You are Always Gonna be a wrestling fan Part 2

The Bushwackers were just drunks

The old NWO crew (even Buff)

My buddy Mike and I prior to Prom, but notice  the comic wall!

By this point (early to mid 90's) I had moved on to greener pastures. I would feel that wrestling was at all time down low, with lamer gimmicks and sillier characters. I moved onto nerdier things in life throughout middle school, like Transformers and into my early years of high school like video taping cartoon shows, cataloging my Star Wars collection, creating a wall of "What If... "and "Transformers" comic books and action figure collecting. I thought wrestling was just for kids, a cartoony drama with muscular guys. One Monday night I was flipping through the channels, I stopped on TNT because I saw that Hulk Hogan was on screen, yelling into the microphone and playing a total bad guy. I never thought such a thing was imaginable, then I noticed that he was there with two other wrestlers from my past Hall and Nash - but I remembered them as Razor Ramon and Big Daddy Diesel. Hulk Hogan had just recently became a bad guy, as this show "Nitro" that I came to know it, consistently showcased highlights from weeks of previous matches. They had this group of wrestlers called the New World Order, and nearly every other week, another wrestler from my childhood joined their ranks. It was SO cool, a whole group of bad guys banding together to single handedly dominate a wrestling organization.

Brotha Bruti

I was getting back into it - their storyline was a simple one to follow, and their frequent recaps could get any fan back into the groove of things. It felt VERY comic booky - on one side, you had all of the bad guys binding together and taking out any in their path. You were either with them or against them - sometimes, they would even take out one of their own (poor Brutus the Barber Beefcake) to prove no one was safe. All of the heroic wrestlers turned to one man to aid them in their defeat, Ric Flair- it was truly feeling like a huge crossover book like an Infinite Crisis where all of the villains teamed up and all of the heroes teamed up for a common goal.

Just.......Perfect

In a gruesome steel cage match Ric Flair and his Four Horseman were going up against the N.W.O. In a seedy moment of betrayal, of the Horseman's own, Mr. Perfect (by this point he was Curt Henning to the world) slammed Ric Flair's head in the steel cage door and cost the defeat and disbanding of the Horseman. By the way, this is called "turning heel" as Mr. Perfect as a good guy, then turned bad (which was a common gimmick during this time) The N.W.O. seemed damn near unstoppable, they held a clutch over WCW and they really made it seem like this was a place of panic, no wrestler was safe but in the shadows Sting lurked about to put fear in the fearless.

STONE COLD! STONE COLD! STONE COLD!

In the mean time, I would occasionally flip between WCW and WWF. There were some wrestlers that I would know by name and/or face but it seemed like it was the end of one era and the beginning of a new. It seemed to me that WWF couldn't compete with WCW's storyline about the drama of New World Order, so their storylines became racier, more aggressive, sexier and having no problem of using profanity. Stone Cold was the one we all loved to watch, we all wanted to see who he was going to give the old "stunner" to next - he even did it to Santa one time and then began to chug a beer. They had ladies in bra and panties matches, bizarre sexuality issues with Golddust (Dusty must be soooo proud), a fight between the boss and the employee and even some rather "racial" issues between groups of wrestlers such as the Nation of Domination, Degeneration X and a third group that I believe were called the "Disciples of the Apocalypse" - they appeared to be skin head bikers.

Extreme Championship Wrestling changed wrestling forever

Bam Bam Bigelow and Taz go through rings

We miss you Joey!

Finally, beneath all of the glitz and glam of multi-billion dollar stage productions, there was an underground hit that you would probably only know about from word of mouth. ECW was extreme hardcore wrestling. I saw performers do things to their bodies that I would have no idea could be possible. Falling through NUMEROUS tables, people on fire, jumping off of twenty feet high walls, etc, AND all the while the fans would treat this with the upmost respect. I would never see a man holding a suplex for about twenty seconds and get a standing ovation. Or an entire crowd to simultaneously utter "Holy Sh**" over and over as they just saw someone fall through a ring. AND, the fans also had no problem letting you know that they knew the maneuver you were about to do and you didn't do it correctly because you were still an amateur, "You f**ked up, you f***ed up!" And all the while using Joey Styles' trademark "OH MY GODDDDDDDDD!" for the most devastating of hits, finishers and feats of wrestling majesty. Thus began the Monday Night Wars and the third Golden Age of Wrestling.

To read more about the Monday Night Wars, continue on to Part III HERE