5 Stupidest Questions Wrestling Fans Get Asked
It's still not real to me either, dammit!
The life of a wrestling fan is almost as painful as it must be for wrestlers themselves.
Even more so than fantasy fiction or sci-fi cinema, a special type of scorn is reserved for grapple fans. It doesn't take someone with the intellectual gifts of Damien Sandow to work out what will appear as the last entry on this list, but it's not just the fake predetermined nature of wrestling which non-fans take umbrage with.
As Paul Heyman once said, you either get it or you don't - but that isn't enough to satisfy incredulous non-fans, who seem to have as much difficulty comprehending our choice of hobby as they would solving the chalkboard equation from Good Will Hunting.
Wrestling, in essence, is very easy to grasp. A good guy and a bad guy resolve a storyline conflict through simulated combat. That's effectively it. Yet, the very same people who will happily accept that there are in fact monsters under your bed and superheroes soaring through the skies will for some reason reject the notion that something like the ankle lock wouldn't inflict excruciating pain.
This list probably won't stop their interrogations - but it might help you answer them.
5. How Many Undertakers Have There Been?
This one is more likely to be posed from a lapsed fan - or at least somebody with a passing familiarity of the business. It's unlikely that they're referring to the diabolical SummerSlam 1994 headliner, in any event.
The Undertaker, despite playing a fictional character, has had the temerity to age and adjust his wardrobe over the years. He is, inarguably, one of wrestling's best ever workers - so much so that he appears to have convinced some that his physical transformations have been literal.
It's difficult to see the logic here. It's as if 'Taker's eschewal of the red rimmed eyes look and the pancake foundation brush is enough to convince some that he went a bit too far and scrubbed off his real face.
To this day, many are also convinced that the Ultimate Warrior was portrayed by another individual at WrestleMania VIII. He looked noticeably different (the impending steroid scandal saw him lose some of his artificial muscle mass) but it was clearly still Jim Hellwig under the facepaint and neon threads.
Wrestling fans are often considered to be fairly dense, yet those who ask this question are entirely ignorant to such concepts as ageing and character development.
"That can't be the real Undertaker - he's gradually lost his hair over a sustained period of time!"