WARNING: There’s some coarse language in this one. It’s cool, my granny said it.
I watched professional wrestling when I was a young boy. Don’t take this as any kind of qualifier on my current intelligence: I was in Southeast Kentucky, so it was either this or Kentucky basketball. Basketball season isn’t that long, so we had to bide our time with wrestling. Besides, my Granny Overbay watched it with me.
We would watch Smoky Mountain Wrestling*, which looked like it was produced on a budget of $15 and a case of Mountain Dew. The intro to the show was a grainy picture of Atlas, holding the world above his head, while Also Sprach Zarathustra** played. It was a lot more emotionally engaging than cartoons, to be sure.
There are basically two roles that wrestlers can play. Face wrestlers are the good guys, and back when I was a kid, they all had 80’s rockstar hair. Heels are the bad guys, and I grew up with heels that were either bald or had large beards that could hold sledgehammers. This was good, since heels often cheated in the following manner:
- Distract the referee (“Hey, ref, look! It’s Elvis!” was a good tactic); and then
- Beating the everlovin’ snot out of the face with whatever they could find, usually a steel chair
There was a particular wrestler, Doug Furnas, that Granny Overbay just loved. Doug Furnas was a face, and all the ladies loved him. He was a weightlifter in college, and he would often do a few bench presses during an interview. He was doing that one episode when suddenly, a heel came out and threw the barbell into his chest.
I thought Doug Furnas was going to die. My six-year-old mind had finally realized what death was, and it was going to happen to someone I actually liked.
Granny Overbay took it a little worse than I did. She jumped out of her chair, dumped her spit-cup***, and yelled at the TV:
“GET UP YOU SONOFABITCH AND KICK THAT BASTARD’S ASS!”
It was all too much to bear. I think I may have cried, or at least prayed that Doug Furnas was all right. He was back the next episode, with a big bandage across his chest, promising to pin that bastard in the ring. It was a miracle, and I knew God answered prayers.
Now, I know wrestling’s fake. Wrestlers are athletes, but their sport is more akin to dancing than to actual fighting. It’s been called a “redneck soap opera,” and I suppose that’s true. But back then, with nothing else to watch, it was the best entertainment to be had. I loved it. These men were acting out scenes from the best of mythology, and I watched it all with Granny Overbay.
That is, until she threw her beer through the TV screen. Then I had to wait for basketball season.
*Wikipedia says that Smoky Mountain Wrestling started in 1992, at which point Granny Overbay was already dead. That only lessened her love for wrestling a little bit.
** The theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Being used to promote wrestling. It was the best thing I’d ever seen on television.
***Yes, my Granny Overbay chewed tobacco. So did everybody’s Granny in the Appalachian Mountains.
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