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King Kamala

What did/do your parents think of wrestling?

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I almost totally forgot about it, but I remember about two weeks before WM XIV, me and my brothers were told by my parents that we weren't allowed to watch wrestling anymore. I was 10 at the time, and my brothers were a year or two older. It really seemed to come out of nowhere considering we had watched wrestling for so long before this. I assume this was because of the beginning of the Attitude era stuff, but the more inappropriate stuff had yet to even air, outside of maybe the original DX stuff.

 

I still wonder what the point of the ban was, because we ended up sneaking into a different room than usual to watch the next Raw, although we were caught, and it was turned off. But then I watched Raw the next week with no problem and managed to order WM after that.

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My parents were thoroughly entertained by wrestling. They both would talk about seeing guys like the Sheik and Bobo Brazil when they were younger. As a kid, I remember my mom would constantly make fun of Ric Flair's "flabby titties" or Chris Benoit's "little ass midget arms" and my dad thought "Brock Lesnuh" and Goldberg were the shit.

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My dad actually got me into it, he made me watch Survivor Series 90 with him and I loved it. He was kind of a casual fan through the years and used to watch the early Wmanias at my uncle's house when I was little. Actually my great grandmother used to watch back in the day. My cousin was into it before me so when I got into it, we would always watch the ppvs together and rent tapes, go to shows, etc. My parents used to buy me subscriptions to WWF magazine as a birthday gift for years.

 

We would usually always order the Mania shows, and sometimes others. In early 99, my dad got back into it by watching the 99 Rumble, and especially enjoying the Rock-Mankind wars and hardcore title matches. We started to watch RAW together every week for awhile. After the early 00's he stopped following it with me and I have been on my own since. Though we have gone to some live events recently together, he doesn't watch on TV. He likes going to indy shows where everything is close and he can yell at the refs. Infact, we are going to a local Indy show this Sat night.

 

My mom has never hated on it, although she thinks I'm too old to still be buying dvds and collecting magazines now (she has a point I'm gonna be 26 in a few weeks). :D

 

My sister dislikes current wrestling, she liked the old school days. Mostly cuz now "it's all half-naked girls" :P

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My mom and dad never had a problem with me watching professional wrestling. In my younger days they brought me tons of toys, tapes, ordered every pay-per-view, got magazines, video games, the whole shebang. My parents watched it with me alot of times as a kid. My mom still watches some shows with me from time to time. She's always had her favourites: Hulk Hogan, Rock, Stone Cold Steve Austin, Sting, Kevin Nash, Shawn Michaels, Marty Jannety, X-Pac, Triple H, Ultimate Warrior. She's also recently developed a new appreciation for Ric Flair. I do recall her banning me from watching wrestling back in 1994 because she said I got "too excited." But that ban didn't last very long at all. My mother has taken me to 2 shows, a WCW house show in December 1998 right after Starrcade, and a WWF SmackDown! taping in July 2000 (the one before Fully Loaded). My father took me to the WWE RAW after SummerSlam 2002 at Madison Square Garden with my cousin.

 

My grandfather used to tell me stories of being a professional wrestler, even though they were quite obviously not true. I don't recall my grandfather ever grappling with The Undertaker or Shawn Michaels on WWF Superstars. He kept up to date on WCW for a time, but then in 1997, he completely turned on it. Called it "crap" and a "waste of time". And I still have no idea why.

 

My uncle used to tease me that it was fake. My aunt is probably as into it as I am. She watches every RAW and SmackDown! with me. Her favourites are John Cena, Jeff Hardy, The Undertaker, Batista, CM Punk, THE Brian Kendrick, MVP, R-Truth, Kane, Edge, Shawn Michaels, Chris Jericho, John Morrison and The Miz.

 

My cousins HATED it. They used to tease me about it too, calling it fake and gay. Although, they certainly had no problem playing wrestling video games with me. Their younger brother and sister (my younger cousins obviously) like professional wrestling. It started with us playing WCW/nWo Revenge on the Nintendo 64. I told them that Hulk Hogan fought The Rock one time. They wanted to see the match. I popped in my tape of WrestleMania X8 and they've been hooked ever since. Although, I've only shown them WWF RAWs and pay-per-views from 1998 so far. They've yet to see anything recent. Some other young cousins of mine like professional wrestling also. They remind me of me when I was a kid.

Edited by Ed Wood Caulfield

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My dad likes it - his favorites are Stone Cold, The Rock, and John Cena. My mom doesnt really care one way or the other. My sister doesnt seem to care for it but I caught her playing the first Smackdown game that was ever released on my PS 1.

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My parents hated it, couldn't understand why I watched it, called it phony, fake, etc. Even a couple of years ago, when I was having a conversation with my brother-in-law about wrestling, my mom heard and said, and I quote, "I can't believe you still watch that garbage." This from someone who tapes 2 1/2 hours of soap operas every day so she can watch them after dinner.

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So DCH and me are the only ones who have parents who hate wrestling? My dad doesn't watch it, doesn't care about it, thinks it's a waste of time, and he's the kindest opinion in the family. My mom is a pacifist liberal who spent a while working at a head injury rehab clinic, so she looks at wrestling as basically being on the same level with hardcore pornography or devil-worshipping. Her second husband, my stepdad, thinks it's a stupid waste of braincells entirely populated by maniacs and retards, partly because his younger brother many years ago was dumb enough to do one of those "fans challenge the wrestlers" thing at some old territory show and got pretty badly fucked up. That's why I literally never watched wrestling at all until I was nineteen years old. It was never watched, never talked about, never considered, never even thought about in our households.

 

 

Your stepdad wasn't too far off.

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My dad always liked it since he grew up watching it in the 70's. He would sometimes order PPV's and watch them with me. My mother however doesn't like it at all and doesn't understand why I still watch it after 15 years.

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Every time I have ever asked my parents for a PPV I've been replied with a Work was bad today not enough money can't fork out $30 for a stupid fake show that I don't even like. So I eventually started watching streams. I don't know. My parents hate a lot of things I like. Wrestling tops that list. Especially women's wreslting, because if they're punching/kicking each other they're not women because women don't fight. They just degrade and abuse you.

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I was watching some stuff one day on a visit home from grad school (I only started watching at the end of college, so it was never present when I was growing up), and my dad walked by and shook his head and sighed. When I asked him what the problem was, he said very tersely, "That's something a 14 year old redneck would watch."

 

My mom's indifferent.

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My dad to this day always talks about how foolish it is, though I can recall a few times from when I still lived at home when he'd accidentally get sucked into the occasional Nigel McGuinness/Bryan Danielson match.

 

My mom resisted my getting into it. I would have been a fan a lot younger than I was if she'd have let me. I can remember watching some goofy afternoon show in the early 90's and being forced to change the channel because wrestling was "violent." In retrospect, I don't know what she was so concerned about, perhaps watching ten minute bear hugs and chinlocks would have warped my fragile little mind.

 

 

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My parents tolerated my love of wrestling. At least they never went off on how it was fake, but they would say "This is stupid, why are you watching this?" My sister would watch it with me, and liked guys like Hogan when she was little, though she "grew" out of of it eventually. It probably didn't help that I remember one of the first times I recall my parents seeing us watch wrestling was the episode of Superstars where Warrior was locked in a casket by Undertaker and Paul Bearer. They wouldn't ever buy me any of the figures and stuff...a friend of mine bought me a couple of the old WCW Galoob figures for my birthday one year, and my mom let me buy just _one_ other figure.

 

My dad actually softened his view on it later...he never watches it, but sometimes talks about how his own dad would watch the old AWA and loved guys like The Crusher. He also mentioned later how he took my other grandfather to a local indy show one time (early '80s I believe), and how "you could tell how far the punches were missing."

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Guest

Forgot to mention this, but a few months after I began watching wrestling, my mom said she wouldn't let me watch it anymore if I didn't understand that it was fake. I told her I understood, and proceeded to rent wrestling tapes like, twice a week. She had no problem with it, cause I knew.

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The only time, someone's flat out told me I couldn't watch wrestling was a friend's parent back when I was six or seven. I was over her house one afternoon and realized Superstars was on and quickly dropped whatever I was doing and turned on the TV. Her mom walked in while we were watching a Yokozuna squash and said something about it being too violent, turned it off, and made us go back outside.

 

Though as I mentioned earlie, for about a week at the height of the Attitude era in early '99, my mom said me and my younger brother couldn't watch WWF for a while thanks to the general crassness of it all but she had no problems with us watching WCW. Thankfully, she forgot about this a couple weeks later and things went to normal. In retrospect, the WCW shows of that time period weren't all that much worse than the WWF ones (yeah I said it).

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My folks watched it in the 80's, and were fans of Jake Roberts and Roddy Piper first and foremost (which influenced me to love them the most out of the 80's WWF roster). I started watching as a little tyke, stopped pretty much for the first half of the 90's (though I still knew who everybody on the WWF roster was, and actually understood the Undertaker/UnderFAKER storyline without watching anything and only hearing it through a friend who watched), and when I got back into it in late '97 my mom watched with me every week. Much more a fan of Nitro than Raw, since it was cleaner and had the WWF 80's guys all over the show.

 

My dad took me to three live shows: one WWF house show in late '97, not too long after Montreal, and a pair of ECW shows in '99. He would sit and watch ECW with me, but nothing else. He loved The Sandman and Rhino, didn't care for New Jack or most of the undercard, and thought Joel Gertner was hilarious. My mother hated ECW, "too violent," but really liked Mick Foley following KotR '98, and we both were among the very few original Jerichoholics.

 

Now? Neither of them give two shits about it. My nephew will watch it when it's on, and always has (was great watching a Mike Awesome/Masato Tanaka match with him, and then he wanted to do the "steel chair swordfighting" with his pillows), and my oldest niece used to watch with us until she realized she was a girl. I think my grandfather wants to get all the men in the family together again to go to a WWE show next time they're up (which happened at the aforementioned late '97 house show), but I'm not sure if he's serious or not. Leaning towards the latter, though he does love to just hang out with all of his grandkids and joke around.

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My parents both pretty much hate "that stupid fake shit." I started watching when I was 12 and my mom thought it was a phase I'd grow out of. I'm 21 now, and she bitches at me for spending so much money on DVDs and such. I didn't get to go to my first live show until I was 18, and ever since WWE has come to Monroe (60 miles from where I live, the closest they have or will ever come) about once a year. Mom bitched at me big time for spending so much money this year when I went to a TNA show in July and then a WWE show in September. Yes, she still treats me like a child. I really need to move out.

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My parents never really saw anything in it but indulged me by buying me wrestling figures etc, and not complaining that I spent my pocket money on sticker albums and so on (my parents' attitudes, my dad's especially was always 'it's your money now, spend it on what you want, just make sure that it IS what you want'). I remember one year I got a birthday cake in the shape of a wrestling ring with the Undertaker and Hulk Hogan figures standing in it. I do remember that my dad found the fact that Undertaker's manager was called Paul Bearer hilarious, but then he's always been a master of appalling puns and was probably very amused that someone had got such an awful pun onto the international stage (needless to say, he didn't explain why he found it so funny and it wasn't until several years later that I got the joke). I was also allowed to record and watch WCW from Saturday night (although that may have been partially swung by the fact that my grandparents would watch it with me on Sunday afternoon. To this day I don't know whether they thought it was real or not).

 

When I got back into wrestling at the age of 18 in 2000 my parents were rather bemused, but since I was spending most of my time at University by then the matter hasn't really come up, apart from the wrestling video games that lie around when I would go home in the holidays.

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My mom has always hated it. She's never waivered to that. My dad thinks it's pretty dumb but he would watch a segment or two of the Nitro replay when he'd wake up at like 3-4am in the morning before work. He does respect it as a business. They were nice enough to take me to a house show or two per year when the WWF would run at the Richfield Coliseum in the 1980s-90s even though I could tell they couldn't wait for the night to be over (not that they made it too obvious or anything like that).

 

EDIT: On a very rare occasion of my dad and I watching Smackdown together in 2002ish I believe it was Rikishi who stripped Billy/Chuck/Rico down to their thongs. MUCH to my surprise, my dad chuckled his ass off at this. He was trying to stifle his laughter but he couldn't help it. He thought it was the funniest thing this side of Seinfeld.

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My mom kind of steered me toward it one afternoon by shipping me to my cousin's place for WrestleMania IV. She probably thought that it would be an easy way to get rid of me for the afternoon, not thinking that it would turn me into a fan. The feeling with her after I became a fan was that it was just something I'd grow out of anyway. Ever since then I've pretty much followed some form of wrestling (WWE/Puro/Indies) except for a while in college.

 

My father always hated it. Even though he hated it he usually took me to all the house shows and TV tapings in Portland back in the early to mid-nineties. Around the time of the Attitude era he really wanted me to stop watching and was hesitant about going to the live Raw in December '97. Of course that episode featured the DX strip poker segment, at which point I could see he'd rather be anywhere else. He made it through that night, but that was it for him, for anymore shows he'd drop me and my friends off and find something to do in the city for next 2-3 hours. Even now he gives me shit like a few weeks ago when I went to Survivor Series .

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My parents had no problem with it. My Dad casually followed Georgia wrestling in the late-70s/early-80s (something I didn't know until right before he died in '99). He took me to almost every show that came down to the Macon Coliseum from 1992 to about 1997. Before Hulk Hogan arrived, WCW used to come down here about 3 or 4 times a year. WWF rarely showed up since this was a WCW town, a lot less than they do now. They come to Macon about twice a year now. They only came to Macon three times from August 1992 to May 2002.

 

But no, they never once chastised me or made fun of it. They bought every PPV for me from '91 to '98, but told me they had to cut down because there was just too many PPVs now and the prices were increasing. As an adult now, I can understand the burden from going to about 4 WWF and 4 WCW PPVs a year to every month for WWF and WCW and every 2 months for ECW. The only problem was that when I started really watching in '91, it was right when Jake Roberts fed Randy Savage's arm to a fucking cobra and was slapping Elizabeth around, so they were a little leary. Undertaker stuffing jobbers into body bags and carrying them off didn't help, but once they saw how normal it was beyond those characters, they didn't care.

 

As an adult, now I know the reason they didn't care is because all they had to do is take me to Blockbuster Video on Friday after school, rent about two or three wrestling tapes, and they'd have a weekend of nothing from me.

 

I remember my Dad actually laughing his ass off when they did that whole bit with Papa Shango making Ultimate Warrior puke and actually asked him why he thought that was funny.

 

The only backlash came when in February 1996, I got in trouble at school. School had just let out and I was down on the ground getting my stuff. Everyone walked by me and were brushing my head, and I thought someone kept shoving me. So I came up flailing my arms around to keep people off me. Since it was clear to an outsider that no one was trying to do anything to me, my teacher flipped the fuck out and thought I was just randomly trying to punch someone. Despite explaining what happened, she actually called my Mom. It was clear who in our grade liked wrestling, so she called and said, "I think he's been watching too much wrestling. You might want to make him stop watching."

 

My Mom actually believed this shit and while she didn't tell me to stop watching it, she told me I should "start thinking about easing off of it". My Dad said this was a load of bullshit though and told me to change nothing. When my teacher called Dad to explain the situation, my Dad said, "Good. He was defending himself. If he doesn't, people are just going to walk all over him. But if he starts doing more than defending himself, call me back."

 

The only real time it was a problem was when the WWF sent out their little merchandise catalog. I bought something from them in 1994, so I was on their catalog mailing list for years. Of course, everything got much raunchier during the Attitude Era and Sable was a big draw. They sent me their spring 1998 catalog, but the mail went to the P.O. Box at my parent's business. The entire cover Sable on her knees at a beach wearing nothing but a pink thong and sand barely covering her nipples. My parents got so fucking pissed off, but not at me. I never knew they sent that until months later. My Mom said Dad immediately threw it in the trash and said, "Why the hell are they sending this crap to a 13-year-old?" Thank god they never actually watched the show to see what Sable usually ended up wearing every week.

 

But yeah, that was about it. Even after Dad died, my Mom has still never once asked me why I still watch it. In fact, I've started doing a lot of indy work in Georgia as a referee, and she thinks it's the coolest thing in the world that I'm actually in the business now after watching it for so long. I can actually tell her stories about what goes on backstage and I can tell she's geniunely fascinated. She's actually come out to one of the shows before (but I didn't know she was there until it was over). It's pretty cool.

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My grandad was the one who got me into wrestling to start with. I live in the UK and WCW Worldwide used to air in the early hours in 92-93. He used to record it for me and that was the start for me. When I was growing up during the monday night wars I would go and watch WCW Nitro with him every Friday. He was actually really into WCW with Sting being his all time favourite. They were actually really good times growing up and i remember not being able to wait for school to end on friday nights as that was when we used to get the shows over here. Now im older (23) and in university I dont really get a chance to watch with him but he occasionally tapes TNA Impact for me on saturday nights if im out and often admits to watching a little to check out what Stings getting up to.

 

My Mum has always checked the show out from time to time. although it was probably to keep me happy growing up there has been a few occasions where she would seem more into it than she let on. I took her to the TNA Impact tapings when we were in florida in 2005. My dad was the one who used to take me to the matches when WWE and WCW would come over but he always had the mentality of "this is fake". There were a couple of occasions during the manchester ppv in the attitude era that come to mind where he got into it even if he would never admit it. Austin comes to mind.

 

Looking at that I got quite lucky as there was nobody in my family growing up to look down on me watching the shows and with my Grandad there was someone who i could go on about things for hours.

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My mom never paid any attention to it. Although she got mad when I powerslammed my brother onto the bed and drove one of the bed legs through the floor

 

 

My dad knew I was a huge fan and started watching with me in 99, we pretty much didn't miss a show from then till 04. He even went to a few shows with me and got into it himself, coming up with angles and everything he wanted to see ran.

 

We just got tired of it in 2004 and kinda stopped watching all together

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