind him as he crumpled to the floor in a dead heap.

To say the least, that got my attention.

Benoit and Booker were able to roll with this (in hindsight) obvious botch and channel it into a fun little ten minute story about Benoit's back being messed up before eventually fighting through the pain and getting his big babyface comeback. (He then lost the bout but that's besides the point.) By the end of the match I was hooked. Pro-wrestling was totally my thing and Chris Benoit was totally my guy.

Turned out well for me, that did.
Couldn't ask for a better role model.


My newfound markdom came at the worst possible time. The second half of the aughts were inarguably the roughest patch in the history of North American professional wrestling. Within a span of five years we had Eddiesploitation, the Benoit murders, WWECW, the start of the PG Era, and The Miz as WWE Champion. And the only alternatives to WWE we had were TNA and the absurdly short-lived Wrestling Society X. It was dogshit and the people who claim otherwise either weren't watching the weekly product or are wafted by the scent of pre-2015 nostalgia with its GameStops, YTMNDs, and $5 Footlongs. If I'd had enough of a frame of reference to know just how awful pro-wrestling was circa 2010, I'd have stopped watching entirely. And a lot of people did.

It was around this time that I started getting into Japanese pro-wrestling. I got into it the same way that everyone in my generation gets into new hobbies – contextless YouTube videos! And lemme tell ya, going from watching John Cena to Toshiaki Kawada has gotta be like being one of those babies getting their first hearing aid. It opened up a whole new dimension to me. Ya know those druggies who have one good trip and decide that chasing that is gonna become their entire personality for the remainder of their 20s? That was me after watching Pro-Wrestling NOAH for the first time. I am so, so sorry to everyone else in the furry wrestling RP scene who had the displeasure of having to interact with me between the years of 2010 and 2020. I was insufferable for many reasons, not the least of which being that I had to steer the conversation into my niche-within-a-niche interests at all times.

The latter half of the 2010s were a vast improvement for pro-wrestling. There was a slight qualitative uptick in WWE's product with the introduction of genuinely interesting new characters like The Wyatt Family and The Shield on their main stage and the staggering success of their developmental territory, WWE NXT. This coincided with an international wrestling boom lasting from 2014-2019 that saw Japan, the U.K., and damn near every indie company in North America firing on all cylinders. New Japan Pro-Wrestling and the first two seasons of El Rey Network's Lucha Underground in particular were appointment viewing. To this day I say that 2016 is up there with 1997 as one of the single best years in the history of the biz. That may be a little rose-colored-glasses on my part, but damn. It finally felt like things were picking up again.

And then WWE inked the Saudi deal.

People say WWE has gotten loads better since 2019 and from what I've seen that may actually be true.

I do not care.

I stopped watching WWE when they made a deal with the Saudis and I will not watch their product again until they cancel it and issue a public apology for even considering it in the first place. Which they won't. Oh well. No real loss. It's not like there isn't seventy years of pro-wrestling from around the globe which I can and do watch instead.


Anyway, there's no real point to this. I just felt like reflecting upon some – nowhere near scratching the surface, even – of my experiences with my favorite fixation. Seeing as how it's been TWENTY YEARS of being a fan of it and all. I suspect I'll continue to be a fan until I die. You don't just waste your high school years watching every single episode of WWECW on Syfy on your bedroom TV set – staying up to 11PM every Tuesday on a school night to watch fuckin' Ricky Ortiz and Mike Knox – only to give up.

After all, Chris Benoit was my first favorite wrestler. And if nothing else he taught me to commit to the bit.

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