On any given night, you'd need a couple monster trucks to drag me to an event involving a bunch of sweaty guys colliding into each other and shouting in each others' faces. It's just not my bag, baby. But when my buddy Adam invited me to join a big gang of wrestling fans and hit the Rosemont Horizon for the WWF's Road Rage show, I heartily agreed.

Even as I said "yes," I couldn't understand my motivations for going. Did I feel some repressed need to assert my manhood, knowing deep down that it wouldn't surprise any of my friends if it turned out that I was, in fact, gay as a tangerine? Or was some hidden part of me encouraging me to expose myself to these half-naked men, in the hopes that it would awaken my repressed sexuality? And if I were gay, would I find Mel Gibson attractive?

These are all important questions. Yet what truly inspired my desire to catch a WWF House Show is the simple fact that wrestling has been returning to the pop culture spotlight in a big way lately, and I wanted to check out the scene for my own nefarious reasons. Also, I was a huge wrestling buff throughout my pre-teen years, and I felt eager to observe the squared circle once again, to find out if it still held the magic and glory which I had bestowed upon it so many moons ago.

Did the evening live up to my expectations? Hardly. Gone from the WWF are the noble gladiators of the mid- and late eighties, wrestlers such as Hulk Hogan, Randy "Macho Man" Savage and the Ultimate Warrior. In their place stand cagey grapplers like "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, the Rock and Mankind. The glistening gold logo has been replaced by something that looks like it was scratched into a table top with a butter knife. And though the plotlines were certainly outlandish during wrestling's last great renaissance (how could a referee's twin brother twist the rules so gratuitously that an evil man like Andre the Giant would gain the World Championship from Hulk Hogan?), they pale in comparison to some of the antics currently underway in the WWF. It's a crazy scene, folks--and that's an understatement.

While my expectations were indeed shattered as I watched the evening's festivities, I came to realize that this was because I'd gone in with useless expectations to begin with. The WWF--and pro wrestling in general--is an entirely different animal from its eighties incarnation. There's a lot more sex, for one, and there's also a heady sense of self-awareness. The action tips so often into the realm of the outlandish simply because it can. Other than little kids, few of the viewers actually believe there's anything real about it anymore. It's "sports entertainment" with a bigger emphasis on the "entertainment" part than ever before. This means there's really no need to work hard at maintaining the artifice, or the "kayfab," as it's inexplicably known to die-hard wrestling fans. The viewer may buy into events long enough to follow the plot, but at the end of the day, they're in on the gag as much as the wrestlers. After all, how can you watch a wrestler like The Godfather--a pimpish rogue whose finishing move is called the "Ho Train"--and maintain even an ounce of seriousness?

You can't. So don't. Wrestling is at its best when you just lay back and enjoy the ride, and that's what I learned to do Saturday night. And if you ain't down with that, then SUCK IT!

7 p.m.

The bastard staff of the Rosemont Horizon exile us to a parking lot blocks from the venue, which will only prove to be a pain in the ass after the event, when we have to walk back to our auto in the freezing cold. Would they try that shit on Stone Cold? I think not. In the bus on the way to the stadium, the mostly young male crowd begins to chant the slogan of one of the tag team competitors, HHH & X-Pac: "Ladies and gentleman, children of all ages..." It's a long intro, so it's an impressive happening. At the same time, hearing bestial men howling their tribal chant only encourages my initial sense of apprehension. Clearly, I'm not in my element. What place do Elton John or Elvis Costello have in this crowd? As we drive, I cower in fear behind my companions, who bravely join in the chant along with their brethren. Like Dian Fossey among the beasts of the jungle, I must adapt to this alien world...or be destroyed.

7:15 p.m.

We enter the arena. Immediately, I'm struck by the diversity of the crowd. There are far more women than I ever expected to see, and lots of young kids and teenagers. Perhaps the most disturbing sight is a girl in her early teens wearing a "Suck it" T-shirt and a green Teletubby-shaped backpack. How anyone could reconcile those two obsessions--aside from split personality disorder--is beyond my feeble understanding.

7:30 p.m.

Pretty much right on schedule, the arena lights dim and the crowd goes nuts. Howard Finkel steps into the ring and welcomes the fans to a night of great wrestling. Howard Finkel! I remember this guy from my most rabid days as a wrestling fan! He's one of the classics--a puny, balding fella with a booming voice who announces the matchups, then announces the winner at the end of each match. He's perhaps the only tenuous link that the current WWF maintains to the "classic" wrestling that dominated much of the previous three decades. Vince McMahon, head of the World Wrestling Federation and owner of Titan Sports, the real-life company that runs the Federation, has degenerated the rules and regulations of the squared circle to the point where literally anything can happen--he awards and strips title belts at his whimsy (or rather, that of the character he portrays in the Federation's ongoing storylines, "Mr. McMahon") and has robbed the rules of any meaning they once might have had. Shenanigans have always been a big part of wrestling, but it's reached a near-critical stage where the rules might evaporate entirely, and fans will have nothing to cling to but the soap-operatic hysterics of the wrestlers and their managers.

I don't think this is such a good idea. Sports are built on rules, rules that lead to so many of the great highs and lows in professional competition. We delight when our home team fouls and the ref misses it, and we boo when he makes a lousy call against our favorites. They're the rigid heart around which sports builds its warm soul. Without them, we may as well just watch guys pretend to kick the crap out of one another, which might just be what most of today's wrestling fans really want: more fake fighting. Me, I like some rules and goofy regulations tossed in. Jack Tunney still holds a soft spot in my heart, I guess.

So Howard Finkel's presence is reassuring, because it means that although the heart of pro wrestling may be crumbling away--its rules and regulations diced for the sake of a few good storylines--not all of its traditions will evaporate in the rush forward to gain new fans and bigger audiences at almost any cost. He's a goofy square who just announces the wrestlers--that's his job. He doesn't yell in anyone's face or hit guys with aluminum chairs when their backs are turned, and I love him for it.

At this point, time began to lose its meaning--I lost all of my reporter's calm demeanor and engulfed myself in screaming, booing and cheering for both the good guys and the bad. Only select strange moments stand out from the rest of my evening with the gladiators of the squared circle:

Goldust and the Blue Meanie

Goldust somehow manages to bring a healthy dose of the glam aesthetic into pro wrestling--he's decked out like David Bowie might be if he were a member of Kiss. The Blue Meanie is a fat guy with blue hair who's a bad wrestler and an even worse actor. The match ended when the Blue Meanie screwed things up and led to a pin for Goldust, and then the Blue Meanie starts pouting and ends up with his head weeping in Goldust's crotch. Man, wrestling fans are gettin' awful progressive an' what-not--if that had happened in the eighties, the guy would have gotten the crap kicked out of him by a rabid band of rednecks.

"HEAD!"

Al Snow. The name suggests nothing. His gimmick? A styrofoam head wearing a wig that he calls "Head." (If you can't already see where this is going, then you've been in that convent a few decades too long, Sister.) His finisher involves hitting his opponents with "Head," but in this match he loses to Hardcore Bob Holly, and gets very angry at "Head," hitting her with an aluminum chair. In a dead-on mimic of the classic abusive relationship scenario, Snow then regrets beating "Head," and confesses his love, which she silently doubts. He says he'll prove his love, leading to the following call and response exchange:

Snow: What do we want?

Crowd: HEAD!

Snow: What do we need?

Crowd: HEAD!

Snow: What do we looooooove?!

Crowd: HEAD!

As if you needed a gimmick to get a mostly-male crowd to start chanting "HEAD." Sheesh.

Part wrestler, part porn star

It's hard not to notice that the sexual politics in the WWF are a bit fucked up--you've got the closeted homosexuality of Goldust and the Blue Meanie, there's the psychotic relationship Al Snow has with "Head," and then there's Val Venis, the wrestler turned porn star. He saunters to the ring wearing only a towel and does a wild gyrating dance to sexy music, a number that begins with his trademark line: "Hello, ladies..." delivered like a white guy failing at impersonating Barry White. In another odd burst of homoeroticism, he does a faux lap dance in the face of any guy who he defeats. I guess that's' what he calls a "finisher." I know that it certainly wouldn't come close to finishing me.

SUCK IT!

You have no idea how fulfilling it is to shout those two words with twenty thousand other jamokes. No idea. It's the best.

The MAIN EVENT

A rattlesnake rules match, anything goes, four-way brawl until somebody falls: Mankind, Kane, The Rock and Stone Cold Steve Austin. Hell yeah!

Here's where the true brilliance of Vince McMahon's vision comes into play. The Rock is a representative of Team Corporate, the major evil faction operating in the WWF today. It's essentially a cadre of bad guys who are organized under the regime of WWF owner Vince McMahon, who at his age can somehow still wrestle. Unlike his past work as both owner and commentator in the WWF, he's now both owner and participant in the action. The genius part is that he's a participant as the owner, so that he represents the "corporate," evil way of life. Stone Cold, the major good guy who opposes McMahon and Team Corporate at every turn, is a rough character straight from the wilderness who represents the American dream: going your own way, opposing the establishment and drinking lots of beer as you do it all.

In the eighties, Hulk Hogan fought Ted Dibiase, the "Million Dollar Man." You could say that McMahon was tapping into the underbelly of the zeitgeist at that stage in our cultural history; the good guy (Hogan) represented the regular Joe who would never see any of the wealth and excess that defined the greed decade, and the bad guy (Dibiase) was the soulless rich man. Now McMahon has done it again, this time by entering into his own pageant and representing the soulless and evil exec who will do anything to get his way and preserve the company line, even if that means crushing the "little guy"--Steve Austin. Stone Cold is us, struggling against Big Business to make a living. McMahon's gift lies in reading shifts in the culture and portraying the events of the day in miniature through his wrestlers. It sure explains the huge popularity of WWF; maybe we all see a little bit of ourselves in Stone Cold, kicking ass against Team Corporate, fighting to remain free from the oppression of his work environment.

When it's all said and done, pro wrestling is so compelling because it's a reflection of us. Who knew?