By Coach B

Classic wrestling still has its hooks in me, and building this site is easier than pretending I’ve fully embraced the current product.

I grew up on rented VHS tapes, hazy signals out of Detroit, and the mythology of it all.

Hogan. Flair. Piper. Delusional, grandiose, and dangerous. You bought a ticket to see the carnage that followed them into the building.

The crowd believed enough to matter. Throw a beer. Take a swing at the heel. Cool. You get to find out, in real time, what another grown man’s fist tastes like.

Today we have some common decency, metal detectors, and security guards. Back then, given the choice between getting nightsticked by the local PD or getting in Bruiser Brody’s face?

Just hand me the stick and I’ll kick my own ass, thanks.

Don’t tell me it’s better now.

It’s cleaner.

That is not the same thing.

The Present Is Not the Enemy, Unfortunately

That doesn’t mean modern wrestling is bad. I’m not the guy who thinks everything made after 1998 should be loaded into a shit cannon and fired into a lake.

Modern wrestling is impressive. A guy built like a substitute gym teacher can hit three dives and a Spanish Fly before the first commercial break, and somehow everyone walks away mostly fine, at least until the next semi-regular, year-ending injury.

But that is exactly the point.

Is modern wrestling more impressive? Absolutely.

Is it always more fun?

No.

I miss wrestling that felt like it was happening in a real place.

Not a universe. A place. A local civic center. A building with folding chairs, angry fans held back by nothing but baling twine and aluminum tubing, and one woman in the fourth row who is somehow her own aunt.

What We Do Here

This whole thing started with a basic idea: watch classic wrestling, get distracted by the ring announcer, remember something from being nine years old, and write it down before the thought escapes into the ceiling fan.

Pretty straightforward.

Sometimes that means serious wrestling analysis. Sometimes it means realizing a jobber in a singlet looks exactly like Mr. White, my sixth-grade gym teacher.

He did. I stand by it.

That eventually turned into four sections:

Altered Tape: Classic wrestling, watched too closely for the wrong reasons. I dig through episodes to figure out what still works, what aged like guacamole, and exactly how much Old Spice Lance Russell wore. A metric shit-ton, for the record.

Bad Tracking: Modern wrestling, reluctantly viewed. I try to be fair and look for the good between the walking, singing, and miraculous medical recoveries.

Loose Ends: The junk drawer. Half-cocked ideas, mailbags, wrestling detritus, and anything else that wandered in through the side door.

Archive: Everything in one place. Miraculously.

I’ll do my best with dates, names, and details, but this is not a museum. Nobody should be learning history from this site without checking the work.

Better isn’t really the question.

It was more fun because we cared. Maybe if we go back and make it fun again, we’ll care more.

I sucked at transitive properties, so do not check that logic too closely.

As for the name, plenty of wrestlers over the last forty years entered the ring in some kind of altered state, legally, spiritually, chemically, or medically inadvisable.

So here we are.

Note: If some of the early articles look familiar from the High On series at Ring the Damn Bell, that’s why. They’re mine, renamed, and they’ll live under Altered Tape going forward.

Huge thanks to BDamage for giving me a place to publish them in the first place and encouraging me to keep going. His support helped lead directly to this site.