How Were You Introduced To Wrestling?

[SomeAreSet]

2001. I was 9. It was the first day of school,and this new kid had just transferred in. Lo and behold,I was assigned to the seat next to his. So we started talking and he told me about how he liked pro wrestling,so I went home and asked my dad about it,and he said he'd buy me a VCD of one of their shows so I could check it out. And he did. It was Royal Rumble 2001. So I popped the first disc in and started watching,and if I remembered correctly the first match I ever watched was Edge and Christian defending their tag titles against the Dudleys. Then it was Jericho vs. Benoit in a Ladder match for the Intercontinental title. That match did it for me. To this day it's still one of my favourite matches ever,and I was hooked from that point on. Oh,not to mention the Rumble match itself. Even though I had no idea who Stone Cold was,I was glad he won the Rumble. The Rock totally blew me away though. Talk about electrifying. I was a big fan of his when I was a kid. Now,eh,not as big a fan,but I still like his work. Taker was in his American Bad-Ass phase back then,so he was cool. Kane was this gigantic motherfucker,and he eliminated Tazz in 5 seconds,so that was cool. So I started watching Raw on TV,and then No Way Out,where The Rock won the WWE title,and as luck would have it,my first WrestleMania was also one of the best WrestleManias of all time. X7 still remains my favourite Mania ever out of the 11 I've seen.

 

[sTyLnK]

It was a nice Spring day in 1989. WrestleMania V just passed a few weeks ago. My friends in the neighborhood couldn’t stop talking about it. By this time, I saw a few matches here and there from the day I was born, but never really got into it. One day, after the Saturday morning cartoons were done, I decided to channel surf. I come across WWE Wrestling Challenge and saw a promo cut by Hulk Hogan, followed by a match pitting the Ultimate Warrior vs. a Jobber. From that point on, I never stopped watching.

I started watching in the late 80's as well. I used to go over to my Uncle's and watch. I have a few old wrestling stamps in the shape of wrestlers that I bought because I got so hooked. In fact I'm looking at them right now. I have the Macho Man and the Big Boss Man. (RIP to both). Copyright 1989. You know you're getting old when? Lord. Anyways, I've been watching wrestling for a few decades and I will always watch. I don't care how cheesy and silly and "fake" it is. I admire what they do because it's one hell of a job. A job I would never do in a million years. So whenever I read that people think it's this or that, I know that person wouldn't last a week as a pro wrestler. And that's a fact.

 

[80s Dude]

I started watching when I was 6 years old in 1984. January 23rd to be exact. That was the day I saw Hulk Hogan beat The Iron Sheik for his very first WWF Heavyweight Title.

I was hooked, and have been watching it ever since. I'm 34 now, and the appeal is still there for me. Even with the bad story lines. For me, its always been about the wrestling.

 

[lowandmighty]

It was by coincidence that I started watching wrestling. I remember the exact day when I started watching.

It was one of those days that started out really bad but ended good. I was in my first year of school, it would've been about 1989 or somewhere around there I couldn't have been older than 4 or 5 years old. My older and at the time only brother was sick that day and I had to catch the bus to school by my self for the first time.
While my brother was sick at home my mother (may she rest in peace) decided to take him to the video store and let him pick some videos to make him feel better and distract his mind because he was worried about me being at school on my own.
I can remember the videos he hired; Karate kid, superman the cartoon rambo 2 and wrestlemania 1. He thought wrestlemania 1 was a movie, my mother told him I wasn't but he wanted to get it anyway so she let him.

I came home and he was all excited to show me wrestlemania and he particularly liked a guy who we always referred to as "the Hawaiian guy" I think it was Jimmy Snuka who's not even Hawaiian but we were just kids so we didn't know any better. I remember how overawed we were by the sheer obesity of King Kong Bundy and thought that he was probably even bigger than Andre the Giant who's match was after Bundy's I think. (I've never actually watched wrestlemania 1 again since then) We also thought it was funny that he wore what we referred to as "a girls swimsuit" hahaha!
However the one thing that had me hooked was how Hulk Hogan won the main event. They were cheating against him but he got out of the trap and won rising against the odds. My dad who's a journalist was home by then and he watched the main event with us playing along and doing a sort of commentary and reinforcing to us that Hogan was the good guy so we went for him and were glad that he stopped the bad guys from winning.
From then on we kept hiring the wwf Colosseum videos and that turned into watching it on tv, then ppv's, going to events and the rest is history.

 

[Khalifa]

I was introduced by my 12 year old cousin (now 20). Me and my mum took a trip to Busselton which is 3 hours south of where I was living to visit her uncle. We stayed at his house for a few nights and on the first night my cousins dad brought in WCW uncensored 2000. We watched it and until then I didn't know what the hell wrestling was, mainly because I was 7 years old. I was instantly hooked, from The Artist vs Psycosis - Sid vs Jarret, the whole show was good I thought. Ever since then I have been watching it

 

[johnnybbad78]

I remember it very clearly. It was 1989 in the summer. I was grocery shopping with my mom and I was looking among the magazines. I came across the then WWF Magazine...and the issue had probably 15 superstars on the cover with Hogan prominantly displayed. I picked it up and asked my mom if I could get it and have been hooked ever since. We'd always go to the video store so I could see if the previous PPV was out on video yet so I could watch it....22 years later, 2/3 of my life, I still love it.

 

[GoShtate]

Final Four PPV in February of 1997 was the first match I remember. Austin vs Bret Hart vs Undertaker vs Vader. I remember watching Vader get bloodied up and had never seen anything like it. I asked my father if we could watch more and it just blossomed from there.

 

[ShinobiMusashi]

I grew up in a wrestling family. My grandpa was friends with a lot of the guys in the Florida scene during the late 70's, and the 80's. My dad was friends with the Von Erich family in Texas.

I grew up listening to a lot of stories of Terry Funk, and Kerry Von Erich. My earliest memories of anything, as far back as I can remember is the image of Hillbilly Jim, and Roddy Piper on TV(seems like I remember them co-hosting a "Superstars" type of saturday morning show together, but I could be wrong).

That was around when I was 4 years old. So I kind of didn't have a chance really. I grew up with Pro Wrestling on the TV all the time. I remember seeing a lot of wrestling from 89 to 91 as a kid. I really started to get into it at the age of about 8 around 1992. That is probobly my favorite year of wrestling to go back, and watch because of the nostalgia.

I was a diehard "Smart Mark" fan until I hit high school in the fall of 2000. Around that time I was big on ECW, and they were dead in the water, so that combined with the high school social life led to me falling out of it altogether up until recently when I stumbled upon the "Rise and Fall of the ECW" DVD. My interest has been renewed. Pro Wrestling is a true art form. Live theater. It is a shame that the performers don't get any credit for their acting, or athletic ability, but rather they are looked at as "Phoney", or "Fake". I think you could have put guys like Bret Hart, Benoit, Malenko, and RVD in MMA in their primes, and they would have been champions.

 

[peterpib2]

I remember watching WWF in 2000 with my two brothers.

It was a match between Rikishi, The Rock, Kane and The Undertaker for the number 30 spot in the Rumble. (Anyone remember that match?)

I was jumping on the sofa (I was 4) cheering when Taker came in on his bike. Since then I've loved wrestling!

 

[The Dragon Saga]

My brother had taped Wrestlemania 13, he was excited for Steve Austin vs. Bret Hart. I remember him and his friends watching it and cheering for Austin; asides from my brother, and I walked into the room. I sat there with them and watched the match and before the match ended I liked Bret Hart so much that to this day he is my favorite professional wrestler of all-time. I was four years of age.

 

[rkovoices]

First time I ever saw wrestling in '96 when I was 7, on my way to bed and my stepdad was channel surfing and stopped for a few minutes. Only thing I remember from that night was Nova from ECW. Didn't watch wrestling next until a year later, when Goldberg debuted against Hugh Morrus a.k.a. Bill DeMott and started his undefeated reign.

 

[jrichardson25]

My cousin whom is about 8 years older than I am has watched it since I was in diapers... I remember seeing it in the early 90s and have the Hulk Hogan Wrestling Buddy to this day still as proof...

As for really getting into it... It started for me when I started high school. I had friends that were into it. I got hooked quickly and realized what exactly it was and haven't stopped watching since.

 

[Raven/StevieRichardsfan]

I remember when I was a kid about 3 or 4 and my older brother LOVED wrestling he could do the Shawn Michaels pose on command. I started watching it with him. When the attitude era started my mom banned wrestling in our house so we'd go over to the neighbors every monday night to watch it. I started getting more into girl stuff when I was six so thought wrestling was a boys thing so I stopped watching it but last year my Popular Culture teacher did a lecture on wrestling and I remember she showed 3 to 4 videos and she stopped them in the middle of the match and I'm just like "I wanted to see what happened!" Right after class I started looking up old wrestling videos on YouTube and then I watched an episode of Smackdown and instantly fell in love with CM Punk even though he was heel at the time. After just that one show I was hooked.

 

[TheExceLLenceOfExecution]

Wrestlemania X

Brets feud with Owen grabbed my attention as a 9 year old kid with two brothers of his own.. The next day my parents took us to blockbuster and my brothers and I rented and recorded 1994 royal rumble using a VCR and a Video camera.. We watched that royal rumble so many times over and over.. Bret became our hero and Owen was the biggest villain to us!

 

[XtheXlegacyX]

I was born in 1995 and I used to watch both WWF and WCW. I remember playing the games, having the figures, and my 2 favorites as a child were Sting and Stone Cold Steve Austin.We had an out-of-business cable provider when we were switched to directv. We didn't know any channels so I stopped watching. Fast forward to 2005, when I was out getting a drink when my brother asked my mother if he could order a wrestling ppv, and she said "Yes, but your brother gets to watch", so I watched and I remember being so enthralled in all of it, the event was The Great American Bash, I remember loving The Undertaker, Eddie, Rey, and Batista. 7 Years later I'm still a major fan, and actually went to an event last night.

 

[EasyMark]

For me it was Mid Atlantic Wrestling on TV every Saturday night in 1977. It was all done in a small studio with a few hundred people. The big stars usually just wrestled a jobber to sell a move. Of course I was 7 and no idea what any of that meant.There were no PPV's, or videos to rent. The only way to see the big matches was at house shows. I was too young to go. The big names then were Gene and Ole Anderson, Chief Wahoo McDaniel, Ric Flair, Jimmy Snuka, Johnny Weaver, Rody Piper and Black Jack Mulligan. By todays standards the wrestling was pretty boring. Back then they actually wrestled which is a little more exciting than golf but not much. The big thing then was ..we all thought it was real. Some older girls I knew would see Flair or Mulligan around town in Norfolk Va and scream at them. Good times...

 

[El Wyshu]

I guess I'm a newcomer here lol. My earliest brush with wrestling was in 2006 when my cousin who was a big fan of WWE invited me to watch RAW with him. That time, the contract signing was taking place between HHH and Cena for WM 22. I loved that segment and even saw the wrestlemania match between the two but for some reason never got hooked on.

Fast forward to 2009. I'm bored and shuffling through some shows when I land at Monday Night Raw, the raw before NOC iirc . I remember the first thing I saw was HHH and Cena calling out Orton. Watching the segment, I felt an eerie similarity to the 2006 segment, this Raw and the awesome CM Punk Jeff hardy feud hooked me on to WWE.

 

[Notorious718]

I remember my father watching old episodes of WCW way back in the day but I can't remember specifically what matches he watched while I happened to be in the room because my mother didn't approve of me watching wrestling at the time. We had a small television in the room we shared and sometimes I would pretend that I'm sleeping when in reality, I'm peeking at the television from under the pillow. After my parents separated, wrestling became the last thing on my mind until I randomly tuned into Raw while channel surfing on November 28, 2005. The night after that year's Survivor Series. I don't know what it was but I was sucked in. I'll never forget watching my first actual WWE main event match that night: John Cena vs Kurt Angle vs Chris Masters in a Triple Threat No DQ Submission match for the WWE Championship. As a wrestling noob who hadn't been an active viewer other than the times I caught glimpses as a child, I remember being on the edge of my seat pulling for Cena to win the match and idolizing him after he overcame the odds and won the match. After that, I tuned in whenever I had the chance which unfortunately wasn't very often at the time (my family had the "no television on school nights" rule). However, at some point after the Royal Rumble in 2006, I randomly tuned into Smackdown on a Friday night and was immediately sucked into the first Smackdown main event I ever saw: Kurt Angle, Randy Orton, and Rey Mysterio vs MNM and Mark Henry. Like with my first Raw main event, I was on the edge of my seat watching Mysterio get dominated and struggling to get the hot tag to Angle while Orton was acting uncooperative with his teammates. I also remember Orton getting the cheap win for his team after Angle and Rey had cleaned house. After that, I ALWAYS tuned into Smackdown. Once my family owned a DVR, I managed to record Raw on a weekly basis so I found myself always watching it by the time I hit high school. Now I watch both WWE shows as well as TNA, which I got into around the time Samoa Joe was in line the world title before Lockdown in 2008 (and was pleasantly surprised to see Christian there), on a weekly basis and the rest is history.

 

[P. Nut Butters]

I was four years old. My older brother was a casual wrestling fan and SummerSlam 1997 had just come and gone. He wanted to see it and since we didn't get WWF PPVs live or even on tape delay back then (at least to my knowledge), you had to wait and then rent the VHS out from the video store.

I went with him to the video store and saw how cool the front cover looked; (it's the poster of Bret with Undertaker in the clouds in the background) and I sat at home absolutely enthralled with what I was seeing. From the Mankind/Hemsley cage match, to Owen/Austin, to the epic ending of Undertaker/Bret Hart... I was hooked.

I began researching wrestling and finding out more and my brother would take me down to the video store each week and I would rent out 2 or 3 other PPVs going further back into the '80's and keeping up with the latest ones as well. I started watching RAW (which, if I'm not mistaken, had just rebranded itself to 'RAW is WAR' around that time.) Being young, I watched wrestling whenever I could. I was a pretty big fan, but not as big a fan as I would become.

I sat rivetted through the first Kane and Undertaker battles, saw the Ministry and the Nation and D-Generation X. I knew about Hogan and Savage and Hall and Nash and Steamboat and I knew about WCW, but it wasn't on prime time in my country.

I knew that Bret Hart (my favourite wrestler back then) left the WWF, but I thought that when wrestlers left, they left forever, and because WCW wasn't prime time for us, I had no way of knowing that Bret had jumped ship.

WWF Raw was on a two-week tape delay for us. We would get it on what was for us 'late-night primetime' at about 9pm on a Friday and it would be edited down to one-hour. I think WCW Nitro was shown a few hours later at around 1:30am on a Saturday morning (or maybe it was a Monday, I can't recall), but one evening in 1998, I stayed up late to catch WCW.

I was appalled. I knew quite a lot about WCW, from Nitro to Bischoff and Hogan and Sting and Goldberg and I'd hired out a few of the earlier WCW PPVs on VHS. They were alright, but not as good as the WWF. I stayed up and watched Nitro and the first angle shown involved Hollywood Hogan cutting an in-ring promo for two segments. What remained of the show was a waste of time as well and I remember being bitterly disappointed. I wanted to see Goldberg smash people and Scott Hall be as awesome as he was in the old WWF tapes... I didn't recieve anything of that nature. After trying out bits of WCW, I was firmly a loyal member of camp WWF.

In 1999, I first experienced the idea of 'death' in some sort of close-to-home fashion when Owen Hart died. It was the first time death really affected my life because somebody who I was used to seeing every week (even if only on television) would no longer play that role in my life.

I ordered my first (and what would prove to be my only) WCW PPV on TV (that being Halloween Havoc 1999) - and while the show wasn't as bad as the Nitro shows that I had seen, it still was a let-down. I really only brought Halloween Havoc because Bret Hart was on the commercial [in-fact the first time I discovered that Bret was in WCW, as well]. Some of the show was great; a great tag-team three-way in which a double-pinfall occurred (one featuring Harlem Heat and a prosthetic mummy), Sid Vicious' insane, crimson-masked rant on Goldberg was awesome, and the mid-card bouts were solid - (notably Benoit vs Rick Steiner). The Main Events were soarly lacking. Page and Flair in an absolute bore of a strap match, Hogan vs. Sting that never really happened and then, the PPV cut out before later title match between Goldberg and Sting. After that, I never looked twice at an upcoming WCW event.

I remember the 2000 Rumble with Cactus and Hunter and The Rock winning, but my fondest memory is of SummerSlam 2000, which raced home to catch halfway through with the epic ladders match. I will never forget coming home and turning on the T.V to an image of the "Wylie Kyote cam" from atop the ladder.

I was a pretty big fan, but then in 2001, I became an absolute wrestling addict. Royal Rumble 2001 was like a religious experience for me. The whole event from the opening promo video and the music that accompanied it, all the way to Austin - bloodstained and beaten up, celebrating his win in the middle of the ring. From that day forward, I watched wrestling religiously every single week until 2008. I would go back and re-watch the episodes over and over again and have a big VHS collection (now unfortunately gathering dust).

After 2002, I felt that the WWF just wasn't the same. I didn't like the feel of the end of 2002. It was changing. 2003 was bittersweet for me, and the last 'up-to-standard' year of wrestling in my opinion. 2005 was the last year that I really enjoyed a few moments and I pretty much and unfortunately wore out my passion between 2006 and 2008 because the product stopped delivering what I felt had made it special.

In 2003, I went to my first wrestling event (WWA), where I got to meet my idol, Bret Hart and I finally saw WWE live for the first time in 2006.

After buying the Royal Rumble 2008, I was sold on the fact that wrestling wasn't what it once was and slowly tuned in less and less until mid-2010, at which point it became very rare for me to do so.

Nowadays, I barely watch the new WWE product. I still love wrestling and always will. I am an avid collector of items from the time period in which I was a passionate fan and try to keep up to speed with even the present day events of WWE.

My country just got Impact Wrestling in January, which I am enjoying one hell of a lot and tune in weekly. It's not as good as WWF, but it's the best thing going today.

 

[Slash-LN]

When I was about 3 my mom turned on the tv and wrestling happened to be on. I guess I showed interest in it because week after week she sat me down in front of the tv and let me watch it. It just became a habit to watch. As I got a little older I was in awe of The Ultimate Warrior. He seemed larger than life so I watched hoping to see him on.
Then one week this blonde harired guy in a leather jacket threw his friend through a barber shop window and I found a new favorite.

 

[FlairFan2003]

You know, I laugh when younger people talk about how edgy WWE was during the Attitude era, though the language was mildly harsher the NWA in the 80s was just as edgy. We had brutal parking lot baseball bat beatdowns (Tully Blanchard jumps Dusty in the TBS studios parking lot, ties him to a pole, and breaks his arm with a bat), an attenpmted lynching (Dusty Rhodes & Magnum TA kidnap Jim Cornette during a match, beat him up, tie a rope around his neck and the other end to Dusty's pick up and attempt to drag him down the highway, only to be saved at the last second by the Midnight Express), we had serious violence against women (Baby Doll was not only called a **** and slapped on camera by Blanchard she was beat in the stomache by Cornette with his loaded tennis rackett), lots of sexual innuendo in the promos, and while not as much in the promos we definately got a lot of course language that aired uncensored on TV during matches (nothing like hearing Ric Flair drop the F-bomb during a cage match on Saturday Morning TV).

By the time Attitude came along much of it was old news to me, plus a lot of it was really juvenile, not very adult in nature.

 

[19NightLong]

I was five years old when i started watching it back in 1997 because my brother(who was in his first year in high school at that time) wanted me to watch it and see so i watched. It was on WWF Raw in the midst of the Monday Night Wars and i believe it was about a week before Austin's first stunner on McMahon. When it goes to break, my brother switched back to Nitro on TNT to see the nWo angle go crazy. Despite that, i grow in love with character in the WWF, such as Stone Cold Steve Austin, Bret Hart, Undertaker, Kane, Mankind, Brian Pillman, Owen Hart, etc and so on. So i was stuck with the WWF Raw for a long time. That's how i get to know about wrestling. I stopped watching in in 2007 because WWE produc was stale and boring let alone Benoit killed himself after murdering his family. That said, wrestling had a huge impact in my life and that's how i get to know it.

 

[WallsofZakku]

For me it was a family thing, my dad (r.i.p) was a huge wrestling fan and every week it would be on the tv. as long as i could remember i've been watching it. i even knew the channels for raw, nitro, smackdown, and thunder at 7 years old. once i started watching i became hooked till this day.
and thanks to the now extinct cable boxes we were able to watch all the ppv's for free :] over the last 18 years it's provided me with many memorable moments.

 

[Stockwell38]

For me it was back in 1984. Pipers pits were catching my eye. They were halarious and piper was always insulting someone...i usualy turned the channel after the pit was done. The actual match that had me hooked was the match were Studd and Patera knocked out Andre the giant and cut his hair. I couldnt belive seeing Andre as big as he was on the ground getting all his hair chopped off.

 

[thegreatone]

Through my family my Dad used to watch the british wrestling on ITV and my older brothers and once WWE/WCW got more known over in the UK with sky and that, being the youngest at 21 all my brothers who are now 30 odd plus watched wrestling and still do, used to get my brother to tape raw/sd and run over the next day and get the tape so I could watch it , but was more of a WCW fan as we got that for free through the old cable box, I can still remember going to Asda to buy the old WCW PPV VHS tapes when I was younger..

Good Times