Professional Wrestling

On July 5, Minnesota Independent Wrestling put on a free show under the big tent in Delano as part of the town’s 4th of July celebration. If you had the opportunity to see the show, you were in for quite a treat.  

The opening match featured a three-way bout between high-flying athletes. These men held nothing back as they pounded, kicked, slammed, and suplexed one another in the ring. Equally enjoyable were the stories and back-n-forth banter. MIW promotes a family friendly show, with clean and entertaining dialogue. Experts say that if you want to make it big in professional wrestling, a performer has to have well-developed speaking skills in order to pump up and excite the crowd. Performers from MIW worked the microphone just as well as they worked their amazing acrobatics and dare-devil stunts.

Who doesn’t love a good villain? The battle between good and bad is the backbone of professional wrestling. Fans love to cheer on their heroes and despise a hated villain. The performers with MIW were experts at baiting and trolling the crowd. A tag-team pair from Canada (at least that was their gimmick) had the crowd booing as they spouted off about how great Canada was and that America couldn’t compete. Of course, this isn’t going to fly, not on the 4th of July. Soon, fans were booing, and their opponents had the crowd chanting, “USA… USA… USA,” in rebuttal.

I loved professional wrestling as a kid, being a big fan of Hulk Hogan and the WWF. Watching the show in Delano over the fourth of July weekend brought back a lot of fond memories from childhood. My best friend and I would collect as many wrestling figurines as we could, having pretend matches in a plastic ring sold by toy company, LJN. We played with those wrestlers until the paint wore off their plastic bodies and the ring had a big crack down the middle, nearly splitting the thing in half. 

I remember collecting King Kong Bundy’s autograph during a random chance meeting while eating dinner at a hotel restaurant with my family. My dad had to approach him and ask for the autograph. I was too scared. King Kong Bundy was the ultimate bad guy at the time, and I was absolutely terrified and mesmerized at being in his presence. I remember my dad saying that he was quite nice during the interaction, far from his in-ring villain persona. 

I ultimately lost interest in professional wrestling, until I lived in a college dorm for a couple years. Each Monday night, students living on the third floor of Ballard Hall at Moorhead State University would gather to watch WWF’s Monday Night Raw. Professional wrestling was amidst a reinvention period at the time. Themes and storylines were rather crude and raunchy in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, but for a bunch of college guys sitting around a dorm room, it was a lot of fun.

I haven’t watched professional wrestling in many years, unless an old video pops up on a social media account and I relive the past for a few minutes. It was nice to see the family-friendly show that MIW put on. There were plenty of kids in the audience who appeared to be having a great time. It’s fun to see that the magic of professional wrestling is still alive.