Why I am obsessed with Vegas wrestling

YOU EVER HAVE one of those out-of-body moments when you're standing outside yourself, watching yourself with clinical curiosity and slight dismay, noticing something novel and strange and maybe a bit alarming about yourself from, like, a third-person perspective?

Yeah, happened to me on July 29, 2023. I noticed that Andrew Kiraly was screaming in a primal froth at a blood-spitting zombie wrestler named Lazarus who just had a sheaf of bamboo skewers jammed into his forehead. It was the culminating match at PrideStyle Pro Wrestling, and – admirably true to the ultraviolent climaxes pro wrestling is known for – it involved not just choreographed slams and kicks, but also industrial staples, thumbtacks, those bamboo skewers, and a hearty complement of weaponized tables and chairs.

I am not, generally, a screamer. I tend to distrust extravagant displays of emotion. But on this night, I'd been unlocked somehow, temporarily unfettered from my everyday identity and common-sense scruples, and was emotionally crowd-surfing in a kind of collective plasma of electrified mass instinct, or something. (Who, exactly, am I screaming for? Following the happy illogic of fandom, I just pick someone whose style and physical confidence I admire, and just like that, I'm a stan for life, whether it's Zara Zakher with her deadly gymnast's flips or Papa Jace, who is basically a giant plug of brutal meat with the best bling ever.)

So yeah, I get the truism that spectator sports trigger tribal behavior – sometimes it's healing and unifying, sometimes violent and fracturing. But, man, add to that sanctioned tribalism the nerviness of really getting into the whole silly-but-also-seriously-athletic theater of choreographed wrestling, and the result is, for me, singularly intoxicating. I've been to almost every PrideStyle event since.

MY CONVERT'S ZEAL might be suspect if it was simply that sudden. The appeal of wrestling is also admittedly nostalgic, and calls back to my Vegas youth when my dad would take us to the Showboat Sports Pavilion to witness explosive personalities such as Hulk Hogan, The Sheik, Baron von Raschke aka The Clawmaster and others grapple, slap, and fly amid torrents of soap-opera emotion.

That was in the '80s, when the short-lived American Wrestling Association televised its bouts from the long-defunct casino on Boulder Highway. Far from the overproduced monster-truck pageantry of cable wrestling, these Showboat bouts, in my recollection, took place in a cavernous, unadorned event hall stocked with plastic chairs. If you'll allow it, it felt underground, which injected the action and storylines with a certain thrilling, cryptic resonance.

Which is maybe another reason these independent wrestling programs have such an animal magnetism: The small, ad hoc venues suggest a roving cult; intimacy only primes the intensity. When you scream at crazy-eyed Lazarus spitting his black blood, you'll never hear an echo – only a chorus of ferocious voices screaming along with you. ✦

Baron Von Raschke: Unknown photographer, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons