I was fifteen years old in November of 1986. In my youth, there was nothing more exciting to me than professional wrestling. I grew up in the era of the titans who brought the World Wrestling Federation (later renamed World Wrestling Entertainment) to global prominence: Hulk Hogan, Rowdy Roddy Piper, Andre the Giant, and Randy ‘Macho Man’ Savage were household names. There were vigorous debates among my friends as to whether wrestling was fake. I was decidedly in the camp that it was real. After all, it was just two years earlier when 20/20 reporter John Stossel was backstage at Madison Square Garden doing a story about professional wrestling’s secrets. During his interview with wrestler David Schultz, Stossel asked Schultz if pro wrestling was fake. Shultz’s response was to hit Stossel in the head twice, knocking him to the floor each time. A lawsuit for physical damages followed, which Stossel won. Lawsuits are real. Stossel had really been hurt. I was as convinced as ever.

In November of that year there occurred an Intercontinental Championship match between Randy “Macho Man” Savage and Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat. Macho Man was the brash, egotistical villain. Steamboat, the classy professional. It was no surprise when Macho Man took a couple of cheap shots during the match to gain an upper hand, but nothing could have prepared me for the way the match ended. Macho Man made his way to the referee table, secured the ring bell, then climbed to the top turnbuckle with the ring bell in hand. Macho Man leaped from the turnbuckle landing on a semi-conscious Steamboat while slamming the bell into his throat. Steamboat flailed around on the mat like a salmon in a fisherman’s boat. His hands clutching his neck. I was horrified and convinced, as the announcers assured me, Steamboat was dying.

Luckily for me, my best friend lived across the street and his dad, Hugh, was very much like an uncle to me. Hugh had been my little league coach, scout master and all-around positive influence in my life. He was an adult I could trust. Hugh became aware of my concerns for Steamboat and decided it was time for me to further enter the world of adulthood. “Jimmy, it’s all fake”, Hugh said. “You gotta believe me. These wrestlers are great athletes, but this is all staged. The results aren’t real. Steamboat is just fine.” I believed him. Hugh had never steered me wrong before. He stood to gain nothing by misleading me. And with that, I never concerned myself with the physical or emotional well-being of another professional wrestler.

I think we’re all susceptible to being misled by things we desperately want to be true. Especially things in which we’re so emotionally invested. Recognizing we may have been misled is hard. Choosing to no longer believe those things is harder. Much harder. It requires us to come face to face with our own humanity and recognize that, despite our keen intellect, we have blind spots in our reason and logic. American writer Mark Twain once opined “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they’ve been fooled.” I know he’s right.

The younger me was wrong about professional wrestling. The younger me was also wrong in believing hazing made for better Sigma Chi brotherhood. Members who are hazed, like I was, can come into the organization believing that the way to get others to love Sigma Chi is to treat new members the way we were treated. After all, the reasoning goes, “if I was hazed and loved Sigma Chi, then those two things must be related. There must be correlation. Maybe even causation.” However, as I learned early as an undergraduate, this isn’t true. The numbers and post-initiation behaviors just don’t support the belief that hazing creates a stronger fraternity. Further, and this should be the beginning and end of the exercise, you can’t defend hazing in light of anything we claim to stand for, public or private. We can’t claim to be men of integrity, possessed of good morals, who believe in congeniality and courtesy while simultaneously treating our newest and most vulnerable members like a third-hand pair of sneakers. I have many Sigma Chi brothers, several from my own chapter, who had little to no involvement once they were initiated. A larger group, still, who have had nothing to do with the organization upon graduation. When we talk about why, it almost always comes back to the way they were treated as a pledge. They couldn’t reconcile the promises of brotherhood and lofty values with the ordeals they were made to endure. It turns out that no initiation ceremony (no matter how beautiful) and no secret handshake (no matter how special), can ever compensate for the way we make people feel.

Being a Sigma Chi is about bettering our lives by practicing a set of virtues in pursuit of a set of fixed ideals. In Sigma Chi, we publicly state the purpose of our organization is to “cultivate and maintain the high ideals of friendship, justice and learning.” Great friendships can’t begin with the great injustice of depriving someone of their dignity and betraying our standards, values, virtues, and ideals. If you want a semester’s worth of indentured servants and a chapter divided along the lines of tribal pledge class loyalties, I suppose hazing could achieve that end. However, if you want a fraternity of deep and meaningful friendships, hazing won’t get you there. If I’m wrong, the brothers who drop out or never come around will continue the same pattern of disengagement. But it will happen with your friendships and their dignity intact, and you will be able to look at yourself in the mirror knowing your values remain uncompromised.

When pledging Sigma Chi, we each acknowledge “the existence of an ever-living God, the Creator and Preserver of all things”. The good news is this means He created you and, because of this, you have inherent value, worth and dignity. It also means He created every guest and every pledge who walks through our doors. They, too, have that inherent value, worth and dignity. What if we began seeing each other like this? What if we began treating each other like this? Imagine the change in our chapters and friendships. I like to think every interaction we have with members of Sigma Chi (both pledges and initiates) is one in which we’re either adding or removing a brick to a metaphorical chapel of fellowship that exists between each member and all members. I suppose, like Macho Man, you could use that brick to harm others, but I think we would be more gratified with the genuine and enduring friendships that would emerge and sustain us if we put those bricks to the purpose for which they were intended.