Living With A Wrestling Fan

I live with a wrestling fan.

Not just someone who occasionally watches it. No. I mean a proper fan. The sort of man who knows everyone's name, their history, their finishing moves and apparently who betrayed whom back in 1998.

Meanwhile, I am still trying to understand why grown adults in sparkly underpants are throwing each other through tables.

The Squeeze watches wrestling with all the seriousness of a surgeon performing a heart transplant.

"Watch this!" he'll say.

I'm watching.

I have no idea what I'm watching, but I'm watching.

Some bloke with hair down to his waist has entered the ring to music that sounds like the soundtrack to Apocalypse Now (I love the smell of napalm in the morning...) while the crowd loses its collective mind.

Apparently, this is important.

Then another bloke appears and everyone boos.

I ask why.

"He turned heel."

I don't know what that means.

Apparently, he used to be good, but now he's bad. Or he used to be bad, but now he's good. Or he pretended to be good while secretly being bad and now everyone knows. 

Honestly, it sounds less like sport and more like high school. And don't get me started on the names.

The Undertaker.

Stone Cold.

The Rock.

John Cena.

Randy Savage.

These are not names. These are things you'd order from Bunnings.

Then there are the moves.

People are thrown off ladders.

Through tables.

Onto chairs.

Onto other people.

And somehow, they all get up and continue arguing.

Meanwhile, if I sit awkwardly on the couch for twenty minutes, I need to stretch before standing up.

What amazes me most is the commitment. The fans know the storylines are ridiculous. The wrestlers know the storylines are ridiculous. Everyone knows. And yet thousands of people willingly suspend reality for a few hours and cheer like children. Hell, even my grandma loved wrestling! 

Which, when you think about it, is actually rather lovely.

The world is serious enough.

Perhaps there is something comforting about knowing that somewhere, every week, two grown men in sequined underpants are pretending to hate each other while fifty thousand people scream in delight.

And if that makes the Squeeze happy, who am I to judge?

Although I still maintain that if someone hits me with a folding chair, I'm not getting back up. I'm sixty-four. I pull a hamstring putting on my socks.