10. I Only Started Watching Wrestling As A Teenager
I used to like to pretend that I'd been watching wrestling my whole life, but that wasn't true. I do have a couple of distinct wrestling memories from my childhood - like watching The Undertaker lock The Ultimate Warrior inside a casket, seeing WrestleMania IX live at a birthday party, or going to a house show with Yokozuna versus "Hacksaw" Jim Duggan on top - but my fandom was only passing, and probably largely due to wanting to fit in. For most of the 90s, I didn't watch any wrestling at all. That all changed in early 1998, when I was 13 and Steve Austin began to take off. I'm not sure how I became aware of him - it must have been through my younger brother, who was already watching - but I took an interest, and was pleased to find out when he won the Royal Rumble. By WrestleMania XIV, I was hooked, but pretty much anything before that show I've only seen after the fact.
Scott Fried is a Slammy Award-winning* writer living and working in New York City. He has been following/writing about professional wrestling for many years and is a graduate of Lance Storm's Storm Wrestling Academy. Follow him on Twitter at https://twitter.com/scottfried.
*Best Crowd of the Year, 2013