Garden parties

It's always a hoot to watch MSG Classics on MSG Network, which is basically a bunch of old WWF matches from the Garden over the years. There's a huge sense of nostalgia -- for the old announcers, the old bad lighting, the evolution of TV graphics and of course the wrestling. Sure, there have been plenty of changes in the action over time. That's just how things have changed.

But it's pretty sad to watch some of these matches (in tonight's case, the first SummerSlam in 1988) and realize that many of the participants have already passed on. And it's not even the older participants like Gorilla Monsoon or Lord Alfred Hayes. It's often the wrestling talent who was at the prime of their careers when these cards originally took place (for instance, there was a Rick Rude-Junkyard Dog match). So many guys are dying relatively early that you almost can't blame guys like Dusty Rhodes and Sgt. Slaughter to occasionally put on the boots just to prove that they've stayed alive. Even stranger is that it seems like the guys from those 1970s Bruno Sammartino cards have a better survival rate than the those mid-'80s, early '90s cards.