My love letter to professional wrestling…
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Story performed by: Aaron Calafato
Audio Production: Ken Wendt
Original Art: Pete Whitehead
Additional Vocals: Cori Birce
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Hey, it's Aaron. I wanted to give a shout out to Fishbowl. They've been a great presenting sponsor for Season Two of 7 Minute Stories. If you didn't know, Fishbowl is a rapidly growing community platform of over two million professionals. I am one of them. They're most commonly described as Reddit meets LinkedIn. And Fishbowl is really becoming the digital water cooler for professionals to talk and post on an assortment of workplace topics like remote work life, interviewing, dealing with bad managers, how to ask for promotions, company politics, the list goes on, stuff that we all deal with. So I'd love if you join me there. To do that, go to joinfishbowl.com/7ms. That's joinfishbowl.com, the number seven, M-S.
You're listening to 7 Minute Stories with Aaron Calafato. Visit our website, 7minutestories.com. That's the number 7minutestories.com to see the awesome new merch available this season. Choose from stickers, coozies, T shirts, tote bags, and more. I have to say, the tote bag is my favorite.
This episode, Wrestling is a Love Story.
I actually changed the title of this story because of a pro wrestler. It was originally going to be titled Pro Wrestling: A Love Story. But just a few days ago, when wrestling superstar Cody Rhodes, who was formerly with AEW, which is All Elite Wrestling, that organization is a relatively new competitor on the stage and trying to compete with Vince McMahon's WWE, Cody Rhodes really helped AEW come to fruition and popularity. And in this very controversial move, he leaves AEW and then he debuts again because he was with WWE before that. But he debuts at WrestleMania just a couple of days ago and he has this amazing entrance, incredible match. He wins. And then after his match, he tweets out this phrase, "Wrestling is a love story." And I thought, damn, that's a much better title, or at least more accurate to what I feel about pro wrestling.
Now, Cody Rhodes has much deeper, visceral feelings towards pro wrestling because of his involvement. He's from a wrestling dynasty, he's a pro wrestler. But people like me, fans who have been following it for decades, it really is comparable to a love story. So when did this love story start?
I wrote a series of questions down for myself that I'm going to answer, kind of retrieve those memories, and paint a picture for you. The first one is, what was my first memory of professional wrestling? Well, the first memory of professional wrestling was actually just defending it on the playground. That's the first thing I can think of, was me defending it because other kids would make fun of me and they would say, "It's fake. It's a fake, you're a fake." I'm like, "Not fake, I'm real, and it's real." And deep down, I knew it was sort of preplanned, written, contrived. I knew it was a ballet between athleticism and storytelling, that there was an entertainment value to it, but I was really connected to it emotionally. And so when they said it was fake, it was like they were calling me a fake, you know?
So when wrestling came out, WWE, other organizations, and said, "We're wrestling entertainment. Let's just not try to hide it anymore. We don't need the ruse. We don't need the guys," it was even better because you could come out of the shadows and be like, "Yeah, and I still love it even more because of this."
Next question. When was the first time I saw professional wrestling? Well, it was on TV. My brother and I and my mom, we were pretty semi-poor. We had a TV. It may have been black and white, I'm not even kidding you. And we had bunny ears. But with the bunny ears, we could get the free stations, the NBC, ABC, CBS, maybe Fox, I don't know. But we could position the bunny ears and get that. And that meant we could at least see, it was WWF at the time, I'll just refer to it as WWE, Superstars on Saturday morning.
Now, they never really faced each other, like Superstars wouldn't wrestle Superstars because it was the free thing. But the Superstars would face what they would call "jobbers," guys that were no-name wrestlers, to elevate the popularity of the Superstar wrestlers. But it was still good enough for us because you got to see them come into the ring. Their entrances were amazing. Their outfits, their personalities, the stories they told in the ring, their athleticism. It was incredible. And a lot of the times they would do flashbacks or replays of what happened on the shows that were on cable, so you can kind of catch up with the storyline. We just could never afford to get the pay-per-views.
Now my next question, who is my first favorite wrestler? Well, I have two. The first one, though, I remember is a guy I saw on WWE Superstar Saturday morning, and that's Bret "The Hitman" Hart. The best there is, the best there was, and the best there ever will be. This guy was the greatest. Athletic, a true technician in the ring, came from a legendary family, the Hart family. He was a real wrestler. What he did in the ring, you felt was so real physically because you're like, "Man, how is he actually not hitting that guy? Is he really hurting that guy?" It was a ballet. And some of his matches were the greatest matches I've ever seen in my life.
His entrance music was so awesome. He'd come down the aisle, he's got the shades, the hot pink, the black tights, the white boots. He'd walk down there and give those shades to a kid in the front row. Man, I wanted to be that kid so bad. And he was noble. His character had a code of ethics that he followed, and he was real in his mic delivery. It wasn't like a cartoon or a caricature, like some of these other wrestlers. He was like a real guy and I just wanted to follow this guy. He was my first favorite wrestler.
Now, the next thing I jotted down, this is interesting because it says, "How often did I watch wrestling?" Well, besides those Saturday mornings and watching Bret Hart or maybe being at a friend's house, that was all my brother and I could do. We had to do a lot of catch up in the '90s because we didn't have cable, as I said before, and we couldn't afford the pay-per-view. So we missed out on a lot of the storylines. But when I got my license, I would drive my brother to Blockbuster, and we'd go to the Special Interest section, not that Special Interest, but like Sports. And there were dozens of VHS tapes from all the WWE pay-per-views for 25 years, from WrestleMania one till current time. And for years, my brother and I would rent these and watch these every single weekend and get caught up on like 20 years of history. It was unreal.
Sometimes Blockbuster didn't have the videos because they were so popular and there wasn't an Amazon at the time. So we would call video stores that were within an hour radius, see if they had the one we wanted, and we would drive there, get it, watch it that weekend and drive it back. We were dedicated and we stayed dedicated into the late '90s. At that time, we were a little bit older. My mom finally got cable, and that's when my brother and I started watching WCW World Championship Wrestling. To me, the greatest era of all time, between 1996 and 1999. There were the ratings wars between WCW and WWE. The entertainment value was off the charts, and that's when I became a huge fan of Sting.
Sting used to be a bleach blonde wrestler in WCW. They called him "The Franchise," kind of energetic. And then he transitioned around 1996 to this crow-like character like Brandon Lee, The Crow. Dark trench coat, black and white makeup, sort of like this silent angel. He would drop down from the ceiling, literally rappel down. And he feuded with Hollywood Hogan, the evil side of Hulk Hogan. And this storyline, I have never been more enraptured by anything in my life. I remember shedding tears.
You see, these guys are superheroes to me. And so many of these heroes have gone through a lot. Life on the road, prescription and drug abuse, premature death. Not everybody, but so many. That's the reality. But they're still superheroes to me. What wrestlers like Bret Hart, Sting, and Cody Rhodes do, it's truly a gift to their audience. You know, as a kid coping with divorce and instability, pro wrestling gave me an escape. Great stories and characters, embodying Greek-like mythic, universal human struggles filtered through a magical performance.
And for me, most importantly, it gave me consistency. There is no season for wrestling, no waiting. No wondering if they'll show up. There will be a show. It goes all year. If I could count on anything, anything, I could count on that. Wrestling is a love story. And in this story, wrestling has loved me back for over 30 years.
7 Minute Stories is created and performed by Aaron Calafato. Audio production by Ken Wendt. You can connect with Ken or inquire about his audio production services at kenwendt.com. That's kenwendt.com. Original artwork by Pete Whitehead. Find out more about Pete's work at petewhitehead.com. Special thanks to our partners at Evergreen Podcasts, and lastly I'm Cori Birce. Make sure to tune in next week for another story.
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