I was paging through a wrestling mag at a drugstore the other day, looking at the top 10 rankings, when I suddenly had a flashback to when I was a kid. No, I'm not going to talk about the '80s and how I was a Hogan mark. Actually, Hogan, with his talk of prayers and vitamins made me want to puke and I quit watching wrestling during that era. I'm talking about 30 years ago in the late '60s and early '70s. For you hard core WWF fans out there, Bruno Sammartino and Pedro Morales did stints as WWWF champ during that time. Unfortunately, living in Detroit, as I still am today, I never got to see the WWWF back then (World Wide Wrestling Federation) except in magazines.

So I was looking at the top 10 rankings the other day. 30 years ago, the rasslin' mags carried top 100 rankings. Add up the rosters of WCW and the WWF today, and that's how many wrestlers I was able to think of that I thought were good enough to be in the top 100 that were not included.

As a kid back in '69, I was fortunate enough to have two warring feds right in my back yard. The NWA was at Cobo Hall either every Saturday or every other Saturday - I forget. And the other, WCW (World Class Wrestling?), had a similar schedule at the now defunct Olympia Stadium.

I didn't know what the NWA was at the time, although now I realize that it was an alliance of many independent wrestling organizations. That isn't important for our discussion today. What does matter is how the NWA looked from the window of the Detroit market.

Don't you get tired of the same faces all the time? Almost the only variety you get these days is people going back and forth between the big 2 feds. Jeff Jarrett was hitting people in the head with guitars in the WWF; and, guess what, now he's kabonging people in WCW. That's not variety.

With the NWA, at any given time you had the big main event, and 2 or 3 established and polished stars that we'd never seen before working their way up the local ranks. There was ALWAYS someone new and interesting being introduced, and always someone who after one match or a series of matches failed to unseat the champion who moved on.

Dory Funk Jr. was the world champ back then. I only recall him coming to Detroit once in what I recall as the best match I have ever seen. We had quite an interesting local championship situation. The NWA US champ was the champ for our region of the country.

Ric Flair is now 14 (or 15?) time world champ. Isn't that cute? The Sheik was US champ, essentially the only champ for at least our part of the Midwest, for 15 solid years. There was a lot of rotation of many people throughout NWA country, but The Sheik was our mainstay. More on him later.

Let's talk TV. What an incredible difference between then and now. Back then the matches were done in small studios with a crowd of maybe 50 - 100 people. You would see the big stars, but NEVER against each other. The jobbers from the studio matches were never on the house cards. This way, all the main players looked absolutely unbeatable. A face, like Flying Fred Curry, would dominate a jobber, but he would obviously try to give the poor guy a chance, even helping him up and shaking his hand afterward (but God help him if he cheats at any point during the match!). A heel like Pompero Firpo would destroy the jobber with a flurry of illegal maneuvers, frequently refusing to pin the poor bastard so he could torture him some more until he was inevitably disqualified. You hated the heels (or appreciated their marvelous viciousness) and you loved the faces. There were no grey areas, and a turn from one side to the other was incredibly rare. If a heel faced The Sheik then he was temporarily cheered for that particular duration, but that was the only real exception.

It was a similar situation in the other Fed. I'm pretty much ignoring them because I was a big mark for The Sheik and the NWA. Over at World Class Wrestling, Dick the Bruiser was as supremely funny on the mic as he was devastating in the ring. He'd make Goldberg and Austin look like panty waists, and he could go toe to toe on the mic with The Rock any day. Brawler of the Century? I don't see any competition at all. Dick the Bruiser was as relentless and destructive as a hurricane.

I went to a lot of house shows back then. You had to if you wanted to see the big names square off against each other. Today, especially in the WWF, it seems that you are more likely to see a title change on free TV than at a PPV. As far as free TV is concerned, we are spoiled rotten today and I think few of us realize it.

Storylines

Back in the late '60s, the only story line was that a heel interfered in a face's match, so now they are going to feud. That, or the heel took out the face's friend. In other words, there was no such thing as a story line back then. Today, at least in comparison, the motivation behind the action is well-thought-out high-art (no matter what was going on with the hummer).

Mic work

It used to be that wrestlers wrestled and the great majority of them were quite good at it. A match between two faces, a somewhat rare event, was a marvel of clean effective maneuvers and counter moves. Today, I think most face match-ups would quickly devolve into ineffective-looking slug fests. But wrestlers wrestled, or did their in-ring thing. Managers did the talking for those who had no real mic skills. There were a LOT of managers back then. A good numbers of wrestlers did their own little schtick on the mic, but since they were typically only around for 2 or 3 months, you didn't much get tired of it and it was fun to sample all of the many personalities.

My favorite mouthpiece was Abdullah Farouk, aka The Wizard. I don't know who that was Kevin Nash was trying to imitate a month or two ago, but it certainly could not have been The Sheik's manager. Picture this: proper British announcer Lord Athol Layton was holding the mic as the Wizard, against the backdrop of a raging inferno, was on his rant, talking 90 miles-an-hour with all smiles and delight while guaranteeing that The Sheik would throw the fire at his opponent that night. While all that was happening, The Sheik was ever-so-slightly foaming at the mouth while ripping Layton's tie to shreads with his teeth and seeming to duck low-flying planes in a paranoid manner.

The Sheik was a disgusting animal, much more interested in doing permanent damage to his opponent than gaining a victory. Without EVER saying a single intelligible word, this man generated deafening heat from the crowds. When I listen to people like Shane Douglas directly insult the crowd for some cheap heat, or Roddy Piper mention the local sports team for a cheap pop, I just have to shake my head and long for the good old days. We need to get back to specialization. The better the in-ring work, GENERALLY, the worse the mic work from a given individual. Let the wrestlers do their in-ring thing, and bring in expert mouthpieces to do the talking where needed.

Back at this same time in the other Fed, World Class Wrestling, Bobby Heenan was an incredibly good manager. I think they were calling him Bobby "The Brain" Heenan even then (and "The Weasel"). He was far from the ass-kissing shill that he is today. He was as compelling and forceful on the mic as he was comical in and out of the ring. I wish Bobby would return to the genuine wit he used to employ back in Hogan's glory days in the '80s. They are really wasting his considerable talents over in WCW today.

End of an Era

An arms race started on TV back in the early mid '70s that signaled the end of an era, AT LEAST in Detroit. Over in World Class Wrestling, they started showing fairly complete tapes of the house shows on TV the following week and soon after the NWA followed suit. This seemed to be a desperate attempt to draw fans but it had the opposite effect. Far too many people seemed to think, 'Why go to the house show when you can see all the action on TV next week?' I don't know if this was the cause, or the result of falling attendance, but it was certainly the beginning of the end of a golden age of wrestling in Detroit and perhaps the Midwest as well.

What ended the interest for me was the end of a long played out drama. I still remember Bobo Brazil with compelling quiet self-confidence guaranteeing the TV audience that he would defeat The Sheik once and for all.

My dad just happened to see Bobo's impassioned promise while walking through the living room. It was the only time I didn't have to beg and plead to get him to take me to Cobo Hall on Saturday night. $6.00 for ringside seats, not the $400 of today, with $30 for the cheapest seats. THAT is a fucking outrage that people should not tolerate, especially when you are paying that big money to look at the back of someone's sign for two and a half hours.

15 years of packed houses, 15 years of the most brutal and disgusting behavior one man could possibly commit. 15 years of intense heat festering within many layers of hatred.

Bobo Brazil walked down the ramp first, a giant black man with a wide kindly face. This evening that face was focused like a tight laser beam of determination and self-assuredness. 18 thousand Detroiters rose as one and cheered wildly for their favorite son.

Then came the Grand Wizard, sparkling blue turban and loud dress suit, arms joyously spread out waving and smiling. The Sheik trailed closely behind, head band holding a fancy sheet about his head that draped down to about his knees. All the way down, he was nervously ducking his own personal demons that only he could see.

It was 20 minutes of brilliant back-and-forth action and I don't remember all the details. What I do remember is a growing electricity that started the instant Bobo started down the ramp and it snowballed the entire duration of the match. In the end, 3 consecutive Coco Butts (head butts) spelled the end, and as the ref cleanly counted 3, for the first time in fifteen years, that crowd erupted like I have never seen before. My ears rang throughout the entire next day from that cacophony. I've been to my share of rock concerts where I have been up close and directly in the face of the main speaker array, but those blaring guitars had nothing on this un-amplified crowd noise. I am still cowed by the experience, some 25 or 30 years later.

TV matches used to be between the big stars and faceless jobbers. This had the effect of making all the stars seem unbeatable and compelled you to go to the house shows. Today, the rule seems to be that the main eventers frequently square off against each other on free TV, almost eerily like what spelled the end for the golden era in Detroit.

Back then, wrestlers wrestled, and mouthpieces did the talking. Beyond that there was no such thing as a story line. Today, "The play is the thing," as we are more concerned with motivation and story telling than in-ring action. This has degraded the art of actual wrestling into a shadow of it's former self (And no, it wasn't any better in Hogan's glory days either).

The prices for going to see a match today are nothing short of outrageous, and that goes for the PPVs too. I am very much distressed that people actually pay these prices! $6.00 in 1969 does NOT translate to $400.00 today. And the signs. There was no such thing as signs at house shows back then, and today I don't see why they don't start riots. I could not bear sitting there and looking at the back of someone's sign rather than seeing the action I came to see AT ANY PRICE!!! They should be banned, no matter how good they might look on TV.

Back then, they played it like it was real. Today, they delight in saying that it is all staged.

Back then, you never even knew the promoters existed. Today, the owners and script writers seem to be the main characters.

Back then, crowd reactions were manipulated by the player's behavior. Now, we are increasingly directly addressing the audience in cheap, shameless, and desperate attempts to draw heat.

In my day, there was an endless supply of talent that easily justified national rankings of 100 wrestlers; and, you never got bored because of the constant introduction of fresh talent which was regularly rotated. Today, magazines and web pages carry top 10 lists where at least half are highly questionable; and, I don't see how people can watch the same people do the exact same things over and over again year after year.

And in my day, a face was a face and a heel was a heel. Today, in some ways for the better, the areas are so grey you can't even distinguish between the faces and heels.

Lastly, outside of the living rooms and arenas, you didn't dare say in public that you liked wrestling for fear of humiliation. Today, it seems the most natural thing in the world to be a wrestling fan and many literally wear this fact on their shirt sleeves.