A guilty pleasure is something you shouldn’t like, but you like it anyway. A better definition might be, “you love it, but you aren’t proud to tell anyone about it.”
This week’s Friday Wrestling Conversation question topic is, who is your pro wrestling guilty pleasure?
My answer’s hard because I write what I think about wrestling shows for a living, so I can’t say “I like Heath Slater” and have it seem weird. You KNOW that. Heath Slater rules. I do columns about wrestling from the 80s and 90s, too, so if I tell you I’m a legitimate, endless mark for Ernest ‘The Cat’ Miller there’s probably a dense, five-paragraph explanation of why somewhere on the site.
Regardless, here are a couple of my answers.
Ashley Massaro. One of the very worst wrestlers of all time. Ashley’s a fascination time capsule of what WWE assumed men found attractive in 2006, with her Avril Lavigne cosplay and flash tattoos. I love going back and watching Ashley’s segments and matches now because you don’t have to worry about where it’s going. It’s going into a garbage can. That lets you detach and simply enjoy watching a woman with no physical coordination whatsoever try to pull off a monkey flip.
Sgt. Craig ‘Pitbull’ Pittman
I never liked Pitbull when he was active, but revisiting early Nitros has made me love him. He’s so awkward in the ring, but there’s a legitimacy to him. He’s a tough guy who never totally figured out how to fake it. His matches are mostly him moving around stressfully and grabbing people and throwing them, or doing these big, exaggerated strikes and hoping they work. If he’d been around in 1975 he’d probably be a legend. Instead, he’s a footnote of the post-Hogan WWF, pre-Attitude 90s.
Yes, I would like to see Craig Pittman wrestle Ashley Massaro.
Let us know your wrestling guilty pleasures in the comments section below. This is an open forum and we’re all family, so feel free to openly mock other peoples’ choices and take the mocking of your own in good fun. Pro wrestling is embarrassing, woo!
