To My Father, A Wrestling Fan

.           . Yesterday was Father’s Day, a day that, for many dads around the world, is a cause for celebration of the laziest kind. Some golf, a tryptophan-laden feast, maybe a movie, a new tie, and just a lot of well-deserved relaxation. For my father, the day is a bittersweet reminder of just how difficult life can be, even on a day predicated by family and happiness. My grandfather, my father’s father from whom he was given the name John, died on Jan. 13, 2009 after a long and arduous battle with cancer. This is my father’s second year without a dad to celebrate the occasion with, as well as the second in which he does not have a job. Times are tough for him and his, as they are on many of us. I’ve recently seen my bank account shrink enigmatically over the past few months, so I wasn’t able to offer anything to my pops other than company. We had a good meal after he came back from church, we raided the candy section at a local Kroger’s, shoved the loot into our pockets and made our way into the 2:25 showing of “Toy Story 3” in 3D. Just like “Wall-E” and “Up” before it, if you don’t find yourself shedding or fighting off tears at least twice, you simply don’t have a heart. We collected ourselves afterward, left the theater, quickly got out of the searing sun, and went home. I didn’t get a lot of sleep the night before, so I went home and crashed. I woke up fairly early today feeling as if I didn’t do enough for my father on His day. I suddenly remembered something that I all too often forget: I’m a freaking writer. I write for a website. My dad reads that website. So, I booted the computer, got a glass of water, gathered the leftover candy I didn’t eat at the theater, placed it in front of me, and I got to work. This is for him.
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.           . I was always a bigger fan of the WWF than I was WCW. With hot properties like “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, The Rock, The Undertaker, The Hardys and Kurt Angle, I found myself drawn to characters and stories that seemed to get better, stronger and more violent every week. WCW always felt like a wrestling nursing home to me: over-the-hill guys like Savage, Hogan and Flair mingling with mildly entertaining but mostly tedious performers such as Lex Luger, Goldberg and Sid Vicious. Guys like Chris Benoit, Chris Jericho, and Eddie Guerrero, some of the best performers WCW had, seemed to always get the rug pulled out from under them before any momentum could be gained. By around 2000, all those guys were in the WWF, so I no longer had any real reason to tune it. Ultimately, I wound up following one WCW show with any consistency: WCW WorldWide. I was living in Keystone Heights, Florida at the time, and I was somewhat infamous in my household for always being up really early, much before everyone else. By fifteen, this trend would of course become inverted, but for that time, I was always up early enough to bathe, eat and watch some TV uninterrupted. I had grown out of the current crop of cartoons that aired on Saturday TV, but another local network aired the great ones from my youth: The Tick, X-Men, Spider-Man, Eerie, Indiana, Batman, Animaniacs, etc. Sunday posed a dilemma, as there were no cartoons to air on Sunday, even with extended cable like we had. However, WCW WorldWide was on at around ten in the morning on Sundays, it was better than the repeats of the morning news. Just barely.
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.           . By that time, nothing was taped for WorldWide; it had become a place where they hyped WCW TV shows by airing past WCW pay-per-view bouts. Now, one reason I watched it was because it presented less of a challenge to tune in. You see, my mother…HATED wrestling. HATES to this day. She was one of those parents that told you it was fake and thought that would be that. That’s the type of brilliant parenting that gets your kid killed from a piledriver to concrete because, “if it’s fake, I can’t get hurt!” I wasn’t that stupid, but I also knew not to cross her on the issue, so I watched WWF television with the volume exceptionally low, captions on, in the hallway where the other television resided. My folks had shows they watched on Mondays and Thursdays, so the only issue was keeping the remote in hand and flipping it if I had visitors. Whenever I’d slip and she’d get annoyed, my dad would be there with her, but without even the smallest sense of genuine anger. It was more reminiscent of how he looked whenever they watched something he wasn’t really interested in; he was still there, just clearly also somewhere else. One Sunday, when my mother had errands to run all that morning, I found out why. It was March 21, 2001, the very last episode of WorldWide. They would spend the show tearing down the set in the background, sounding somewhat morose for the entirety of the program. The featured match to be shown was the 1994 Fall Brawl WarGames Match that saw Team Rhodes face off against The Stud Stable. Team Rhodes consisted of “American Dream” Dusty Rhodes, son Dustin Rhodes and the Nasty Boys, while the somewhat humorously titled Stud Stable was Terry Funk, Arn Anderson, Bunkhouse Buck and Colonel Robert Parker. As it was starting, I heard my father coming and reached for the remote and came up empty. I couldn’t find the damn thing. By the time I realized I left it in my room, he was already in the room. “Whatcha watchin’?” Pops said. “Uh…wrestling…” I said sheepishly. I thought it’d be the last TV I was going to watch for a week. Instead, a big smile spread across his face and he sat down next to me.
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.           . My dad spent the better part of the next twenty minutes talking about his all-time favorite wrestler, Dusty Rhodes, and everything that he remembered and loved about pro wrasslin’. He and Dick Murdoch tearing up the AWA as “The Texas Outlaws”. The Graham brothers packing the heat stroke-inducing armories with people all over Florida. His grandma Ollie throwing buckets of ice at all the dastardly heels that roamed the Fort Homer Hesterly Armory. “American Dream” and his star-making battles again “Superstar” Billy Graham. He would talk about tons of wrestlers both legendary and local. Harley Race. Gerald and Jack Briscoe. Ivan Koloff. “Dirty” Dick Slater, who my father would refer to as “certifiably insane”. Pedro Morales, who was a Tampa Bay area icon. Dory Funk Sr. and those two kids of his. “The Great Malenko”, father of Joe and Dean. “The Korean Assassin” Pak Song.  “The Master of the Japanese Sleeper” Hero Matsuda. Jos LeDuc. Bob Orton. Haystacks Calhoun. The Masked Destroyer, better known as Killer Kowalski. The Missouri Mauler. “Bullet” Bob Armstrong. “Big Cat” Ernie Ladd, who would often refer to Dusty as “Dirty Rhodes”. And, of course…The Mongolian Stomper. He ran out of silly-sounding names just in time for us to see Dusty Rhodes tap out the colonel with a Figure Four, securing the victory for Team Rhodes. He began to talk again, but we heard Mom coming back from her errands. “We’ll talk more later.” he told me.
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.           . Those twenty minutes have fostered a decade of hilarious anecdotes and war stories of bloody battles in the ring that my father has given me. As a kid, everything’s about upgrading and updating: bigger televisions and movies, better cars and video games. But at some point, a kid becomes a young adult and then a full-grown member of society. Somewhere in that growth, most become enamored with some part of their past. For me, it was old-school wrestling. If it weren’t for my dad, I don’t know if I would have become interested in seeking out older wrestling. When I saw modern grapplers in Pro Wrestling NOAH like Go Shiozaki and KENTA mixing it up with fan favorite, aging starts like Jun Akiyama and Kenta Kobashi, the internet offered a great opportunity to seek out and download dozens and dozens of amazing material from a time and a style made memorable through the stories my father told me. In those ten years since we sat down and I listened to my father express love for something that I thought he hated, a lot has changed. He and my mom divorced, he got remarried to a really lovely woman, and I gained three step sisters and several wonderful family members on my step mom’s side. He only lives two minutes from me and I don’t see him nearly as much as I should. The time we do spend together, well…we watch a lot of wrestling together. The occasional Monday Night Raw, and in the past it was Ring of Honor, but mostly we watch Chikara, the company I cover for this very website. He is a huge fan of Delirious, Colt Cabana, & Dasher Hatfield, so anything we watch with them in it is time well spent. We have also seen almost every episode of NXT together. He knew of Bryan Danielson well before he was “Daniel Bryan”, so he often intentionally calls him “Danny O’Danielson”, “Daniel Bryan Danielson”, etc. It drives me mad for some reason, and because he’s basically a grown-up kid, he shows no signs of stopping. That’s my dad; he’s over 50, yet he is still finding things in life that make him giggle, finding ways to enjoy himself in the face of emotionally taxing adversity.
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.           . We are and always have been very different people, but when it comes to wrestling, we are as akin in tastes as a father and son can be. He was the very first person I remember that made me feel okay to be me, and I’ll never be able to thank him enough. Hopefully, this is a good start. And to all those people who think that I’m a self-serving, long-winded hack who spews nonsense and should not have be given a forum to express his countless bad ideas and lame jokes…blame Dad. He unintentionally started all of this, ten years ago, in Keystone Heights, Florida. So there. It’s his fault. Send him your uncouth, filthy emails. I think he has a Facebook, too.

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.           . I love you, Dad. Thanks.

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