After drawing all those wrestling mash-ups, it got me to thinking about how long I’ve been following pro wrestling and how big it was for me for the longest time.
I started watching WWF Superstars in late June of 1986. One of the first matches I can remember is Hulk Hogan and Paul Orndorff vs. Big John Studd and King Kong Bundy, the match where Orndorff turned on his “best friend” Hogan and laid him out with a piledriver. I was hooked. I would tune in to NBC every Sunday night at 11pm to catch the latest episode. Later, when NBC stopped airing Superstars, I would watch on CFCF 12 on Saturdays at noon.When I saw Roddy Piper take on a guy with one hand tied behind his back (literally), I decided he was the coolest guy ever.
At that time, I didn’t know that it was fake. It was my “sport”. My sister’s boyfriend at the time seemed happy to tell me it wasn’t real. I didn’t believe him at first, but after a few more people told me the same thing, I came to the realization that it must be true. Still, real or not, it was darn entertaining to watch, even though it was nothing but squash matches on television geared towards selling the local cards touring the country. Once a month though, I could count on Saturday Night’s Main Event for some BIG matches.
Then there was Wrestlemania III. I didn’t quite get the idea of pay per view. I thought that meant TSN, which back then you had to pay extra for. What a disappointment when I found out they weren’t carrying the event. Did Hogan beat the Giant? Did my favorite Roddy Piper go out on top? Did Ricky Steamboat get his revenge on Macho Man? I had to wait a whole week to find out all the winners on Superstars. Several months later, when the card was released on home video, my friend Gilles invited me over to watch it with his family. It wasn’t quite as exciting since we already knew all the outcomes, but still cool to be able to see the matches.
Speaking of Gilles, we’d “wrestle” in the park with his brother Bryan. The posts that used to be for the seesaws that never got reinstalled marked out our ring and we’d act out our own matches with us as our favorite superstars. Don’t worry, we did it all in slow motion and didn’t actually hit each other. In the winter we’d body slam each other in the snow but that’s it. Boy did we have fun though. Gilles and Bryan eventually trained to be real pro wrestlers. They wrestled in independent cards here in Quebec. I’m sad to say I didn’t attend all that many of their shows as we’d fallen out of touch. I just found out last week that Gilles had his last match earlier this year.
LJN had a line of wrestling “action” figures. They were preposed with no articulation whatsoever, but I had a whole mess of them and would play out hundreds of wrestling cards in my ring. That ring cracked when I decided “Planet Bundy” (the most massive of all the figures) would crash into it from orbit (I dropped him from standing height). I fixed it up as best I could with cardboard and masking tape, but it was never quite the same. One night I was playing a little too late and the upstairs neighbours yelled at me through the floor to pipe down (those wrestlers made quite the racket bouncing around in the ring). Undaunted, I put a blanket under the ring to muffle the sound and went right back to it.
I attended my first wrestling card in Trois Rivieres. The main event was the Can-Am Connection (Tom Zenk and Rick Martel) vs. “King” Harley Race and Hercules. It was during the NHL playoffs and the newspaper article the next day said there were barely 600 fans in attendance, but it was still great. I remember seeing Tama of the Islanders at the concession stand ordering hot dogs for him and his partner. A week or two later on TV, the Islanders turned heel (bad guys) by attacking the Can-Am Connection and Tom Zenk disappeared.
I would go on to attend a number of other wrestling events in Trois Rivieres and even my home town of Shawinigan until finally I got to go to one of the “big” shows at the old Montreal Forum when my hero “Rowdy” Roddy Piper was returning “for one night only” (he made a comeback the next year) to take on Randy Savage. We were in the fourth or fifth row and it was awesome. The guys sitting next to us had been at a WWF show in Ontario a couple of days prior that was practically the same lineup, but when they found out Piper was going to be in Montreal (Savage faced Brutus “The Barber” Beefcake in the card they’d seen) they made the trip.
I haven’t always been proud to be a wrestling fan, because there were times when it was lame to be one (some might argue it still is). Most of my friends have lost interest and don’t follow wrestling anymore. I still watch every week more out of habit than anything else. Nothing will capture the magic of that period in the 80s though.