The timekeeper’s job is a difficult one.

I’m not kidding. Theirs is a critical role, especially on live television and pay-per-view, as they keep the time not in terms of how long a match runs, but how much time it is allotted.

They also get to ring the bell.

There aren’t many man-made sounds on earth as sweet and lovely as the ring bell. I am neither old nor from a farm, so I can’t say I’ve experienced whatever pangs a dinner bell conjures, but I imagine the ring bell’s clarion call is similar — here’s a meal, let’s feast.

Lost in the good, primordial sound of the ring bell is that it is produced by a musical instrument, a percussive one. In order for it to sound, a person has to strike one physical object with another.

I am being nonspecific with the objects because, outside of major promotions where the bell gets rung when it is rung, it is the wild, wild west out there. I go to a lot of indie shows in Georgia, a lot of indie shows in general, and very few of them try to actually have a bell. Most of the time there’s a coffee cup and a wrench and a guy trying and failing to hit those things with weight. THUNK. …..thunk.

Like I said, the timekeeper’s job is not easy. While bells are often perceived by people who exist outside of the creative sphere of music as a lesser instrument, to get good at the thing, to achieve the deep, rich tone necessary to imbue the art of dudes playfighting in their undies with the gravitas of legitimate combat sports, you have to practice. The guy sitting ringside at WWE events? That’s his whole world. He has practiced. The dude sitting ringside with a coffee can and a wrench? He probably whacks the thing once before showtime and goes “yeah, I’ve got this” before spending the next three hours fucking up the beginning of every match and making the end of every match feel a little less significant.

I have written all of this, and everything that follows, because I saw a tweet from a GCW show last night that showed their (probably not all that) unique solution to the problem: playing a YouTube video of the sound a ring bell makes at the beginning and end of every match.

This is great. Just great. It is the first thing I’ve seen about GCW that’s charmed me, the last true rebel yell from an outlaw promotion whose promoter gets invited to major WWE shows by Stephanie McMahon. I love this, baby. DING.WAV for life.