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Jim Gramze

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Come in, sit down.  Thank you for coming at such short notice.  I've just read something very disturbing and I desperately need a sounding board to sort out my thoughts.
 
You know, the book I just read was so sick it made me think of Ernest Hemingway in some ways.  With Hemingway, you have writings about killing animals and how such ultimate victories give you god-like feelings of immortality.  That is incredibly sick.
 
The book I just read, Mick Foley's autobiography, is about someone who actively seeks out getting hurt for mass approval.  It goes beyond the personal disregard for safety to actually insisting that others hurt him, especially opening up cuts that profusely bleed.  What further complicates this idiocy is that many people, children included, idolize this person.
 
On the one hand, I fear that there will be kids that will try to emulate his behavior in similar attempts to gain approval.  On the other hand, such individuals are going to do incredibly stupid things with or without any real provocation or sources of ideas.  Rest assured, the herd will be thinned one way or the other.
 
In the words of Bret Hart, which you can read on a link a bit lower on the main page, "Great wrestling is not about how many bones you break, or how many teeth you lose, or being set on fire, or walking back to the dressing room with tacks in your back."  Further, "The pride used to come from not hurting anybody and not getting hurt yourself."
 
The hardcore trend in pro wrestling is a very dangerous one.  As wrestlers take more and more risks, so are the kids who imitate them.  I have seen film clips on the TV news of kids jumping off garage roofs onto flaming tables covered with barbed wire.  Way to go kids!  Yeah, Mick, you write one sentence in your entire book saying that kids shouldn't do stuff like that and you spend the bulk of 500 pages talking about how you yourself do exactly that on a daily basis.  People imitate those they idolize.
 
In many ways, the book is about a failure who learns how to capitalize on failing: by getting the living shit kicked out of him for pay.  That really is most of the story of Mick Foley, a loser who learned to make a bloody art of losing.  If he only could have gone deeper into the desire of getting hurt and becoming a bloody spectacle to feed his hunger for crowd approval.  That would have made this autobiography art, and would shed light on a sickness worthy of Hemingway.

Jim Gramze
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