6-3-94: What it Means to Me

If you don't know what the date 6/3/94 represents to wrestling fans, you should probably flee now.  This is the wrong blog for you.  You're better off thinking it is simply the day they debuted the bikini in Paris, or the day Kennedy met with Krushchev Khrushchev in Vienna. 

If the date is one that is special in your heart, if it leads you to host a gathering you call "King of Steaks VII" you are probably irredeemable.  This blog is for you. 6-3-94 is for you.  

6-3-94 is more than simply the greatest wrestling match of all time.  It symbolizes a way of thinking about wrestling.  This is no mere sports entertainment! These men are athletes!  Skilled performers!  Extraordinary story tellers!  And damn tough too!  It is the pinnacle of wrestling as an art form, unencumbered by the silly theatrics and horrible hillbillies that populated the pseudo sport in years past.

Not only did two men, Toshiaki Kawada and Mitsuharu Misawa, prove wrestling was legitimate art; they also paved the way for a new breed of pundit- the wrestling scholar. Professional wrestling was no longer the refuge of toothless rednecks, blacks, retards, and children.  It had to be analyzed and only the smartest of the smart could decipher the complex stories being told by the brain dead Terry Gordy and the drug addled Steve Williams.   And like that, the smark was born.  

Later, we would learn the human cost of these great achievements in theatre.  Chris Benoit would be tragically killed, perhaps at his own hand, perhaps by those jealous of his workrate?  The world would never be sure, but either way, the cost was too high.  The men who created the great match were themsleves victims of their own excess.  Misawa is concussed to the point his brain will not allow his face to make a single expression.  What was once thought off as an admirable stoicism is now recognized as brain damage.  His opponent, Toshiaki Kawada, is reduced to performing in the kind of circus he once loathed-sports entertainment.  Could there be a higher cost for a once proud man?

Worse, many of the hardcore fans have moved on to Mixed Martial Arts a brand of fighting that allows you to watch roided up numbskulls beat on each other harder than the pro wrestlers ever did.  Others have recognized wrestling's true genius is in the over the top theatrics of Ric Flair dropping an elbow on his own suit jacket or Scott Hall drunkenly slurring to the world "Hey Giant, that's your cue."  Only a select few continue to watch with a keen eye, doling out star ratings and insisting that they do it better in Japan, or Memphis, or in the pissed soaked streets of Tijuana.

This blog is for you.

This blog is about you.

Faggot.