I used to watch professional wrestling.
There, I said it, and I feel better.
Most of my viewing occurred way back before pro wrestling
became the huge entertainment business it is now and before its scripted nature
was publicly acknowledged. We’re talking the late 1960s, when I was ten or
eleven years old.
I’d watch wrestling on channel 11 out of Atlanta on Saturday
nights at 11:30. But the really entertaining telecast was on Columbus’s channel
3 at 4:00 p.m. on Saturdays. Jim Carlisle was the announcer. Promoter Fred Ward
joined him on air. Ward always sent a special greeting to “all our shut-ins”
hoping they’d “be up and at ‘em real real soon!”
Live wrestling took place every Friday night at the Atlanta
Civic Auditorium. I’d beg my father to take me, but he never would. Then,
miracle of miracles, around 1970 they started having wrestling on Saturday
nights at the Sports Palace, which was on the Barnesville side of Griffin. My
father agreed to take me one time. He sat there and laughed through the entire
card, so I decided he was an unsuitable companion with whom to watch wrestling.
Luckily, my Uncle Dock Knight (he wasn’t really my uncle;
his wife was a cousin to my mother, and I was raised to call them Uncle Dock
and Aunt Bernice) and his son, the legendary Rudy Knight, regularly attended
the matches, so I’d occasionally hitch a ride with them.
Those were the days of grapplers such as Joe Scarpa, Paul
DeMarco, the Assassins, Ray Gunkel and Buddy Fuller, El Mongol, Buddy Colt,
Bobby Shane, and the Professional Doug Gilbert, most of whom I saw in Griffin.
In pro wrestling, as in cowboy movies, you have your good
guys and your bad guys. Good guys are known as “faces” and bad guys as “heels.”
Occasionally there would be a “heel turn” in which a good guy would become a
bad guy, or a “face turn” in which a bad guy would become a good guy.
These turns offered an interesting lesson in crowd
psychology. Even as a child, I was amazed at how easily and quickly a crowd
could switch from hating someone to loving them, or vice-versa. It didn’t seem
logical to me, even as I went along with it, to cease booing and start cheering
someone just because he switched sides.
The wrestlers were just following the script. So were we. We
just didn’t know it.
We should beware letting that happen in other, much more
important areas of life.
Take politics, for example. Maybe the same mentality that
lets wrestling fans believe that—a long history that proves otherwise
notwithstanding—a heel is really a face and is therefore someone they can and
should support, also enables a large group of Americans to believe that someone
who has never shown any sign of being on their side now is.
This might be a good time to remind ourselves that a
political narrative can be, like a professional wrestling one, fiction.
