P rofessional wrestling is all over the world, from the high-flying luchadors in Mexico to the more physical style in Japan, but the WWE, and back in my day — the late Seventies and early Eighties — the National Wrestling Alliance and Georgia Championship Wrestling, made it such a distinctly American thing that it’s now a part of the country’s DNA.
What drew me in, and continues to attract new fans, is the good-versus-evil narrative. If you look at all of the characters over the years in American pro wrestling, from the gimmicks of heels like the Russian character Nikolai Volkoff to the Iranian-born Iron Sheik, they were ways to talk people into the seats. Fans wanted to come to the matches just to see the villains lose.
Even my grandmother was a huge wrestling fan. She had a heart problem, and was so into it when I was a kid that her doctor made her stop watching! It was such a part of my childhood, probably because I grew up without a dad and I’d look at the wrestling stars like father figures.
Dusty Rhodes was my favorite. He had a working-class persona and talked like a preacher. Anytime he was saying something, it was gospel. The way he spoke, and his cadence, was so electrifying, almost like he was rapping. I was so influenced by the way he gave interviews that I spent two years of my life trying to talk like Dusty. To really see what I mean, watch his famous 1985 “Hard Times” promo, where he connects his injury at the hands of Ric Flair to the hard times affecting American workers in the Eighties. Dusty Rhodes was an everyman hero to a lot of wrestling fans — he was nicknamed the American Dream for a reason.
Because of storylines like that, professional wrestling will always be one of the biggest things in America. There’s a new generation of kids who love the stories just as much as I did. And now with the Internet and YouTube, it’s everywhere.
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