There comes a time in every man’s life where he looks back
and thinks, “Damn, am I really that old?”
When I was 7 years old, I watched my first Wrestlemania. It
wasn’t live or even on closed-circuit TV. Instead, it was a week later, Easter
Sunday, at my uncle’s house, recorded on VHS. We were stoked and it was
awesome. This would be the tradition for many years. Someone would get a
recording of it and we would watch it a week or two later. At that age, it was
the same as being live. As a teenager, despite being poor, I was lucky enough
to have all the cable channels. You might be thinking my parents were
deadbeats, but no, a different uncle was. Apparently, getting free cable was a
rather simple task back then, so long as you knew the right person. We had
cable in four rooms of our house and four TVs, which was impressive at the
time. Only one box could receive the Pay-Per-View signal, and that was in the
living room. My dad would let me unhook it and take it to my room to watch it, for
free. As a young adult, it was always paid for, no cheating, one of us would
order it the legal and legit way. The past few years, as my friends who watched
wrestling waned, I was forced to watch it at sports bars, surrounded by grown
men who have way too many kids and still think the matches aren’t
predetermined. In a complete regression, I will be reuniting with some old
friends who I used to watch it with, now available on the WWE network. I
imagine in a few years we will be back to stealing them from the cable
companies with black boxes, and eventually trading tapes, too.
It’s been a long road.
Still runnin' wild.