Can you imagine the level of a mind that watches wrestling? -Max Von Sydow, "Hannah and Her Sisters". This line, penned by Woody Allen, sums up what a large portion of the United States thinks about professional wrestling. I have had to deal with any question you can think of from people of all different walks of life. "Don't you know that it's fake?" "So, now that Jesse Ventura is a Governor, will he still wrestle?" "They don't even hit each other, why do you watch that trash?" In response: yes, I know that wrestling is fake; no, Ventura hasn't wrestled for fifteen years and I watch it because I personally enjoy it. Perhaps I presuppose too much about the people who ask these questions that annoy me so. This is not like oil and water. A wrestling fan and a non-wrestling fan can be brought together. It seems as if this one difference is a stigma, though. Just because "The Rock" brings to mind a Nicolas Cage movie and "Steve Austin" reminds you of a part that Lee Majors played on The Six Million Dollar Man, doesn't mean we cannot get along. So let us, together, break down this issue and hopefully bring some clarity to it.

I was a wrestling fan from the age of four to the age of eleven. The gap in between my first period of fanaticism and my second came about due to an offhand comment. In 1992, I was watching a wrestling show with friends and heard my dad remark to another parent, "You know, some of these guys are pretty good athletes. And I guess it's pretty entertaining." These were defining words in my life, it turned out. They probably would have never stuck in my mind if it were not for renting a wrestling tape a week later and asking my dad to watch it with me. He looked at me as if I were from Mars. "Sorry Andy, I really have no interest in it." I stopped watching wrestling for five and a half years.

I don't think I watched a single wrestling match in the time between mid-1992 and late 1997. And then, after a cousin's birthday party, on a lark, I sat down for two hours and was immediately hooked, moreso than I ever had been as a younger child. Unfortunately, with this new fondness came a reproach I had never before encountered. It seemed that it was all right for a young boy to enjoy the act of two grown men choreographing a fight, but not a high school student. No, I should have been beyond that. At first, my dad ignored my renewed fascination, but my mom scoffed at me from the beginning, hoping perhaps to shame me out of something that she found less than desirable. A less than subtle roll of the eyes or a chortle here and there greeted me nearly every Monday night as I sat down to watch. She seemed, and still seems, to be of the mind that "no child born of me is that low, able to enjoy something that base".

The rest of the family seemed more than happy to join in the "joke". Every Christmas since 1997, I've had to smile half-wittedly as numerous gag gifts are presented to me, all of a wrestling nature, as my own flesh and blood mocks me under a thin veil of familial love. My family made me so ashamed of my love of wrestling that I began hiding it from people. I became afraid that everyone would judge me based on this small personal preference that really goes no farther than the television room of my house. For months after we began dating, I told my girlfriend, Katie, that all of the wrestling comments, jibes and paraphernalia around the house were "gags". I wasn't really a wrestling fan, after all. I left that behind in 1992 with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Little League.

The day finally came when Katie found the truth. An extensive collection, 13 years of wrestling tapes had been carelessly left in plain sight and I couldn't explain these away so readily. She asked me why I had lied to her and I told her that I had been embarrassed. She understood. Quite simply, she didn't mock, ridicule, look down on or harass me as the others did. Her acceptance brought me a level of comfort with my fascination that I had not previously enjoyed. I find it validating to be accepted fully by a "normal" person for once in my life because no matter what happens, I'm still a wrestling fan.