The Resurrection of Professional Wrestling, Special Thanks High Def and Mickey Rourke

So I'm not sure if anyone's been paying attention, but over the last two years professional wrestling has finally returned to glory. They've hired veterans like Dusty Rhodes and Michael P.S. Hayes as writers, they've brought in guys like Arn Anderson and Ricky "The Dragon" Steamboat to work with the younger guys on their matches, and they've used the medium of High Definition to bring professional wrestling back to what it should be, Full Contact Art. And now with Darren Aronofsky's new film "The Wrestler"I feel that some of the pain and glory of the sport will finally get the spotlight it deserves.

Somewhere in the late 90's amidst all the pyro and big ratings Vince McMahon took wrestling into entertainment and in the switch he forgot to bring the wrestling. The matches became more scripted instead of letting the wrestlers "work" the matches themselves. The fan interaction aspect was lost as wrestlers only focused on the cameras and not the crowd. And the full on contact of the sport was taken away some. But while his product was loosing it's roots, out on the independent circuits the true art of the sport was not lost, and that's what I feel "The Wrestler" is aiming to bring to light.

You see you can't "fake" a punch in a VFW hall in front of 45 people, you have to actually hit them. You can't let your wrestlers take it easy in order to prolong their careers. And you can't get a crowd into a match without the art of story telling. I've known guys like Mickey Rourke's character in this movie and they are the lifeblood of the sport, sort of like orators passing on the tradition of a once fine craft. They drive to a school gymnasium, get beaten from pillar to post all for 20 dollars and the roar of the crowd, then limp to their cars after the match and pull their broken bodies out of bed to head to work in the morning. These are the guys whose last words before heading out the curtain are "let's make it look real" and a silent prayer. And it is in this tradition that the finest this sport have ever known have come from. The Ric Flair's, the Steve Austin's, the Mick Foley's, they all got their start in this kind of life, and it's why they were such experts at their craft and have such respect for the business. They understood and never forgot how special the intimacy of it all is.

But with the miracle of High Definition the intimacy has come back. The camera angles are now so close, and the pictures are so sharp that there is no choice but to up the contact and take wrestling back to how it used to be, and Vince realized this. So now when you tune in you see the sweat fly from someone being punched in the face, you see the red on someones back when they take a forearm, and you can hear the sound of bone on flesh as these finely tuned athletes beat the wholly hell out of one another. Professional wrestling is back and I couldn't be happier. And with this new film I feel that it's finally going to get the recognition it deserves.

When The Boss sings in the title track that "My only faith's in the broken bones and bruises I display", he tells the story not only of Randy "The Ram" Robinson, but of the thousands of wrestlers like him. It's about time their story was told, and in this age of wrestling on the resurgence, Rourke, Aronofsky, and Springsteen couldn't have picked a better time.