Getting your friends to fall in love with professional wrestling can be a tough task. We’re here to help.
One of the biggest challenges of being an adult who likes professional wrestling is finding new people to watch it with. Most wrestling fandom is cemented in adolescence; it’s rare for someone who didn’t grow up watching wrestling to come to it as an adult and find it anything besides ludicrous. Professional wrestling carries a lot of connotations, most of which are negative, and though the cultural tide is shifting a bit, as big-name media figures like Michelle Beadle and Bill Simmons continue to openly discuss their love of wrestling, the general attitude still leans toward the idea that liking wrestling as an adult is some sort of guilty pleasure, a lingering artifact from childhood.
This is not to say that it’s impossible to convert adults to wrestling fandom. Doing so just requires finesse. It’s a delicate, slow process, one that demands patience on the part of the wrestling proselytizer, but the payoff is entirely worth it.
So if you’re an adult wrestling fan looking to introduce your friends to the joys of professional wrestling, here’s a guide on how to go about it without being obnoxious. You’ll have to take off your smark hat for a bit, and you’ll have to endure a lot of foolish questions and snide remarks, but with enough time and effort you’ll see results.
Expect resistance
It’s pretty tough to get people to appreciate something that’s inherently ridiculous, and there are few forms of entertainment more ridiculous than professional wrestling. Be prepared to have your friends roll their eyes at some of the stuff you’ve learned to either ignore or appreciate: the dramatic kick-outs at 2.99 seconds, the use of the Irish whip, referees being unaware of any sort of interference, wrestlers stopping mid-match because another wrestler’s music hits, etc. Don’t get mad when your friends go, “Man, that was so stupid.” Chances are, yeah, it was stupid, especially to an outside observer. Don’t waste time trying to justify all the silly things that happen in the squared circle; just laugh along with your friends and keep things moving.
Don’t bombard them with terminology
The jargon of professional wrestling is fascinating, but it can be pretty overwhelming for new fans. Yes, wrestling jargon can help explain what exactly is occurring in a match or segment, much like how, say, all those fancy literary theory terms you learned in college can help precisely describe the mechanics of a novel, but similar to how someone can enjoy a novel without knowing those terms, so too can someone be caught up in the thrill of a good wrestling match without knowing the exact terminology that describes the action. Allow the emotions of the match to speak for themselves. There will be plenty of opportunities to slap vocabulary onto things later.
Don’t force favorites
If you’ve been watching professional wrestling since you were a child, chances are that you’re current favorite stars are wrestlers who do all the little things well. It’s like with basketball: when you’re young all you want is for your favorite team to have a guy who can throw down some spectacular dunks. But when you’re older and wiser, more aware of the nuances of the game, what you want is someone who will take care of the ball, crash the boards when needed, and shoot at an efficient rate. It’s not that you no longer care about highlights; it’s that you’re more appreciative of the skills that directly translate to winning.
This explains why it can be a bit of a challenge to introduce prospective fans to wrestling. The wrestlers you want them to root for, the men and women you find most interesting, are probably the wrestlers who with a great work-rates and sublime in-ring psychology — the tacticians who excel at all the subtle nuances necessary to tell a great story over the course of a match. But chances are your friends won’t be initially wowed by those subtle skills, and that’s totally fine! They will probably gravitate toward the wrestlers you find boring and one-dimensional — say, the behemoths like Ryback — because the barrier of entry for appreciating those wrestlers is far lower. Look at that huge dude! He’s so big! Wow, he can lift people over his head! Crazy! The experienced fan in you will probably want to scoff, to point out things like poor selling and limited move sets, but it’ll behoove you to suppress your inner smark and let your friends take joy in whichever wrestlers they so choose.
Avoid matches with complex back stories
Yes, those 30-minute feud-concluding Wrestlemania matches are wonderful, but for a new fan they mean very little. Even if you try to explain all the back story between two wrestlers — see, this guy was that guy’s mentor ten years ago, and now they’re feuding because *insert in-depth history lesson here* — it’s near impossible to truly impress upon your fledgling fan friends the true emotional weight of what they’re watching. It’s like showing someone with no prior watching experience the last few episodes of Breaking Bad and expecting the Jesse-Walt scenes to resonate. Sure, you can explain what’s going on, even in detail, but true emotional investment — watching from the beginning — is required in order to make story arc climaxes actually powerful.
Avoid unusual or uncommon matches
If your friends think every match is going to be a TLC extravaganza, they will probably be a tad underwhelmed by a technically sound regular match. It’s tempting to go straight to the outlandish matches with the jaw-dropping spots, because even new fans can mark out for a crazy “holy s—“ moment, but doing so skews expectations and sets a bad precedent about what makes a wrestling match good. Hold off on introducing your friends to those gimmick matches until you’ve gotten a chance to show them exciting matches that don’t involve a ladder or a casket or anything of that nature.
Focus on what’s current, not nostalgia binges
It’s OK to show your friends a few of your favorite matches from back in the day, but overall it is not a great tactic for building fandom for the current product. First, it gives the impression, even on a subconscious level, that all the best matches have already happened, that the glory days are gone. By only showing your friends matches from, say, the Attitude Era, you’re setting your friends up for disappointment when they watch current matches, because the product is so different now from what it was years ago. Your friends may be able to appreciate a great match from a bygone era, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into excitement for what the world of wrestling currently offers. Also, chances are that those older matches, the ones that made such a huge impression on you when you were a young fan, may not stand the test of time. Don’t just live in the past; make your friends enthusiastic about what’s happening now.
Branch out from WWE
I mean, duh. You have the internet at your disposal. Use it. Thanks to YouTube there are countless hours of wrestling available to watch, wrestling from many different promotions. Just because, say, a WWE match doesn’t click with your friends doesn’t mean that you should give up on making them wrestling fans. Show them some stuff from Lucha Underground or Ring of Honor or New Japan. Eventually you’ll find which style of wrestling your friends most enjoy, thus providing you with good baseline information to build on going forward.