WWF fans' appreciation of 'raw' violence a disturbing scene

It was sad seeing my $5 get pushed through the acrylic bin in the ticket window.

Before I went to see the WWF, I thought the bulk of the fans were, at most, 12 years old. I assumed the other people at the match would be college guys who were there for the campiness of it all, to savor the grade-school nostalgia. Guys, who, like myself, were at the match to fondly recall a time when Hulk Hogan was still a good guy, worthy of ingestion in chewable multi-vitamin form, and emblazoned heroically on lunch boxes everywhere.

These grandiose thoughts lasted about as long as it took me to get to my seat and look around.

The wrestling fans included many adults, too many, seemingly there by their own free will. "Don't sweat this," I said to myself. "Their little kids have to be around here somewhere." I looked around, still no sign of the little kids. I was getting nervous.

To whomever may be leaping to the defense of the man I have just described, saying, "Maybe he was just having fun," let me say this: Wrestling looks even more choreographed and artificial in person than it does on television.

It wasn't just this one isolated individual in front of me either, it was everyone in The Bryce Jordan Center. Here I was, watching gigantic men in their underwear pretending to beat the crap out of one another, and the crowd was loving it. (Freud could have had a field day with that last scene I described.) And to usher all of this in, one wrestler said he was glad to be at "State College University."

In fact, the only two times I have heard louder cheering were during the Ohio State game last year, and at a U2 concert. Both of those times the crowd was about 10 times bigger.

And so, the matches wore on along with the evening. Often there were about seven people in the ring in a blur of limbs like the blades of windmills. The referees were absolutely impotent. The bell's incessant ringing was ignored. These men wanted fake blood, so did the crowd. Someone yelled, "hit 'em with a chair." I left early with a headache, I had seen and heard enough. As I left, I hoped that nobody I knew saw me.

Now, I can't stop wondering what inside people makes them want to believe in this inhumane spectacle. Really, it is little more than a modern version of the barbarism of Roman coliseums.

The WWF is proof that our society becomes more callous every day. I wouldn't be surprised to find that a few of the fans that I saw that evening were capable of spontaneously beating the bejeezus out of someone.

In a more Orwellian nation, the human decency police would raid WWF matches and the league would be debunked in a week. But this is America, and here most everything is tolerated, as it should be.

Still, everyone should watch the WWF out of the corner of his or her eye, like a canary in a coal mine. I think its popularity is an indication of deeper problems that we have or may have as a nation. Also, it's as poor an influence on children as any I could imagine.

Everyone at the match had a reason to be there. I hope those reasons were closely examined and weren't the wrong ones; A Clockwork Orange-esque reasons where the appeal of wrestling lies in the blurring of a type of "ultra-violence" fantasy with reality or the feeding of some imbalance of temperament.