Let me get this straight: You don't like wrestling. (part 1?)

"Yeah, I don't like wrestling. I like the real shit. UFC, MMA, that kind of thing."

This is the typical response i get from men who find out I like wrestling.

"I used to watch, back when it was the WWF/back when they had The Rock and/or Stone Cold," is the response I get from everybody else.

So, basically, when I mention that I like professional wrestling, everybody feels the need to not only tell me that they don't like it, they also tell me WHY IT SUCKS.

First of all, to everybody watching "MMA," that is the most mis-leading name of all time. "Mixed Martial Arts" is not a fighting style, and FUCK UFC and all of the other so-called "MMA Promotions" for confusing the masses.

Go back and watch UFC1, from 1994 or whatever. It was a boxer, a sumo, a kickboxer, a jiu-jitsu guy, a karate guy, etc. Eight guys out to prove what the best fighting discipline was. No pads, no "stopping the fight to protect the athletes," no weight classes, none of that bullshit. The Ultimate Fighting Championship was just that - an 8-man tournament to determine the Ultimate Fighter. And Royce Gracie was better at Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu than any of those other guys were at their respective disciplines. THREE TIMES.

UFC is a far cry from what it set out to be, and is now a bastardization of Pro Wrestling's showmanship and the Olympiad Games' overabundance of rules so deep you don't ever get to see an actual fight.

Or, in the case that you actually DO get to see a fight, you get two guys covered in tattoos (because they're that HARD, you see) hugging, while punching each other in the kidneys until one of them falls over. Then they try and wrap body parts around each other, often resulting in a "Triangle Choke," so called because the guy in the hold has his face in a triangle between the other guy's wang, left testicle, and right testicle.

Or the thing that plagued boxing pay-per-view events, 30-second knockouts. Hey, it's totally impressive for the guy doing the knocking out. It's not impressive for the sucker that just shelled out $50 for the event and spent $100 on snacks for his friends that he invited over.

In the mid-1990s, Royce Gracie was the best fighter in the world. In 2010, nobody can pronounce his first name correctly, nevermind even remember it. Instead, we get the "Ultimate Fighting Championship Champion" (thank you for calling the department of redundancy department) Brock Lesnar, canceling fights because his tummy hurts. Referees are suddenly stopping fights at indiscriminate times to "protect the fighters," or not, because "the fight is too important." Everybody's wearing padded gloves and boxing shorts. It disgusts me.

Now, to the crowd you "used to" watch "WWF" programming:

You're the equivalent of what traditional sports viewers call a "fairweather fan." You like something that all of your friends like, because it's doing well right now. People who watched Stone Cold and The Rock in 1998-2002 are the wrestling equivalent of the lady who went into Sports Authority a couple months ago, and asked if they had any Netherlands' jerseys, so she could wear one to the World Cup Finals. Ten bucks says that lady had never even heard of the Netherlands before April.

Look, Stone Cold Steve Austin was one of the most compelling characters on television, ever. There's no denying that fact. He drank on the job, he got to swear at and beat up his boss, he gave people the finger... He embodied what the blue-collar worker wanted to do every day at the office or on the construction site. So, basically, a pissed-off, drunken, sociopathic redneck. The exact kind of thing that reasonable people make fun of each other for being.

And if Austin wasn't your flavor, there was The Rock, a man so obsessed with saying things more outrageous than you could imagine that nobody bothered to notice that he was also probably the world's biggest asshole. No wonder his only friend was Mankind, a guy so dirt-poor and smelly that he hung out with a sock, when he wasn't busy getting thrown off steel cages through tables.

Nobody seems to remember that in 1998 and 1999, Ken Shamrock was one of the biggest stars in the WWF. You remember Ken Shamrock, right? He tapped out to Royce Gracie in under a minute, at UFC1. I mean, he was the guy in the red wrestling trunks who would go crazy and suplex referees all the time, because he had a temper that he just couldn't keep in check.

Or what about in 1999, when the Undertaker went even darker than usual and started abducting wrestlers, and brainwashing them into joining his "Ministry of Darkness." Really? You forget that a 7-foot guy called The Undertaker (who is still wrestling now, by the way), was BRAINWASHING wrestlers, and forcing them to join his cult of death?

How about in November 1999, when Kurt Angle joined the WWF? You remember Kurt Angle, yeah? He won the OLYMPIC FUCKING GOLD MEDALS at the 1996 Olympiad Games in Atlanta, Georgia in Freestyle Wrestling. Kurt Angle was to wrestling what Royce Gracie was to Mixed Martial Arts (back when they were still mixed) -- THE BEST IN THE WORLD. And then he joined the WWF, and started acting like the world's biggest dork; preaching abstinence, well-balanced diets, and spilling milk all over himself.

It seems that people who no longer watch wrestling only remember eight matches, and seven of them are The Undertaker vs. Mankind in the Hell in a Cell match atthe  King of the Ring 1998 Pay-Per-View event. You know, the one where Mankind kept getting thrown off the steel cage, in what was one of the most brutal, disgusting, barbaric, revolting events in the history of humanity. The very fact that this match is as highly revered as it is makes me question the humanity of the people who talk about it fondly.

Mankind (whose real name is Mick Foley, which is what he's going by now) had one of his teeth driven up THROUGH HIS UPPER LIP during this match, and it got STUCK in his BEARD. No, think about that for a second. Imagine being thrown around so hard that one of your TEETH pops loose. And then, it gets driven THROUGH YOUR SKIN! And people talk FONDLY if the match where this happens.

(But don't forget, professional wrestling isn't real. UFC, the promotion where referees stop fights because one guy is getting punched by padded gloves, THAT'S real. But the one where a guy who gets a tooth driven through his lip is fake.)

The late 90s were a time when the WWF were in direct competition with rival wrestling promotion, WCW. The two companies had wrestling programs broadcast simultaneously on Monday nights, and both were always trying to one-up each other, in the war for that thing that stops intelligent television from existing: Ratings. People were figuratively and literally killing themselves just so one company could get a little bit ahead in the ratings, so they could charge a little more for advertising.

WWF totally ended up winning that war, by the way. One week in 1999, when WCW's show, Nitro, was pre-empted for the NBA finals, WWF Raw scored a 10.0 in the ratings. A TEN. That basically meant that at least one out of every 10 people you knew was watching wrestling, that night. And it didn't hurt that it was one of the better Raws ever produced.

WCW never recovered from that loss in ratings, and basically bankrupted themselves over the next year, trying to regain the lead (despite being owned by Time-Warner), They closed up shop in early 2001, and the WWF owner, Vince McMahon, was more than happy to buy his competition for a measly 3 million dollars (which was the cost of a month's worth of episodes of Raw, incidentally - So, basically, operating expenses). For that $3 million, the WWF gained access to most of WCW's talent, and every single one of their assets - Including their video tape library. McMahon saw ahead, and quickly began releasing DVD sets that included WCW matches for his more popular WWF stars.

A lawsuit with the World Wildlife Foundation forced World Wrestling Federation Entertainment, Inc. to "Get the 'F' Out," and become WWE. And that's when a lot of people stopped watching.

So, basically, WWF won the war, and then all their fairweather fans gave up on them. Way to go, guys.

I don't know what my point was in all this. I just really needed to vent about the stupidity i see in people's opinions about pro wrestling. Maybe tomorrow, I'll write about why I DO like wrestling.

But I'm not promising anything.