For about five years now, professional wrestling has been a guilty pleasure of mine. I started out going back and watching WWF and WCW’s Monday Night Wars, perhaps the cultural and creative peak of pro wrestling as television, and connected instantly with D-Generation X’s rebellious antics and the nWo’s refusal to conform to established formulas. When I turned to then-current WWE, I found myself cheering on CM Punk, a straight-edge guy like me who wasn’t afraid to speak truth to power, and Daniel Bryan, then a bearded lunatic who yelled “No! No! No!” all the time because he hated the word “yes.”
The initial appeal of wrestling, at least for me, was in the larger-than-life characters and ludicrous storylines. That’s half the reason I love Lucha Underground, a full-on urban fantasy show with wrestlers treated in-universe as dragons, aliens, and zombies, among other things, fighting in a wrestling promotion built in tribute to ancient Aztec warriors. But the longer I’ve watched, the more I’ve come to appreciate the in-ring action. See, apart from the important beats that advance whatever story the match is telling, like who wins, what move they use to get the win, or who comes out from backstage and messes with the match, these wrestlers are basically doing live improvised stunt work--and if they screw up, they risk permanent injury or even death. Put the plot threads and the matches together, and you have the capacity to tell stories not possible in any other form of entertainment.
So imagine my surprise when, while watching WWE Raw two weeks ago, a graphic flashed across the bottom of the screen advertising an upcoming event that weekend in Stockton, roughly an hour out from where I live. In pro wrestling terms, this event was a “house show,” a strictly live event not meant to air on television. In fact, there were signs all over reminding the audience not to take video of the event, but that didn’t stop me from putting clip after clip of video into my Snapchat story. Seriously, that thing probably ended up 15 minutes long and had way too much of me chanting along with everyone. But I digress. Point is, when I saw the show was coming up that weekend, I knew I had to be there. So I talked my dad--who’d wanted to go to a pro wrestling show of some sort for years--into getting tickets, and after a week of anticipation, it was finally time for the both of us to finally see the art of professional wrestling live and in person for the very first time.
Stockton itself, as we discovered on our drive through its downtown streets, was a run-down, depressing city. I guess that comes with the territory when said city declared one of the largest bankruptcies of all time back in 2012. But once we got to the event, it was as though the curtain of kayfabe had descended and everyone in Stockton Arena was transported to a magical place full of spectacle, glamor, and giant inflatable boxes of Booty-O’s. (Booty-O’s: they make sure you ain’t booty!)
The show opened with a bang, as Cesaro and Sheamus put on a stellar match, just as they’d done on Raw that week and would do again on the next Raw two days later. Cesaro is, by far, the more entertaining of the two wrestlers in the ring, but you can’t carry a no-talent wrestler to a great match, and Sheamus, boring as he sometimes gets, can hold his own in the ring when the time calls for it. Sami Zayn put on a similarly great performance in his matchup with Baron Corbin, who actually showed some personality for once and got a nice moment of villainy by beating up the victorious Sami after the match was over.
Speaking of villains--or heels, if you speak wrestler--evil was the side that carried the story in many of the night’s matches. Fandango acted like a cocky, over-the-top jerk so that when Jey Uso finally got the win, it felt like proper comeuppance. In the women’s tag team match, Natalya posed for the crowd to draw boos so that when her partner, Alexa Bliss, had to tap out to a submission hold from Becky Lynch, the crowd would cheer all the louder. Speaking of that match, the single loudest boos of the night came when Eva Marie came out and interrupted the match to play up her “injury,” since her storyline on SmackDown right now is that she keeps faking leg injuries and wardrobe malfunctions so she doesn’t actually have to wrestle. Given that Eva’s reputation right now is “can’t wrestle for crap,” this is a brilliant way to cover her weaknesses while still giving her a chance to be on TV and get a rise out of the audience.
In contrast, the biggest outburst of cheers came when Randy Orton, he of the RKO outta nowhere, made his entrance for his match against Bray Wyatt. The two put on one of the better matches of the night, made all the more impressive by the fact that Wyatt had sprained his ankle that week on SmackDown and still managed to wrestle like nothing had happened. Between Orton’s massive pop of cheers, Wyatt’s signature entrance, where the lights go out and the cell phone lights of the audience become his “fireflies,” and the inevitable RKO that had everyone in the audience, myself included, screaming their heads off, this was a match that began and ended in striking fashion.
Overall, it was a solid card of matches, even if it was easy to predict how the matches would end. At house shows, the “face” of the match pretty much always wins unless it’s a title match and a heel is holding the belt. Speaking of title belts, there were a surprising amount of title fights over the course of the night, with the Intercontinental, Tag Team, and World Championships all put on the line over the course of the night. Again, from a story perspective, it was obvious none of these belts were going to change hands--unless the show is at Madison Square Garden, they’re going to save that sort of craziness for TV or pay-per-view--but that didn’t stop any of those matches from being entertaining.
Out of those three matches, the Intercontinental Championship match was probably the weakest, and the one with the least focus on the actual champion. Compared to Darren Young and Titus O’Neil, whose feud took up most of the match’s story, The Miz was kind of an afterthought, there to fight when one of the other two needed a break and pin Titus at the end so the belt wouldn’t change hands and Darren, the only heroic wrestler in the match, wouldn’t take the actual loss. It was a good match, but I have to wonder why they didn’t just have Titus and Darren fight one-on-one, apart from maybe breaking up the monotony of singles match after singles match.
The Tag Team title match, on the other hand, was a huge spectacle that really drew the crowd in. The New Day, the champions, are the single most-popular team on the roster aside from maybe Enzo and Cass--who, sadly, weren’t there--and their signature antics had “New! Day rocks! New! Day rocks!” chants going all throughout their match with The Club, who held their own in shenanigans by stealing a New Day shirt only to have it stolen back. However, as fun as that match was, it felt weird having only two of the three members come out at the start and delaying Big E’s arrival and signature introduction until the very end, using it to distract the other team and get the victory. I mean, I get that it was a way to have Big E still show up while he’s “recovering” from his case of “ringpostitis”--long story short, The Club dragged Big E crotch-first into a ring post after a match on Raw and “injured” him, giving the writers an excuse to keep him out of the New Day vs. Club title match this month at SummerSlam--but given how electrifying it is to hear him yell “Awwwwww, [city name]! Don’t you DARE! Be sour! CLAP! For your world-famous two-time champs, and FEEEEEEEL! The POWAAAAAAAH!” before their entrance music hits, it felt wrong not hearing that part until the match was almost over.
And then there was the main event, a match for the WWE World Championship between champion Dean Ambrose, whose main thing is being a crazy person, and challenger AJ Styles, whose main thing is that he likes to beat up John Cena. The two put on a main event worthy of that distinction, with the best example of in-ring storytelling in the whole night, as Styles wailed away on one of Ambrose’s legs and Ambrose acted like said leg was in severe pain for a good chunk of the match. Even though Dean was clearly the face and AJ the heel, the crowd cheered on both wrestlers enthusiastically. Even if, for whatever reason, the writers had decided to shock the audience with an AJ Styles victory, I think the crowd would have gone home happy.
But the best match of the night wasn’t Ambrose vs. Styles. It was the fourth-to-last match of the night, a sort of mini-main event between Seth Rollins and Roman Reigns. This was the one match where the usual “cheer the face and boo the heel” dynamic nearly got flipped upside-down. See, from roughly June of 2014 until this year’s Money in the Bank pay-per-view, Roman Reigns was pushed as the new franchise player of WWE--as in, the writers wanted him to be the new John Cena. The problem was that Roman was rough around the edges as a wrestler and not nearly charismatic enough to salvage the hot garbage the writers made him say whenever he got hold of a microphone. Night after night, he was booed out of the arena, but rather than adjust accordingly by either reducing Roman’s screentime or turning him into a heel, the writers started trying to warp the logic of the story and shoved him down the audience’s throats even more, including muting the crowd when they booed him too loudly and putting the WWE World Championship on him three times for a combined 118 days. That only stopped when he violated the company’s drug policy and got suspended. After that, he dropped the title to Dean Ambrose at Money in the Bank, started losing matches, and dropped out of the main event scene.
Don’t get me wrong--Roman is a good wrestler, and he absolutely can be the megastar the company wants him to be if they give him the chance to find his groove and develop his character organically. However, the wounds from his time as the Wesley Crusher of WWE are still deep, and if Raw turns back into The Roman Reigns Show any time soon, the backlash is guaranteed to be huge.
So if you take that and combine it with the fact that Roman’s opponent, Seth Rollins, is so charismatic that he can outright insult the crowd and still get cheers from half the people in the building, then you get a recipe for an audience with divided loyalties. The best demonstration occurred when Rollins and Reigns traded punches and the audience did the customary “Boo!/Yay!” chants in time with the hits. Half the audience cheered when Seth threw a punch and booed when Roman hit back, and the other half of the audience did the opposite. However, the overwhelming majority of people in the audience could agree on one thing: the match was awesome. This was one of the longest matches of the night, and the two wrestlers absolutely beat the crap out of each other over the course of it. It was the kind of match where both men looked like absolute powerhouses, and it felt like it could have gone either way, even if it ultimately ended with Roman coming out on top.
I walked into the arena wearing a New York City FC jersey, but by the time I walked out, I had a Seth Rollins shirt on over it. Even if I didn’t get to see all my favorites in one night, this show was an absolute blast, with moments that will stay with me for years to come. That night in Stockton, I was officially baptized as a fan of professional wrestling. And if you ain’t down with that, I got two words for ya...too bad. You’re missing out, man. (Oh, come on, did you really think I was going to tell you to suck it? I’m a wrestling fan, not friggin’ X-Pac.)
