5 Ways to Tell You’re Getting Too Old for Pro Wrestling
We tend to be critical of pro wrestling as wrestling columnists and wrestling connoisseurs, but come on, both companies deserve it. Tickets are at an all time high “premium” cost, and that’s not even all of it — There’s shirts, posters, Jey Uso “Yeet” condoms. If they don’t like when us old people hold their feet to the fire, tough shit.
A lot of the bitching I hear about pro wrestling is that I’m no longer the target audience for their show. I’m no longer the niche pro wrestling caters to. Here are some signs that, sadly, you might be outgrowing your old pastime.
5. Wrestling is Just Too Much Wrestling
Smackdown recently announced it’s going to 3-hours to the collective sigh of literally everyone in existence. My dog sighed and he licks his balls for at least 4 hours every day. Critics are going crazy over the idea of more wrestling. It’s just too much wrestling. There isn’t a day of the week where you can get away from wrestling television anymore. Now, there’s websites, streaming, YouTube… it’s just too much wrestling. I can’t stand it. When you’re 12, a 3-hour show and the chance to stay up a little longer felt like Christmas once a month, now the idea of it feels like a chore along the lines of taking out the trash but the garbage has commercials every 15 minutes.
In Reality:
3 hours of wrestling is great… when you’re 12. When your biggest responsibility of the day is whether or not Taylor Swift is showing her belly button or not, 3 hours of wrestling tends to be pretty convenient. When you’re older, married, working, with children and pets, your responsibilities change drastically and finding 3 hours a night to donate to watching sweaty old men (and now women!) roll on top of each other semi naked is a Herculean task – Let alone doing it TWO to THREE times a week.
There’s a lot of grown ass men weighing in on whether or not 3-hours is too long for a PG television show meant for children and families, and there’s nothing more cringe than someone who watched wrestling in the 90s saying that 2 hours is the sweet spot when the shows we actually paid money for in the 90s were 3 hours long.
4. Flippy Dos Are the Absolute Dick
I have never, not once, ever, seen someone do acrobats in the wrestling ring and been blown away by it. By the time I started watching wrestling in the 1990s, I had already been exposed to the circus. There’s absolutely nothing they can do in the ring I haven’t already seen – except higher, bigger, and better – from a guy dressed as a hobo with balloons, a net, and an inflatable schlong. They need to slow down, tell a story, and protect themselves until they make it big.
In Reality:
This is a very, very outdated outlook on professional wrestling and I know that. I watch people like Will Ospreay flip around and tell a great story in the ring, but I’m more impressed that he can tell that story than I am the flips he’s doing. But this is 2025, not 1995. The things that get you noticed now aren’t the things that got you noticed before. Flipping in the air used to be a novelty that only select wrestlers would do, ie Justin Gabriel in the Nexus. It was a big deal to watch Justin Gabriel do the 450 splash to his opponents and the WWE knew it. It was portrayed as the end-all-be-all to a Nexus beatdown. Today, people do 450 drop-toe-holds and that’s considered a break from the fast-paced stuff.
But in a world where everyone has a phone, you’re not performing in front of 12 people in a gymnasium anymore. You’re performing in front of whoever YouTube decides is the optimal audience for a video of you doing 720-degree flips in a speedo. The old mentality of not killing yourself for a small group of people is gone – any and every match is your chance to be seen by the entire world. If you’re not giving it your all every single match you have, someone else is and they’re going to take your spot.
3. You Miss When Storylines Were More Edgy
Remember when Stephanie McMahon was being crucified by the Undertaker, but she was eventually saved by the reluctant hero Stone Cold Steve Austin? Crucified? Steve Austin? Am I hitting all the buzzwords yet for a good storyline? Could you imagine something like that happening in 2025 with Damien Priest crucifying Adam Pearce’s daughter and Cody Rhodes WHOOAA-OHHH has to come out and save the day? It’d never happen! God I miss good TV.
In Reality:
Uh, remember “we choppy choppy your pee pee?” Remember Beaver Cleavage? Not everything was good in the Attitude Era. In fact, I’d dare say most of it was awful. “But Tim,” I’m forcing my rhetorical reader to say, “If it was so bad, how do you remember it 30 years later?” I also remember the first time my cat vomited up pieces of a mouse 15-years-ago, but if Rey Mysterio were to do that I wouldn’t call it must-see-TV.
What we really miss is good writing, and we still get that on occasion in the WWE – And “on occasion” is when we got it during the Attitude Era. Rose tinted glasses have convinced people that the Attitude Era was always good all the time, but I guarantee you if Naomi revealed her baby was actually a white mannequin hand there would be an uproar on social media about how Triple H has lost the plot. I’m actually a big fan of Vince Russo. I loved his mentality that every wrestler should have something to do if they’re being used for television, but even I will admit not every story was a home run.
2. Ratings Don’t Matter Now Anymore Than They Did Then
Every time the ratings are released, grown men flock to them to see how big their penis is today. You see it all over comment sections and forums everywhere you look. “Ha-ha, Collision doesn’t get any viewers!” Or “Oh, no! WWE is getting a fraction of the ratings today that it got in the 90s! It must be the apocalypse! Wrestling is dead, light the fires of Gondor!”
In Reality:
When I was a kid, I had no idea that WCW beat WWE for 83 weeks in a row. In fact, I’m willing to bet no one under the age of 15 did. The internet wasn’t really a big thing in the 90s, so the idea that anyone knew who got good ratings — let alone what ratings actually were — were slim to none. We didn’t think any less of WWE when they were losing the ratings war, and, in fact, WWE eventually overcame the odds and started beating WCW after a year.
WWE gets half the ratings now than it got in the 90s because half the population has cable than the 90s. Now, you’re probably saying, “Okay, but what about Netflix? It’s streaming and it still only does a couple million viewers?” This doesn’t prove the point you think it does. People don’t watch television live anymore, period. Streaming at your own convenience is the way of the future. Look at how many views a segment from RAW or Dynamite gets on YouTube. Orange Cassidy and Toni Storm defeating their opponents with a plié has 15 million views on Instagram – even though if you ask social media it was widely hated. People do not digest television the way they used to, period. Still, even to this day, our ratings articles are some of the highest viewed pages of the week.
1. You Miss When Everyone Watched Wrestling
“I miss when everyone around me wore wrestling shirts!” That’s what you think you’re saying.
In Reality:
“I miss when I was a teenager and wrestling was one of 5 unique shows on during the week” is what you’re actually saying. Wrestling hasn’t decreased in popularity. Despite increases in ticket prices, WWE and AEW still manage to sell out arenas. Merchandise is doing fine. What you’re noticing is that pro wrestling isn’t the only thing available on a Monday or Wednesday night now. It’s not just competing with C-SPAN and the weather channel. It’s competing with a billion different multimillion endeavors all at once from all over the world. As I sit here writing this piece about pro wrestling, my kid is playing some Roblox game right next to me (I supervise that shit). Could you imagine if you had access to everything all the time all at once in the 1990s? Pro wrestling would be a blip on the radar.
Don’t kids these days realize it is not cool anymore to like wrestling? Why are they still having fun? Why are they buying tickets? Why are they throwing their hands to the Jey Uso entrance?
Wait… why am I old?
