Thank you for reading my first blog post! Please go easy on me with the criticism because I am a newbie. My love for wrestling has run deep since I was a child and has been pretty constant except for a breif hiatus from 2004-2008. I loved the late eighties when most people thought it was unscripted (I won't call it "fake") , the ridiculous characters of the early nineties, and of course the attitude era. I was about fourteen in 1998 and remember the first time I seen Vince McMahon open raw with an enouncement that "due to the new creative direction of the show it was adviced to not let children watch raw" or something to that effect. My parents didn't watch wrestling so they had no idea how inappropriate the content was becoming and I loved every minute of the show.

Now by 1999 I was drinking Pepsi the way Stone Cold chugged beer and had two words for anyone willing to listen. For the first time in my life I wasn't the only person (besides my two cousins) who thought wrestling was cool. Even as a nine year old I was drawn to the heel characters. When Shawn Michaels put Marty Jannetty throught the Barber Shop window I became his biggest fan. The attitude era was the height of wrestling entertainment. It was edgy, well scripted, exciting, unpredictable, and the matches were top notch for the most part. All good thing eventually end and once WWE won the war and bought WCW and ECW the ratings fell.


Now for the next few years wrestling gotten raunchier and more depraved then ever. Another thing happened, the excitement and popularity also kept diminishing. No matter how far they pushed the envelope they could grab no new attention and seemed to be going so far that they lost viewers who felt the line was finally being crossed. The best example is the infamous Katie Vick vignette. I watched in shock and disgust as my favorite wrestler (at that moment) pretended to engage in necrophilia. It was hands down the most tasteless thing I ever seen on television. At that time I wasn't religious and wasn't offended by much. It wasn't long after that moment I began slowly to stop watching wrestling for a while.

In 2008 for no particular reason I turned on Raw and began watching weekly as if I never stopped. I was indifferent to the new squeaky clean image of the WWE and didn't find it as exciting as I did years previous. I married in 2010 my lovely wife who has young boys from a previous marriage, and they now watch with me sometimes. At first I would tell them John Cena stinks until I realized what I was doing. Why wouldn't I want them to have a role model who teaches them respect, a never quit mentality, and a good work ethic? Certainly better than my hero's of HHH and StoneCold.


My point is the quality of wrestling is not determined by the moral context. Why can't we have mature stories without the profanity and over sexual images? Wrestling needs balance not a parental rating, be it MA or tvpg.