On Saturday, Lucy and I took a trip to Coventry to see some Japanese professional wrestling.
On the surface, that sounds like an odd thing to do. In fact, the juxtapostition of a strange thing (wrestling) with an amusingly mundane placename (Coventry), sounds like something a bad comedian would come up with. Well, it really happened. Don't blame me, blame God. He's really the ultimate bad comedian.
"Why did the chicken cross the road?
Because I created it! It does what I say!
Knock knock.
Who's there!
Your creator, you heretical worm!"
God's gigs never end well. He always panics, and responds to hecklers with plagues and floods. The insurance for the comedy clubs are through the roof.
Anyway, we went to Coventry. On a bus. And stayed in a budget hotel. Lucy was thrilled. I wanted to go to Paris, and have champagne and a moonlight stroll down the Champs-Élysées.
But she said no. Let's go to Coventry. How many chances are we going to get to see Mitsuhara Misawa elbow someone in the face?
And I acquiesced.
I'm not anti-Coventry, but it's a bit of a shame that, on Pro Wrestling NOAH's first trip to the UK, they are faced with an overcast, grey city.
Still, they have a fantastic Cathedral, which I will come back to later.
I suppose the wrestling aspect of the trip requires a bit of explanation. Japanese pro-wrestling (or puroresu) is a bit different to American wrestling. There's less outside-the-ring shenanigans. It has traditionally been taken more seriously as a sport (even though there's a fair deal of Japanese-wackiness as well).
The weird thing about puroresu is the audience is different. In America the audience for wrestling is probably mainly teenage and college-aged males (and also plenty of kids). In the UK, there seems to be a higher proportion of kids at the live shows.
In Japan, there are adult professionals in the audience. Married couples. In suits. It's quite odd. Although puroresu isn't as popular as it used to be, it still feels like a unique cultural experience.
Pro Wrestling NOAH is one of the biggest puroresu companies in Japan. The reason they're called NOAH is the aforementioned Mitsuhara Misawa, left All Japan Pro Wrestling to form the company, taking with him some of the best wrestlers. So it was like taking two of every animal. I don't think breeding played much part in the venture. I also don't know know if the same kind of exploitation occurred as in the original Ark, but I suspect so.
But regardless of the makeup of domestic audiences, people who go to see NOAH on a Saturday night in Coventry are almost all geeks. We could see them around the city centre. You could just tell they were wrestling fans. Lots of bad beards and comic-book t-shirts. Mostly over or under-weight. Nasal laughs. The scum of the earth.
Of course, I am a wrestling geek too. I fit most of the profile. Being in the city for a big wrestling show was like attending a family reunion. A reunion where you realise all your relations are annoying idiots. And the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
Actually, I'm exaggerating a little bit. The crowd was suprisingly diverse. We arrived at the Coventry Skydome (which sounds much more impressive than it is - more of a disused ice-rink), to find a huge queue of wrestling fans snaking its way around the arena. For a foreign wrestling company to draw this many people is quite an achievement. God bless the internet.
Inside there was a huge scrum at the merchandise stand. I waited for ages, but they didn't have anything I wanted. I bought a t-shirt, just because I didn't want to feel like I wasted my time. A woman got chatting to me in the queue. She was obviously there with her son (a teenage proto-nerd, I suppose). She was one of those loud, chatty mums that I would have been torturously embarrassed by as a teen, but I quite like now. She was complaining about the queue, making jokes, chatting to everyone. Her son was cringing.
I like people like her. Because I'm quite shy, I like to have the conversation monopolised. These people are aggressively sociable. I like that, because all I need to do is butt in with the occasional quip, and don't have to shoulder the burden of conversation.
As the wrestling started, I began to lost my faith in humanity. Nerd wrestling-fans (mainly fans of the generally good, US indy-promotion Ring of Honor [the lack of a 'u' makes me wish for re-colonisation]) are notorious for starting up irritating chants. Not only are they needlessly profane - such as the 'You fucked up!' chant after every mistake - they are never funny. They're usually started by three friends who chuckle at their own genius.
A little while into the event, a couple of people shouted annoying things. Other people responded with a 'Shut the fuck up!' chant that lasted far too long. Quite how they thought this was less annoying, I have no idea.
[While all this is going on, consider how much Lucy was enjoying her day]
Luckily, this idiocy was not too pervasive. In fact, my faith in humanity was restored ten-fold by the presence of a young boy sitting behind me. He clearly only knew WWE wrestling, and had never heard of any of the Japanese stars. But he was loving it. He hated the heels and got sucked in by the action. He oooh-ed and aaah-ed at all the right places.
You can't get much better than hearing a boy, in a broad Lancashire accent, exclaiming "That were brilliant!" after a cool move.
Anyway, I won't talk too much about the specific action, as no-one is that interested. But it was a great show, enjoyed by chatty mums, naive kids and sweaty nerds alike.
Even Lucy had some fun. Although this might just have been because of the presence of the young wrestler KENTA (the capitals are necessary), who she claimed was, and I quote, "the most handsome man I've ever seen". I assume she was excluding me from that list, to give KENTA and everyone else a chance.
Here he is on the right. You be the judge: me or KENTA?
The main event featured veteran wrestler (and one of my all-time favourites) Kenta Kobashi (no relation to KENTA), competing less than a year after returning to action after beating cancer. It was pretty cool. Here's a music video of him chopping people and dropping them on their heads:
All in all, a very fun night. My wrestling geek status was confirmed. But I'm not too bothered by that. Dysfunctional though they are, I'm proud to be part of the wrestling nerd family. It's like being proud of your older brother, even though he's in prison for beating up a nurse. Admirable.
So, from the church of the wrestling ring (with Kenta Kobashi as a purple-robed, chop-throwing deity) to the more established church of the Christian faith...
We went to look around Coventry Cathedral on Sunday. The Cathedral was heavily bombed during World War II, and is pretty much a ruin. It looked pretty cool in the sunshine, and made quite a powerful statement. There were lots of monuments dedicated to peace and reconciliation. There is a statue which has a twin in Hiroshima. There are monuments displaying Coventry's ties to another war-torn city: Dresden.
Although my views on religion are well documented, it's still so tragic that the idiocy of war can wipe out beautiful things. Mankind is constantly striving for something more meaningful, and is in turn reminded of its base nature.
Next to the ruin, a modern Cathedral has been built. I like that. It's an acceptance of things having to move on, while at the same time respecting and honouring the past.
Plus, it looks cool.
There's a cool statue of an angel and devil hanging on one of the outside walls (see the top of the page). It looked like something from a cool Manga cartoon or, even, something from a professional wrestling match.
And here's where religion and wrestling meet.
Almost no-one over the age of ten believes wrestling is real. It's clearly choreographed. And yet annoying non-wrestling fans seem to find this really hard to accept. They're keen to point out how fake it is. "He's not even hitting him!", "The ref is so stupid!" "Why wouldn't he be knocked out after that? This is ridiculous!"
We know. We know it's not real. We know it's implausible. It's like someone who watches a Bond film, and criticises it for lacking realism. They've missed the point completely.
That is where religion should go. That's the only way forward. If they don't, they'll be left looking as ridiculous as people clinging to the idea that The Undertaker can really shoot lightning out of his bumhole.
We need to get to a stage where people implicitly know religion is fake. They know the idea of a devil and burning bushes and parting the waters is hokum. They know that the ideas of God being benevolent and omnipotent are irreconcilable. But, they can say, you're missing the point.
Religion is something that we can enjoy and feel connected to. We can take it seriously at some times and mock it at others. We can feel affectionately towards it. It can draw people together. Religion is as fake as wrestling, but we still like it.
Because when all is said and done, despite the inconsistencies and the pompousness and the carny sleaziness of it all, despite all that, that bit when God hit Satan with a steel chair was pretty cool.
***
This whole thing paints the atheist as the annoying idiot, which I'm not all that happy with. I don't know if I believe any of what I wrote. It just seemed like an interesting idea.
On the way home our bus nearly got blown off the road in gale-force winds. I suppose God was angry with me. But I'd rather face a plague from him than a roaring elbow from Mitsuhara Misawa, that's for sure:
An enjoyable read but it's always embarrassing when you're scrolling through a page of text - smiling, perhaps laughing and drawing a bit of attention to yourself in an otherwise quiet library - and you come to the muscular Japanese guy in his pants.
ReplyDeleteI must learn.