WHAT MADE YOU STOP WATCHING WRESTLING (and what made you come back)?

I continued to follow wrestling even after reaching the stage of knowing what was happening. The skills of the Roccos and Saints of the wrestling world could still be admired whatever the ‘legitimacy’ of the proceedings. I wasn’t surprised when Haystacks jobbed to Daddy in just a few seconds of farce, because Haystacks could never sell anything as far as I was concerned. But when even Quinn did a similarly ridiculous one round job to Daddy .. at a time when the effort of climbing in the ring looked as if it would finish Crabtree .. well that was that for me. The promoters never even bothered to think of a good line … and clearly thought punters would take any old tosh. So that was that for me.

MC

This subject could run and run. Perhaps rightly so. I suppose that all of us on here are a reflection of public attitudes to pro wrestling. We probably all passed through a spectrum something like.......

It's all 100% competitive but with a lot of showmanship thrown in.

Some of it is worked some of it real and you never can tell.

Most of it is a work but occasionally you get the real thing.

It's all fake now but there was a time when it was all legit. (The Golden Age Myth)

It is and always was a total con but a highly skilled and sometimes very entertaining one.

I can't remember the last live show that I saw. I think it might have been Bridges as HW Champion of The World. I do know that I continued to take an interest long after I had arrived at the final stage of awareness. I did stop watching WOS tv wrestling for all of the usual reasons (Big Daddy, small roster, same old same old) and that was a shame because the likes of King Ben and Pat Roach were still doing good work. One final thought - When I got to work and train with wrestlers and ex wrestlers I came to realize that if the product was not to be taken seriously, some of the people involved certainly had to be! It was a monster con but that, and the characters who worked it, was part of the charm.

sorry, never stopped watching, still do. I can enjoy both the black and white 60s videos, British JP style as well as the WWF 80s cartoonish style and the current WWE style. I have no problem with it at all. You can ask me why did I stop watching football, and that one is easy to answer. Because fifa/uefa turned a beautiful game into one big hell of a joke.

The Kendo vs Brookes/Regal hypnotism tag was the straw that broke the camel's back for me, completely ludicrous. My interest had been waning for a while as the pool of wrestlers grew alarmingly smaller by the week. Shirley should have been allowed to retire in the early 1980s. Illness and age had taken it's toll on him by the mid 80s and he appeared smaller than men he had once dwarfed, and for all i have a soft spot for Shirls his tags were monotonous. Perhaps in theory an amalgamation of Joint and the Independents might have made the sport last a few more years but that was never going to happen in reality.

Having read much about American wrestling in the U.S. magazines prior to it's initial broadcast over here i was disappointed with much of what i would later view. Count-outs, disqualifications, foreign objects, interference from outside the ring and endless gobshite-ing prior to a contest abounded without much actual wrestling taking place. Personally, i would have preferred to have watched the European tournaments and some of the Japanese promotions instead. Following this i just returned to reading my late Dad's old wrestling magazines and snippets.

The Big Daddy circus drove me away as other things such as football, music etc took priority, I still occasionally went to independent shows as the product was more innovative and more entertaining in general. I watch a couple of shows when in the states and was surprised to see Geoff Portz in the bill, I married and my boys were beginning to take interest in WWF and WCW so off we went to see WWF at Whitley Bay arena, one or two duff matches but a couple of corkers including Bret Hart v Bam Bam Bigelow which rekindled my interest. I have attended arena shows, shows in pubs and was at a show last Saturday as a friend of my sons was wrestling, it was a good nights entertainment on the whole, about 300 in the audience and everyone seemed to go home happy. Wrestling is still out there but they aren't catering to lovers of the wrestling style of the 1960's and 70's, but if you go with an open mind you can still enjoy the event, I did.

For me it changed when ITV changed the regular scheduled program to WCW. Big Daddy was still active, but by this stage I was bored. This was the late 80’s. I had attended some shows, and they were good. YouTube, got me watching wrestling again.

False advertising became more frequent in the early 1990s and promoters gave increasingly absurd excuses for the non appearance of the wrestlers on the bill. This put me off attending live matches. Also the WWF and WCW went down the infantile storylines road-too much chat and not much action

Today of course the really big promotions do not print bills and those that do are generic with no specific matches mentioned

I felt extremely uncomfortable going to a wrestling show where the wrestlers were described:

• Catweazle with his funny antics

• referee Bryan

• Mams and Dads Favourite

• Popular Mick McMichael

It was a sign that the promoters had either given up trying to make out it was legit; or they really dimissed the punters' intelligence. That's the main reason I can think of now, but certainly the fairer sex started to dominate my time.

As Hack writes, the internet brought a new beginning and I have spent more years as an internet fan than ever I was an attendee. He was working full-time and I had to make him realise it was a bit risky using your real name on a forum. I had rustled up my Anglo Italian in literally two seconds when I was bursting to make my first forum post. I am now Anglo Italian not only here but also in another walk of life and it suits me down to the ground. (Even though someone was convinced I was Eddie Capelli)

The internet fascination incredibly keeps going because somehow we still manage to uncover new names and details and secrets. I feel like I saw The Ghoul and Jack Pye and Assisrati wrestle countless times.

And yet, as Ron aptly calls it, this great Deception still manages to retain many of its secrets.

the beginning of the 70's it lost the appeal, to put bluntly it went dead.. they wanted us to believe crap was real

I started in the first half of the 1960s though detailed memories only come from 1965 when I started watching live shows. In those days it was all real, of course, as far as I was concerned. The 1960s newspaper exposes had no impact on me. By the early 1970s I had my doubts, but that wasn't what put me off. It was a combination of changes to wrestling and other interests that stopped me watching. At college from 1972 - 1976 I continued watching live events though was becoming increasingly disenchanted with what I watched. In 1974 I no longer had enough interest to continue writing but did continue watching live shows. I moved to Birmingham in 1976 and only continued going to Digbeth because it was something to do. By 1977 when I had made friends that was it and I no longer watched live. I carried on watching tv, but less frequently in the 1980s. By 1988 when it was taken off ITV I didn't care. That was it. Just the memories were left.

I bought my first computer. One bored day I searched for wrestling and found a few comments about traditional wrestling. Even found a few wrestlers I that I knew were still working. Pat Roach was one. In the early 2000s there was a forum called 1Stop. For months I read memories of wrestlers I knew but thought I'd nothing to offer. One day I was brave and posted a message about Jack Dempsey. Then I replied to a message about Jack Pye. Next came Jackie Pallo. I hadn't seen a connection but got a private message from someone calling himself Anglo Italian asking me if I had a thing about men called Jack (He didn't say if his name was Jack. It isn't).In 2005 or 06 Anglo Italian came over to Britain with his work, we met up in Wolverhampton. I bought him a curry. He bought a beer. I remember he said there must be money in this website business. He was wrong. In 2007 we started Heritage because we were fed up of people taking the time of posting to forums and then those memories being lost forever. I've looked at the modern style on tv but haven't seen anything I want to follow.

I started as a six year old going to St James Hall with both my dad and grandad, as I got into my teens the talented wrestlers started to be pushed out for Big Shirley and the road show along with his brother as a clown of a referee, who used to get some of the biggest boos of the night at Newcastle city hall. The guys who should have been topping bill's became the support act to the belly busting and I had enough. I occasionally would take in an independent show when I was working in various parts of the country and when in the states in the early 80s went to a couple of shows featuring a couple of British wrestlers Geoff Portz and Les Thornton , this was territory wrestling before the WWF monster. I probably got back into it when my boys took an interest and started to watch wcw and WWF, we began to go to british shows, Joint, all star and local Promotions, even booked a couple of promotions for events and in turn helped with insurance, publicity etc. for a couple of Promotions when dropped in it. I still go to shows, and will do again when they eventually start up though I think a lot of UK Promotions wont start back up. and think the British scene is going to be very different.

The Big Daddy circus finished it for me. I realised I’d sooner tear off and juggle my nuts than watch anymore of that rubbish. I never did come back to it after that but I retained the fond memories of what went before and the father and son time I had going to Fairfield with my Dad.

My answer is that the interest is built in Era's.

I watched as a kid with granddad from 1959 in that great tv era up to the late 1960's and then sought it out live , in particular at Belle Vue.

I realize now that by the time I got a car in 1971 , wrestling had passed it's peak , but I did not know that then , and for me it was Kendo Nagasaki , the mystery and still lots of great wrestlers. I went to many halls.

I did not like the Kendo unmasking in 1977 and he also went missing for quite a few years before coming back in the 1980's. By then I thought the quality of the bills was dropping off and the best wrestlers were not heavyweights and I could see the business was not being built round them.

By 1978 I dropped out , hardly watching on tv either.

I think it was about 1984 when I saw the American stuff and followed it for about 20 years , much of it fantastic.

I was then only lukewarm for a while but watched the BBC Timeshift Documentary , I think in 2012, and also had been a silent observer on Wrestling Heritage , I think from 2010. Timeshift was an awakening because of it's Heritage connection.

From 2013 Ron Historyo was born , because I spotted a gap , in that as a genealogist , I was aware of where I could find wrestling bills and reports from the old days.

Now I enjoy trying to understand the Industry , it's fascinating , and must be the greatest deception of all time.

Not so today , it's just very talented acrobatics , great athletes and I can look in on it , but to be honest , I don't know who any of them are.

Most weeks though I learn something and I enjoy the most, doing the investigative work to help others.

The critical moment though was probably 1974/1975 , and you have to have lived through it , Wrestling was not at the same level as it had been in the early 1960's.

It is unique though that so many people enjoyed the 1980's because they were young then.

That is the magic of wrestling.

To answer my own question - for me, it's happened twice: once British wrestling went off the air, I turned my attention across the Atlantic but that came to an abrupt and ignominious end after Hulk Hogan won the belt for the umpteenth time at WrestleMania IX (1993) - I couldn't suspend my disbelief that much. But I came back a few years later thanks to the NWO and the stuff with Austin in the WWF.

The second time I dropped out was in 2007 out of protest because I despised Cena as champion - though I continued to sporadically keep an eye on players on the indie circuit (including a certain Bryan Danielson) - and came back in 2011 when CM Punk cut the pipebomb promo and had that great match with Cena at MITB, and I've stayed a fan ever since.