Closed Circle

Over the years, I've been pretty much every type of professional wrestling fan. The first time I ever watched it I was about six years old, and I'm pretty sure I had absolutely no idea what was going on. Later, in high school, I had a friend who followed the old World Championship Wrestling (WCW). He'd occasionally come over on weekends and we'd watch the replay of Monday Nitro, and he would leap off the couch with glee every time Bill Goldberg spear-tackled somebody. For my part, I was entering a phase of my life where I was much too serious and analytical for my own good: I enjoyed the matches but sighed heavily whenever one ended early due to outside interference.

In the 2000s, I watched World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) sporadically but with bursts of intensity. Remember, this was before Tivo-style recording systems, and they were running a brand extension after absorbing the recently defunct WCW and Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW). As such, Foxtel would show upwards of six hours of wrestling a week, with each show featuring different performers and storylines. It was one of the most difficult possible times for a casual fan to try and go deeper, yet it was also the era of performers like Stone Cold Steve Austin, the Rock, Edge, Rob Van Dam, Chris Jericho, Triple H, and a certain young upstart named John Cena, which made it one of the best possible times to learn about the theater elements of wrestling.

However, I wouldn't start seriously watching week in and week out until just last year, and by that time the world of wrestling fandom had become a very different place. When I was in high school, if you couldn't catch Monday Nitro, you would have to wait for the weekend or buy a VCR - the words "live blog" were decades away. If you keep a careful eye on an episode of Raw or Smackdown, you'll notice that there is always a hashtag suggestion for social media users at the top left corner of the screen. Sometimes they go so far as to repost selected Twitter reactions in a ticker on the bottom of the screen. And from there, I quickly went down the rabbit hole to the dirt sheets and fan forums; to the backstage rumors, storyline predictions, and character (over)analysis, and to the power rankings, and letter grades for matches, and arguments over which performer possesses that most nebulous attribute of "technical skill".

There are undeniable benefits to elements of being a knowledgeable fan, and to certain elements of what knowledgeable fans know. An in-depth understanding of one's hobby is certainly beneficial. Echo chambers and rigid orthodoxy are certainly not, and it's sad when internet discussion - in any fandom - takes that direction.

For my part, in the time between pre-ordering my ticket to the WWE live show in Melbourne and actually getting ready to go to it, I had started to feel a little burned out. I'd gotten into the habit of scanning the news sites between broadcasts, and I'd inadvertantly chosen some pretty cynical ones to read. I was actually considering going on hiatus for a while, even with the possibility of never catching up on the storyline.

I arrived at the Rod Laver Arena more than an hour early, and the first thing that struck me was the crowd's average age. That age was around mine, early 30s - but in a most technical manner, as many members of the audience were very young, early teens or so, accompanied by their parents or even grandparents. There were men and women, and not all from the same high school clique type - I would later pass time during intermission conversing with a group who resembled adult versions of the Goth kids from South Park and who had been trying to start a comedic chant in the outdoor section of the lobby. As you might expect, almost everyone was wearing the colors and signs of their favorite wrestlers, and there was more variety among those favorites than you'll ever see on forums. References to former indie darlings and "technical wizards" were under-represented, especially if you're used to the online environment. Parents in ancient Austin 3:16 and nWo t-shirts rubbed shoulders with middle schoolers decked head to toe in John Cena merchandise or Roman Reigns' recognizable fist icon. I found myself seated with two young girls of perhaps sixteen years to my left, and a man around my age accompanying a squad of elementary school-aged Cena fans to my right.

This was, as you may have surmised, my first time in a live WWE audience. One of the most important elements of a WWE wrestler is their entrance. The music, lighting, and routine are selected to go with the individual, and reinforce their on-stage character - without the right entrance, they're just some random person. When the actual show started, I learned that there is a world of difference between seeing an entrance on TV and being in the presence of one. The music sounds entirely different when it hasn't been digitized and beamed halfway across the planet; its impact seems much more direct, and you hear a militant Celtic march instead of just Sheamus' music, an ominous warning of threats to come instead of just AJ Styles' music. And the crowd's reactions are also entirely different when you are inside that crowd - striking as they are on TV, but far more intense and far more compelling.

And I was impressed by just how responsive that crowd was. It's hard to give cynical thoughts much credence when you're being deafened by 5,000 people chanting "New Day rocks!", and raising your voice along with the equivalent of the population of a small town to sing along with Sami Zayn's theme. It's hard not to be moved when the young women sitting to your left swoon in the aisle as Seth Rollins makes his way to the ring, or when the young man across the way names wrestlers' special moves as they perform them, or when the little girl on the other side of the ring weeps with joy as Sasha Banks leans over the barricade to hug her.

At the risk of hyperbole, the show may well have saved me as a wrestling fan. If you saw any tweets about three weeks ago along the lines of "What kind of 33-year-old man cheers his guts out for Roman Reigns?", that may well have been a reference to me by any internet-style smart fans in my section, who I presume were among the ones that spent most of each match making cell phone videos and most of the intermission posting on Twitter. But I put my phone in my pocket, and allowed myself to be swept up in the spectacle, and I understood something that neither me nor my friend from high school could articulate at the time; something that those young people in the audience hadn't yet forgotten. Wrestling - just like life - is beset by all that everyone knows you're supposedly supposed to do and say and be; yet in the end it is simply, in a liberating realization, about what you experience in each moment.