And That’s the Bottom Line

Back when WWE was called WWF, and you could tell a teacher to “Suck It” while giving them a crotch chop, there was no telling me that Stone Cold Steve Austin wasn’t the coolest guy on the planet. Before him, it was Razor Ramon. And before that, it was the Macho Man Randy Savage, Ravishing Rick Rude, and a host of other slick-named, coked-up, steroid-infused maniacs bringing joy to millions and millions of fans across the globe.

The Wrestling Territories

I was born when the territory era was ending, and the wrestling superstars were about to shine brightly. My introduction to the sport was on a Saturday morning in the late nineteen eighties, watching a garden shear-wielding barber fight an Elvis impersonator, and I was instantly hooked. A little too young to follow any storylines, I loved to see all these whackos in their crazy costumes running wild on each other. One guy brought a snake with him to the ring. Another had a parrot. What was there not to love about it?

My brother and I would practice wrestling moves in our parents’ queen-sized bed. Since he was bigger, he’d throw me around and give me a powerbomb or suplex. I was more technical and practiced submission moves like the Sharpshooter and the Figure-Four Leg Lock. We never got the Wrestling Buddies we desired, so we settled for playing with the popular WWF Real Wrestling Action figures with limited mobility and articulation. Booking a reunited Shawn Michaels and Marty Jannetty against the Bushwhackers in the famed Official Wrestling Ring led to more than one real fight with my sibling.

Conservative parents didn’t let their children watch this sort of thing on television due to its violent nature and sometimes mature themes. I was only limited by my lack of awareness of when the next time I’d get to feast my eyes on these larger-than-life kings of the ring. Once we stumbled upon World Championship Wrestling Saturday Night playing on the TBS superstation, a new world opened. There were different heroes and villains to be captivated by.

The all-time great stable, The Dangerous Alliance

Tuning in each week, I became familiar with Sting, the Steiner Brothers, Big Van Vader, Cactus Jack, Ric Flair, and “Stunning” Steve Austin. I took the side of the Dangerous Alliance as they ran roughshod over the airwaves. Rooting for the bad guys never felt so good. This was all before I knew that the wrestlers moved back and forth between promotions, changing names and identities like they were on the lamb.

Prior to the advent of the internet, I’d beg for the latest copies of WWF and WCW’s official magazines or Pro Wrestling Illustrated to get the inside scoop on my favorite superstars. I wanted nothing more in life than to own a pair of the Bret ‘The Hitman” Hart’s wrap-around shades and a replica championship belt from the merchandise catalogs. At the local arcade, I would pump quarters into the WWF WrestleFest machine, trying to win the tag-team championships with Mr. Perfect and Sgt. Slaughter.

Pro wrestling was still novel to me, but I was starting to appreciate the sum of the pieces. The theatrics, high-energy performances, risky maneuvers, amped-up interviews, and wild wardrobes made me crave more. My dad would regale me with stories of Haystacks Calhoun, the “Nature Boy” Buddy Rogers, and other champions from his formative years. A benefit of having a January birthday was that I would ask for my folks to order the Royal Rumble on pay-per-view as a gift each year and invite some friends over for a watch party.

By the mid-1990’s, it was a foregone conclusion that any homework assigned to me on a Monday wasn’t going to be completed until Tuesday morning, right before it was due, if at all. Switching between WWF’s Monday Night Raw and WCW’s Monday Nitro kept me current with both promotions and gave me plenty of material for the lunch table talk the next day. Without the on-demand viewing or digital recording capabilities of today, if you missed the action on the TV, it was harder to keep up with the soap opera that is pro wrestling.

RAW is WAR, and the Attitude Era generated the most excitement for me and my friends. In 1997, I was thirteen years old and looking for any and every excuse to consume sex, violence, and explicit language in my media. The constant stream of Degeneration X’s vulgarity, Divas wrestling in their underwear, The Godfather parading around his “hoes”, and the ferocious CTE-inducing chair shots to the head made sure that my needs were met.

Upon seeing Extreme Championship Wrestling’s Hardcore TV being broadcast on my local airwaves late one Friday night, I lost my shit. It made WWF look like a Disney production. The crowds were wilder, and the promos were cooler. The language was harsh, and most wrestlers seemed like real people, not superheroes or cartoon characters. There was more violence and blood. The foreign objects used to inflict hurt and brutalize the wrestlers were not limited to tables, ladders, and chairs.

For Christmas that year, I received a VHS mail-order copy of StrangleMania, a strange and wonderful compilation of Japanese death matches with exploding wrestling rings and barbed wire ropes. To top it off, the Insane Clown Posse provided the hilarious and raunchy overdubbed commentary making it popular viewing during weekend sleepovers with the homies. During my heyday as a fan, Backyard Wrestling turned everyday idiot suburban kids from daredevils into paraplegics. Despite my adoration of all things wrestling at the time, I was never inclined to want to be a wrestler, backyard or otherwise. It seemed too dangerous.

During a misguided freshman year spent at a Catholic high school, I proved to be quite incompetent when an assignment for my theology class called on me to come up with my own religion. Without any previous theological training to fall back on or refer to, I based my religion on the tenets of my lord and savior Stone Cold Steve Austin. Thou shall not trust anybody. And that’s the bottom line because Stone Cold said so. Followers, if I recall correctly, were called Stunners, as in “A group of us Stunners are going to worship on Monday night at 7:57 pm”.

Album cover for Stone Cold Metal

Coors Light was our holy water. Our hymn book drew from Stone Cold Metal, a compilation album featuring some of the man’s favorite tunes, including tracks from KISS, Terrible Ted Nugent, Def Leppard, and many more greats. Austin 3:16 said, “I just whipped your ass.” That got me sent to the Dean of Discipline, which sounds like a wrestler’s nickname but was, in fact, the title of a job that someone held at the school.

My mother’s job as a journalist offered me an opportunity to get up close and personal with my wrestling idols. Half joking, I suggested that it would be cool of her to reach out to WWF and see if she could interview any of the Superstars when they came to town the following month. Next thing I know, I’m holding a press kit and a stack of glossy 8×10 photos of everyone on the roster, from outcasts like Luna Vachon and Gangrel to fan favorites Kane and Undertaker that they sent in advance of her interviews.

Personalized autograph from Stone Cold Steve Austin

Ticket stub from WrestleMania Road Rage March 6, 1999

When the untelevised ‘WrestleMania Road Rage!’ event arrived, a friend and I got to sit in on interviews with both Stone Cold and Mankind and get photos and autographs before the action got underway. After I saw The Rock walking around backstage, I flipped through my folder of photos quickly enough that I could run him down and get his signature. Talk about a dream coming true.

Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Rockers

Mankind, Dude Love and Cactus Jack

One of the first solo drives I took after getting my driver’s license was in a torrential rainstorm to a movie theater an hour from where I lived to see the documentary Beyond the Mat, which provided me a view into the darker side of the wrestling biz. Turns out the same guy that brought his snake to the ring liked to smoke crack. Ignorant folks will continue to make arguments stating wrestling is “fake”, but show them a clip of Mankind getting his head bashed repeatedly while his hands are restrained behind him and they’ll switch their tune real quick.

When other pursuits of happiness became more important to me, my wrestling fandom waned. Injuries and stints in rehab forced my favorite performers to the sidelines or into their first retirements. I followed along peripherally but eventually stopped keeping up with the week-to-week that had been such a big part of my youth. By the time WWE bought out WCW, I was totally checked out.

Personalized autograph from Mankind and Socko

After stumbling through my twenties and sprinting through my thirties, I arrived at my forties with a deeper appreciation of the pain and suffering the superstars put their bodies and minds through to provide me with many great memories decades later. Some of my favorite wrestlers aged with grace and dignity, most didn’t fare as well. For every career that turned out like the Rock or Stone Cold’s, there are a hundred that ended at the bottom of a bottle of booze or strung out pills or dope.

Personalized autograph from The Rock

In the most recent years, I have been able to revive my interest and relive my childhood through the eyes of my seven-year-old nephew. He is excited to share his take on kayfabe. His desire to deliver a Stone Cold Stunner to me when I walk in the door or asking to be body slammed onto the couch awaken my inner child. After he thoroughly destroys me in WWE 2K24 during a Hell in the Cell match we team up in a boiler room brawl and he throws our opponent through a spotlight from twenty feet up in a move that would paralyze or kill someone in real life.

Front of 1998 Austin 3:16 Texas Rattlesnake Don’t Trust Anybody T-Shirt

Back of 1998 Austin 3:16 Texas Rattlesnake Don’t Trust Anybody T-Shirt

When my brother asked me if I would be interested in going to a taping of Monday Night Raw with them, I said yes and immediately started looking for a suitable Stone Cold shirt that I could wear to the event. I  picked up the 1998 Don’t Trust Anybody beauty for around $65 from eBay. A few days before the event, I ended up at a vintage marketplace, and while going through the racks of Fad2Fresh, I happened upon a perfectly distressed, paper-thin Stone Cold Steve Austin shirt with a sick smokey fade and cracked print in all its glory. It was meant to be, so I snagged it for under eighty bucks.

Beautifully faded Stone Cold Steve Austin Shirt

With the event happening right before WrestleMania, the stadium had an extra level of excitement coursing through it. My nephew’s favorite wrestler, Cody Rhodes, was the little brother of Goldust, who had one of the most bizarre and memorable gimmicks of all time. The American Nightmare Cody Rhodes was engaged in a feud with The Rock who had come back on the scene as he’s wont to do when he has something to promote. I’m not sure if the audience was expecting him to show, I certainly wasn’t.

The Rock’s entrance to the ring

When The Rock interrupted Cody in the middle of cutting a promo, and he came out to lightening and lasers, the crowd popped. The Rock sauntered to the ring wearing an elaborate vest, then stared his opponent down without saying a word for about three minutes. I was screaming and cheering at the top of my lungs like I was a young kid again. When the Rock left Cody beaten, battered, bruised, and bloody in a parking lot at the end of the night, my nephew shared genuine concern for his well-being while simultaneously being furious at me for cheering The Rock along while he whipped Cody’s roody-poo candy ass with a weight belt.

A few months later, a childhood friend invited me to attend a taping of Smackdown where I was pleasantly surprised that none of his young sons or nephews would be joining us. We stopped at a dispensary on the way, then chain-smoked joints in the parking lot before the show, and reminisced about the madness and mania brought to life by the spandex-clad warriors we envied so much. I was complimented for my Don’t Trust Anybody tee by two men similarly aged as me. My joy couldn’t be contained.

These days, it is easy to get my fix of nostalgia by following my childhood hero’s Instagram feeds, watching their old matches online, or listening to them tell tales on each other’s podcasts. The excellent series Dark Side of the Ring has highlighted many of the saddest, scariest, nastiest, and most notorious stories from the history of wrestling. It’s normal to see tributes pour in from all corners of the internet when a former or current superstar dies at an early age.

There is no shortage of vintage wrestling shirt collectors posting amazing items online for all to enjoy. Wrestling4sale is a great source for those trying to add a “Superfly” Jimmy Snuka or Texas Tornado grail to their closet. I recently was put on to TopShelfWrestlingFinds‘ auctions that highlight amazing and rare items. Defunkd has been on always been on the wave. I’m on the lookout for the ‘Oozing Machismo’ Razor Ramon at a reasonable price, but it is not something I obsess over like the other shirts I’ve got my eye on.

Classic Razor Ramon Oozing Machismo Shirt

After all the tragedies in and out of the ring and the bad press that Vince McMahon and WWE have received, there are an equally great number of moments that cannot be forgotten. I’m glad that the connection to my childhood is strengthened by my memories of these larger-than-life characters. My appreciation for the show is enhanced every time my nephew shows me the newest wrestler he’s unlocked on his game or reminds me about the time Mick Foley entered the Royal Rumble three times in one night as Mankind, Dude Love and Cactus Jack.

I don’t think I realized how much this sport meant to me until I got to enjoy it with the next generation of my family. In 2025, the road to the Royal Rumble runs  straight down I-65 South to Indianapolis. I have no idea which wrestlers will be feuding with each other then or who will be the favorite to make it through the battle royale and receive a title shot, but I’ll be sitting in the crowd with a big grin on my face while stealing glances at my nephew as his mind is blown at the spectacle of it all.