When people ask me what my favorite sports are, I often will just go with the easy answers such as football, baseball and basketball. I tend to leave out one of my favorite sports: professional wrestling. I will not mention it because of the bad reputation that wrestling seems to get, especially in the Seventh-day Adventist world. Other times, I won’t mention it because some believe that professional wrestling is staged and, therefore, isn’t even a sport.
World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) is my favorite form of professional wrestling, and I have enjoyed it since I was a young kid. I was introduced to WWE by my grandpa when I was about 10 years old. When I was introduced to it, I wasn’t super in to wrestling, other than the fact that I wanted to pull off some of the moves that I saw on TV on any one of my three brothers.
As a kid I didn’t know that WWE was fake. I actually thought that the wrestlers were fighting, and this left me in awe. I loved going over to my grandparents’ house on Monday nights to watch WWE RAW with my grandpa. I would never get to finish a whole episode of RAW. But every time I would watch, I would get more and more interested in wrestling.
There are a couple of reasons why my interest started to peak and why I consider wrestling to be one of my favorite sports. The majority of people know that wrestling is a farce. It has a predetermined outcome of what is going to happen and who is going to win. With that in mind ,though, the wrestlers are still very athletic and can do things I can only dream of. Another reason that keeps me watching wrestling every week is the increasing drama. Wrestling has many different wrestlers, and sometimes viewers, myself included, who fall in love with the many different types of wrestlers.
In wrestling there are usually two ways that wrestlers are described. A “face” is a wrestler who is considered the “hero” and the one the crowd will usually cheer for. The other is a “heel” or the wrestler who is considered bad and usually gets booed. Many times I will cheer for the face, but sometimes I will see myself cheering for the heel. This is largely because of the many different ways that the wrestlers are presented.
The best feeling for a wrestling fan is when a wrestler makes his or her return after going on a hiatus. When a fan hears a walkout theme for a wrestler who hasn’t been seen in awhile, it makes them feel really happy.
As we get older, we often don’t stay as connected with our family as we used to. With this in mind, wrestling has continued to grow in my heart, as I often view it as a way that I can still connect with my grandpa.
