What was your first wrestling experience?

[LODemolition]

My older brother got me into wrestling when I was 4 years old. We watched every Saturday morning and begged our parents to take us to the old Richfield Colisseum for a house show in 1985. The main event wad Hulk Hogan & Junk Yard Dog vs. King Kong Bundy & Big John Studd. All I remember about that night is that a piss drunk fan jumped the guard rail and onto Bundy's back while he was standing in the aisleway. Needless to say, the rest is history and I've been hooked ever since.

 

[jayger777]

My uncle got me into wrestling, I cant really remember it as it was an early age but I do remember waking up early on the Saturday to watch it on the old sky 1 channel ( uk) Now countless years and money spent on wrestling im still hooked!

 

[tdmoon]

I started watching in the early eighties, AWA wrestling broadcast in the Bay Area(TV20?). Then I began hunting for all the wrestling I could find on cable stations and became a fan of the NWA through WTBS. I started spending summer vacations with grandparents in the midwest and that is where I have my fondest early memories of wrestling. My uncle would take me to the weekly shows in Evansville, IN. watching Lawler, Idol, Rich, Dundee, Moondogs, etc. That really got me hooked; a great thing about CWA wrestling was that most everyone passed through there at some time so I could find some of my favorites no matter which promotion was on television.

 

[FrankyM]

I don't live in the United States. I was introduced to wrestling around 15 years ago, and started following the sport ever since.

 

[Lowdown]

Much like LODemolition, my first experience with wrestling was at the age of 4, but not in the conventional sense. MY older cousin exposed me to his WWF figures like Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant. From there I would watch wrestling with him if I was over at his house on Saturdays or Sundays. After that, I was watching Rock n Wrestling Saturday mornings, then Superstars or Challenge in the afternoons. My only regret is that I should've watched more NWA/WCW with him, or at least paid more attention to it. But I was so stuck on WWF at that time I didn't know any better.

 

[LODemolition]

Man, those figures that LJN made in the 80's were great. I must have had about 30 of those things along with the ring when I was a kid, because I remember throwing them all in the ring at the same time and having my own Royal Rumble.

 

[Wrestlingaholic]

For those of us in the UK over the age of thirty, our initial exposure to wrestling came, I imagine, in the same fashion: ITV's World of Sport. Max Crabtree's promotion was THE UK promotion for some time, airing on national television every Saturday afternoon. Personally I only caught the very tail end of it, as I'm 34 and it got taken off the air when I was about 4, so I remember very little about the actual matches, but vividly remember the larger than life personalities of its two biggest draws, Big Daddy and the Giant Haystacks.

My first live experience I don't really count, an event that happened to be on for the campers when I holidayed in Butlins.

Then I was at a friend's in August 1990 and we saw a replay of Summerslam about a week after it took place. I was hooked on these characters and have been a fan ever since.

At around the same time, WWE got a tv deal with Sky Sports over here, and whilst I didn't have Sky, WCW countered by signing a deal with the aforementioned ITV, bringing wrestling back to national tv on Saturday afternoons, with its Worldwide syndicated programme.

Between about 1994 (not long after Hogan debuted with WCW) and 1997, I rarely got an opportunity to watch wrestling, as WCW Worldwide got dropped, and I started getting into football (soccer) more, though I bought the WWF Magazine every month so knew the happenings, but when my parents divorced in 1997, my dad got Sky Sports, just two weeks before In Your House: Canadian Stampede, which he taped for me, and I never looked back. Taping Raw, Nitro, and eventually ECE Hardcore TV and a new British promotion set up by Alex Shane, I think called UPW (though I can't remember exactly), my brother and I may have single handedly kept VHS going for an extra few years, such is the amount we taped (including all WWE ppvs) before finally attending our first real event live at Earl's Court in London, WWE Insurrexion 2001, headlined by the Undertaker v Stone Cold and Triple H.

These days I'm still hooked, though I rarely watch Raw and Smackdown, I still watch every ppv and NXT, and am always looking for a new wrestling fix: AAA, Lucha Underground, TNA, ROH, NJPW etc, I'll give any wrestling a go (except backyard wrestling) and indeed this year has been my most prolific for attending wrestling live, with Takeover: Orlando, Wrestlemania, Raw and Smackdown in London, an NXT house show in Brighton, as well as British promotions Rev Pro and WhatCulture, leaving me hungry for more in 2018

 

[Sai the Uganda Guy]

Bash at the Beach 1996. My mother had just gotten this PPV on VHS from the local Video Hut she worked at. I was bored at home one day after school while she was at work, so I grabbed this tape out of the cabinet (which also had every other WCW PPV on VHS leading up to it) because the cover appealed to me, as did the description of the Hostile Takeover.

I watched in awe at the high-flying match between Rey Mysterio Jr. and Psychosis, laughed at the Carson City Silver Dollar match, booed DDP after he beat Jim Duggan, cringed at the brutality of the Double Dog Collar match, laughed at Disco Inferno as he lost to Dean Malenko, and so on.

But the main event sold me to wrestling forever. I never despised anyone more than the Outsiders as they injured Luger, and so I cheered hard for Macho Man and Sting... Until Hogan appeared.

I'd never watched wrestling before this, but I knew who he was, I'd seen him on TV before; I knew he was a good guy... But then he dropped his leg on Savage and sucked me into wrestling forever.

When my mom returned from work I begged her to get the Hog Wild 1996 VHS. To my dismay, it had yet to be released, but I tuned into Nitro that following Monday and watched ever since.

 

[rmp0012002]

WWWF on Friday nights around ‘79 or ‘80. No cable at that time so it was the only wrestling on.

 

[Psykohurricane55]

I started watching wrestling on TV a couple of weeks before Wrestlemania 4, My dad was a big wrestling fans back then and he was watching WWF on the french channel with Edouard carpentier and Guy aurest has the play by play guy. At some point they had a interview with Hogan talking about his match with andre at mania 4 and i was hooked instantly. I started to watch both the french and English version of the show. Sometimes, i could watch superstars three times on the same day because we had the french version playing at 11 am, then the canadian version was playing at noon and the american version was playing at one. I didn't care that it was the same show, i just wanted to see wrestling.

As for my first live experience, that came after wrestlemania 5, so a year later. This was something at the time because it was my first time going to see wrestling at the old Montreal Forum, which was pretty much one of the most legendary building for wrestling in Canada, So already going to see in that building with my mom and dad was and awesome experience for me, but the fact that the main event for that show was Hulk Hogan vs Macho man randy savage was the best thing ever. Sadly, the motto of card subject to change was real and i think you had like 4 or 5 wrestlers that day that didn'T show up, on top of that since we we're in montreal, Hogan vs Savage was the match before the intermission, so after the intermission we we're serve with what i would called today, the Quebec matches. By that i mean that all the wrestlers that we're super over in quebec got to have their matches put after the intermission, so we got the bushwhackers vs the rougeaus and Brutus beefcake vs Dino Bravo as the last 2 matches on the card. Nothing agains theses guys but when you're a 8 years old kid, you want to see Hogan beat up the bad guys at the end of the show not Beefcake beating Bravo.

Still i was a great memory for me and probably the reason why i'm still a fan today.

 

[stingray11214]

I just turned nine back in the late Spring/Summer 1975. I was up at Midnight on a Saturday night. I was laying in bed, when my Mother gave me a choice: Godzilla or Wrestling. Well, being 9 years old at the time, I did what every red-blooded American nine year-old boy would do: I chose Godzilla on Channel 11 (The movie was "War of the Monsters".). Well, we get past the beginning of the film, and it goes to commercial. Being it was on WPIX, it was also the home of Chiller Theater. Chiller featured a six-fingered hand coming out of a grave. That thing would have me running into the next room. Wellll, guess what that movie was on? Chiller Theater. I changed that channel so fast, I was in bed before the dial moved!

So, on Channel 9 was the Eddie Einhorn's old IWA promotion. Saw the Mighty Igor against Dick "The Bulldog" Brower, and I was hooked. A few weeks later, Channel 9 had "Championship Wrestling" with a guy in a cheap mustard-yellow suit with the name of Vince McMahon doing the play-by-play, and Gary Michael Capetta as the ring announcer. And, as they say, the rest is history.

 

[FromGlasgow]

Being from the UK my first experiance of wrestling was watching world of sport every Saturday as we were kind of deprived of wrestling here for years as this was the only wrestling we could watch and seeing as we only had 3 television channels at this point we really had no choice but to watch world of sport even though nobody else in my family were really into it and kind of been addicted ever since, I started getting into US wrestling when I heard MR T was appearing at Wrestlemania as when I was a child the A-team was my favourite TV show, Used to buy litterally hundreds of VHS tapes of WWF PPV's and other companies like world class, USWA, AWA, NWA and later WCW and ECW through the years.