Darius Rucker went public last week with his thinking on the current state of pro wrestling, and how it can never match up to what we grew up with.
Darius Rucker is 60, I’m 54, so, we’re just about contemporaries, in terms of being wrestling fans.
And he’s right; it will never be the same.
Rucker was quote-tweeting a Mid-Atlantic Wrestling fan account that had highlighted a video chronicling the famous 1980 heel turn of Ole Anderson, ornery ol’ cuss if there ever was one, on Dusty Rhodes, “The American Dream.”
Quick backstory on the turn: Anderson, long a heel in the Georgia territory, had turned babyface in 1979, and worked for months to gain the trust of Rhodes, the top babyface in the territory, though Rhodes was a hard sell, given their history with each other.
Eventually, Rhodes relented, and embraced the friendship of Anderson, setting the scene for a big match in Atlanta against The Assassins – a masked heel tag team, the tag champs in the Georgia territory at the time – in which Gene Anderson, Ole’s kayfabe brother, and “The Russian Bear,” Ivan Koloff, were appointed guest referees.
At a critical point in the match, Rhodes, after taking a lengthy beating from The Assassins, tried to tag in Anderson, who refused the tag, and led the group of heels, including the special guest referees, in an attack of Rhodes.
Getting to Rucker’s take on this, then:
As much as I love the @WWE and @AEW and all the others out there doing there thing. It can never be this great. We believed this. I had watched Dusty and Ole hate for my entire childhood. And then on the Superstation bang. I wanted Ole dead!! Damn I miss the territories! https://t.co/ZJn2cyUePP
— Darius Rucker (@dariusrucker) August 30, 2026
The internet being what it is, there have, of course, been people trying to detract from what Rucker had to offer here, most notably, Dave Meltzer, the dean of wrestling journalists, who weighed in after another fan quote-tweeted Rucker with an observation about the recent Will Ospreay-Kenny Omega match for the AEW world title at “All In.”
Rucker’s response there: “You obviously never saw Flair vs. Steamboat.”
Meltzer’s two cents on that:
I saw countless Flair-Steamboat matches. Seriously, Ospreay vs, Omega had more emotion than any Flair-Steamboat match and Flair-Steamboat was state of the art from 1977 to 1989. https://t.co/tCeX2Svbzp
— Dave Meltzer (@davemeltzerWON) September 1, 2026
For the record here, I loved the Ospreay-Omega match, but, no, just, no, it didn’t have anywhere near the level of emotion of any Flair-Steamboat match from the 1970s and 1980s, or for that matter, any run-of-the-mill TV squash match from the 1970s or 1980s.
Actually watch, or at least scan, the video that Rucker linked to, giving us the synopsis of the Ole Anderson heel turn.
The people in the arena felt it to the core of their existence, believed what they saw with every fiber of their being, which is just not possible today – because while in 1980, most fans at least questioned the veracity of what they were being presented in the guise of professional wrestling, they hadn’t been told outright that wrestling was fake, and so, they could let themselves believe that there was some mystery to the whole enterprise, if they were so inclined.
We’re going on 40 years since Vince McMahon took that from us, with his push to get wrestling out from the regulatory thumb of state athletics commissions, so that he could save a few bucks on taxes and licensing.
Nowadays, fans – Darius Rucker, me, you, I assume, if you’re reading this – have to force ourselves to forget that what we’re watching is not on the up-and-up, so that we can play along with what we’re seeing unfold.
With regard to the Ospreay-Omega match, it was plainly obvious going in that Ospreay was going to win the AEW title – the match was held at Wembley Stadium, 45 minutes from where Ospreay, a UK native, got his start in wrestling, and the whole show, and the last several months of AEW TV, had been built around the idea that he was going to emerge victorious.
When Ole and Dusty went into that steel cage in Atlanta in 1980 to face The Assassins, we had no idea what was going to happen – that the past year of Anderson making himself to be a paragon of virtue was a con, that it was all a plot to exact some misguided sense of revenge on Rhodes for a past slight.
So, when Ole turned on Dusty, man, like Darius Rucker wrote in his tweet, we all “wanted Ole dead!”
We don’t watch wrestling the same way today, haven’t for decades.
Now we’re all like theater critics, watching for technical proficiency, analyzing interview and promo segments like we would the plot of a movie or a Netflix drama.
The only reason we pay attention to who wins and who loses is because we want to cry and moan about one guy or gal getting a push over another guy or gal who we believe deserves it more.
I’m with Darius Rucker here.
Damn, I miss the territories.
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Chris Graham
