Wrestling is wrestling but sometimes it sucks
(This was definitely not what I had in mind when I asked Midjourney for an image but it’s certainly evocative)
Now, there’s a story that back in the travelling carnival days, the wrestling shows were ‘real’1. Namely, the wrestling was legitimate, shoot2 fighting. Two guys would get in a ring and they would fight and then a winner would be determined, the two guys wouldn’t know who was going to win.
Problem was, it took hours. Hours and hours of two guys doing holds on one another and finally, maybe getting to a finish. Which was exhausting for the performers and exhausting for the crowd. Plus it raised the spectre that someone could get hurt, which would make it hard to put them back in the ring when the show got to the next town.
So, someone had the bright idea that really, the crowd just wanted to be entertained. So why not predetermine the winner. The fighters could work out who was going to win and how, and then you could have a match that was only 15 minutes long and everyone was happy.
And professional wrestling was born.
When I was young, I was raised in a strongly anti-violence household. I had to get up earlier than my parents in the morning to be able to watch Transformers. Astro Boy was a bridge too far for what I was allowed to watch.
So I’m not even sure I knew that wrestling was a thing until I was 8 years old. What little TV was watched in our household certainly wasn’t wrestling and wouldn’t have had any commercials for wrestling action figures and the like.
I had a friend at primary school when we lived in New Zealand, and getting to go round to his house to play after school was where I was introduced to all manner of things. The Simpson, WWF, Ninja Turtles, all things I was not allowed at home but could readily consume at his place (and sugary snacks).
It was the late 80s. WWF was at a bit of a peak and people like Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant were close enough to household names that even if I wasn’t up to speed on wrestling, I had a sense of who they were.
I can’t say I was entranced by the product WWF was putting out then but I liked it well enough that I was happy to pretend to be Shawn Michaels while we indulged in some bedroom wrestling (the sort of thing that as a parent I now look back on and think ‘we came pretty close to messing ourselves up real good back then’).
Perhaps a year or two later when we had moved back to Australia, someone brought a crappy VHS tape of Wrestlemania 3 to a sleepover one night. Of course, it lead to a full living room brawl between a bunch of 9 year olds. Again, I wasn’t entranced but I wasn’t going to ignore this wrestling thing.
In the modern day within World Wrestling Entertainment (yeah, they had a name change), there are talks of eras. The Ruthless Aggression era, the Reality era, the PG era. But there was an era before WWF/WWE. The era when wrestling in the United States consisted of a lot of territories around the country.
When Vince McMahon took over the family business from his dad, part of his genius was recognising that he could buy up all the major talent in all those disparate territories and get them to work for him. In doing so he could have essentially a super promotion which covered the entire United States rather than the many parochial, geographical based territories/promotions. Then he could put it on national TV.
Wrestling had long been on TV but often it would only show in the local market for the particular territory.
But Vince McMahon Jr was going to take it national.
And it worked. Holy shit did it work.
One of my younger brothers had a friend in high school that had cable and started giving him VHS tapes of Monday Night Raw, WWF’s flagship weekly show. We gobbled it up.
The time was the mid to late 90s and it was peak pro wrestling. The Monday Night Wars3 were on like Bundy Kong. Free to air TV in Australia was showing Pay Per Views from WWF from time to time (clearly in a bid to gain more market share). It was the Attitude Era.
And I fucking loved it.
No longer was I all ‘well, this wrestling thing is not bad but other sports are better’. Now I was all in.
I knew it wasn’t legitimate. We all did by that time. Long gone were the days where the business did everything it could to maintain kayfabe4. Vince McMahon has been dragged in front of Congress due to a steroids scandal (one that would keep rearing its head from time to time over the years). There were journalists sniffing around starting to say that all of this was a work.
So he out and out went and said, “Yeah, it’s a work. This isn’t a sport, it’s an entertainment product. Let’s call it sports entertainment.”
Because if this isn’t a sport, well then you don’t need to regulate it like one. So performance enhancing substances, what performance is being enhanced?
Now I know a lot of people that come to pro wrestling and say "Well, it’s not real. It’s fake5. How could I enjoy this? It's silly."
And I get every word said there (except ‘fake’).
It is silly.
And it’s not real.
But by gawd do I enjoy it.
Of course, at age 15, I didn’t know all the lingo. I wasn’t versed in wrestling. I knew it wasn’t real and still I didn’t care. I was thrilled by it.
The Attitude Era was the time of Stone Cold, The Rock, Mankind. The wrestlers that were household names. On the other side of the Monday Night Wars, WCW was riding the NWO to victory more Monday nights than not.
The product was loud, brash, targeted at adolescent boys that wanted to hear dick jokes and see boobs.
In hindsight, the Attitude Era was trash.
Let me tell you about Vince Russo.
Vince Russo wasn’t from the wrestling world. Not really. He got his start writing for the WWF magazine as a freelancer in the early 90s. Cause WCW were winning the ratings battle, Vince McMahon wanted to shake things up and pulled Russo into the creative team which he ended up leading.
Vince Russo wasn’t a wrestling guy. He didn’t really know the business. He certainly didn’t know the history. But he didn’t care. Hell, he thought that was a bonus. His job wasn’t to make a great wrestling show. His job was to make a great TV show. At least as far as he was concerned.
To a point, it worked.
Russo pioneered what became known as Crash TV. The point wasn’t long form storytelling or building wrestlers into stars (though if that happened, he wouldn’t be disappointed) or showing any respect to the business that had come before his tenure. He wanted to pop6 the crowd as much as possible.
Because if you pop the crowd, you'll keep their eyes on your product. His view wasn't 'what will make a wrestling fan keep watching this' but 'what will make someone flicking between stations keep watching this if they come across it.'
One of the main ways he did that was by using swerves. A swerve is essentially a twist. That good guy wrestler? He just turned on his tag team partner. What a swerve. That bad guy wrestler actually has a heart of gold and just helped out that good guy wrestler who was under attack. What a swerve.
Quickly it became swerves upon swerves. I’ve never heard Russo say it but I suspect his modus operandi was that if a show didn’t include at least 2 swerves then they were doing it wrong.
It was also the era of very, very long promos (that is, a wrestler speaking on the mic - when you think of a promo, you probably think of Macho Man Randy Savage on the mic saying ‘brother’ a lot). Like the first half an hour (or more) of an episode of Raw would often be someone just talking. The idea being that the story element was beefed up, so people would be more likely to tune in than if they had no real interest in the wrestling itself.
Wrestling wasn’t a sport. It was a sports entertainment soap opera.
But a lot of it didn’t make a huge amount of sense and wasn’t very good.
Take the Higher Power and the Corporate Ministry. Vince McMahon had screwed over Mankind at Survivor Series and given the title to The Rock (which was essentially them making kayfabe what had been a shoot at Survivor Series the year before when Vince McMahon screwed Bret Hart out of the title before he left for WCW).
On the back of that, the Corporation stable (that is, a team of wrestlers) was formed with The Rock leading it. At the same time, The Undertaker formed The Ministry of Darkness (which was some real late 90s, emo edgelord bullshit - essentially, any wrestler that had some sort of mystical/vampire/magic gimmick7).
So you’ve got two rather massive heel stables, so what do you do? You merge the two. At which point The Undertaker starts going on about how he is carrying out the work of a Higher Power. He kidnaps Vince McMahon’s daughter (and drugs her and marries her cause… wrestling I guess?). Vince McMahon rallies the troops to fight back against The Undertaker, the Corporate Ministry and whoever the mysterious High Power is.
Cool? Cool.
Well, it turns out that Vince McMahon was the Higher Power all along. Which makes no sense and is super stupid.
When people say wrestling is dumb, it’s that sort of thing they can point to. And they aren’t wrong. Oh lord, they are not wrong.
Fortunately, Vince Russo left for the higher pay check that WCW was offering and proceeded to run that company into the ground. Which lead to WWF buying out WCW in 2000.
The years since have varied wildly. Sometimes, holding a monopoly on the market has done exactly what you would imagine. The product has suffered and wrestling sucks. Other times, it has been amazing and makes those earlier years look laughable in comparison. Often that will come down to who is running the show. Unfortunately, as Vince McMahon has gotten older and consolidated power, that means it’s his vision or no show.
Of course, he resigned in disgrace earlier this year and I think we can all be thankful for that.
Why am I telling you all this?
Because as much as the product can often be substandard. As much as it can outright suck. As much as the Attitude Era was terrible in retrospect, and the Ruthless Aggression era pissed me off, and the Reality era wanted to have its cake and elbow drop it too. As much as all that, when wrestling is good, there is pretty much nothing else like it.
Mankind (Mick Foley) winning his first championship against The Rock. Chills. Stone Cold’s heel turn against The Rock. Fire8.
Because the sneaky thing about pro wrestling not being real is that it means that you don’t run into the issue that happens a lot with sport. We think of the great moments in sporting history but the fact is that the majority of the time, sport can be pretty dull to consume.
I love sport (and don’t watch enough it because my kids just want to watch random Youtube crap all the time) but its filled with one sided contests, scrappy versions of the game, bad calls, injuries, awful weather which means the game is a mess or doesn’t even happen.
Wrestling throws all that out the window by having a pre determined outcome.
Which isn’t to say that it can’t be terrible. It can, and often is. But they are able to manufacture a story within the bounds of the squared circle. Long form stories can be told (though WWE in the modern era doesn’t do enough of it). And it doesn’t just have to be a story about fighting, it can become something more than just two wrestlers in a ring throwing hands.
When you learn more about pro wrestling, you come across ‘workrate’ as a term. It pretty much means how many moves a wrestler will do in a time period (a minute or across a match) but also comes down to the variety of moves and how they are utilised. People like AJ Styles, Shawn Michaels, Kazuchika Okada, these are examples of wrestlers with good work rates.
I bring this up because there are a numbers of layers that add to a match being good or not.
There’s the layers outside the ring. The promos, the storytelling of why these people are in the ring. Macho Man was the king of this (whilst also being bugnuts and just kind of spraying words at a microphone).
As a 15 year old, I loved the promo work of Mankind (sure The Rock was the one electrifying crowds but Mankind was doing something extraordinary).
Bless you Mick Foley. The man also writes a pretty good book.
People often talk about the build to a match. What’s the story of why they are gonna fight. That’s what promos are for. Good promos will do a lot to build a match into something that people are going to go wild for.
Then you’ve got the in ring work. The technical ability. You want the crowd to get out of their seats and start shouting ‘holy shit!’. There are good versions of this.
(Yes, I could have gone with something like Okada x Omega but I love me some strong style).
There are bad versions of getting a crowd to do that.
(You want to tell people that wrestling isn’t ‘fake’, that’s a good clip for you).
I know we all thought that was the shit when we were younger, and it’s still just about the craziest spot ever but it’s not good wrestling (where the point is to leave the ring as you entered… ie. not dead).
Problem is that so often wrestlers are heavy and slow and just go to rest holds all the time, and it bores the crap out of the audience.
Additionally, the best matches will tell a story within the ring. Depending on the story outside of the ring, it might play into elements of that. If there hasn’t been much build then it will need to rely more on the story of the match inside the ring making logical sense. One wrestler is focusing on the right knee of the other one? Okay, that injury needs to be sold. There’s nothing quite like a wrestler taking a battering for a whole match, then just getting up, hitting their finishing move as though they just got out of bed and then walking up the ramp to the back to kill any cohesive story.
Perhaps this is the third match in a series of matches and the winner will take all so they give it their everything. Perhaps this is the climax of a long running feud where both wrestlers know each other as well as they know themselves so they are hitting each other with the other’s moves.
Of course, Vince McMahon spends far too much time getting the way of telling a good story these days (yeah, he left the company and now has come back and managed to sell WWE to the parent company of UFC… strange days).
Because the thing is, even when wrestling is bad, it’s still fun. It can be amusing. And it takes skill. The people that rise to the top do so because they either have technical in ring skills that can deliver a good match (look at AJ Styles who can get a good match out of just about anyone) or can talk in a way that they get the crowd on their side (look at the New Day who were a heel tag team but they were getting so over with the crowd on the mic that the WWE had to turn them face).
Sure, it might be pre determined. And it might be done in a way to protect people from injuries. But that isn’t a bad thing. Two wrestlers go into the ring and they put on a show to entertain a crowd (and sell tickets and merch of course) and the aim is that they walk out of the ring the way they came in. That’s the game. Joe Rogan can go on about how its fake and UFC is far superior cause in MMA the fighters are trying to kill each other and its real (and it is real but they obviously aren’t trying to kill each other because that is called a crime) but that isn’t the game at hand.
It’s storytelling with hands being thrown. It’s feats of prowess and athleticism. It’s a prime time version of a carnival side show. It’s fantastic. And sometimes, it sucks.
I leave you with the following. The first because it slaps. The second because it gives an overview of one of the greatest (and queerest) stories ever told in wrestling.
I hesitate to throw that term around lightly because if something is not real, then it must be fake. That’s not quite true.
Shoot’ means that something is not predetermined, that the workers aren’t cooperating towards an agreed outcome. The opposite of ‘shoot’ is a ‘work’.
The second half of the 1990s saw a massive ratings battle between Vince McMahon’s WWF Monday Night Raw and Ted Turner’s WCW Nitro. This ratings battle was known as the Monday Night Wars.
Kayfabe is maintaining the illusion that this is all a shoot. Not letting the audience know that this wasn’t a real fight. Not letting the audience know that the performers were playing characters rather than just being themselves. Essentially, maintaining kayfabe meant selling wrestling as a sport rather than an entertainment product.
It ain’t fake, you just don’t have a good vocab.
‘Pop’ is when the crowd cheers. Often people will mention a ‘cheap pop’. A babyface wrestler walks into an arena and praises the city that they’re in. Like a band does. The opposite of ‘pop’ is ‘heat’ which is pretty much when the crowd boos. A heel wrestler (or bad guy wrestler) will be looking to get heat from the crowd with what they do. If they don’t, they aren’t really doing their job as a heel.
A gimmick is essentially the defining element of a wrestler’s character. The Undertaker’s gimmick is that he is an undead wrestler that makes lightning happen. Well, except when his gimmick was The American Badass, at which point it was that he was a biker… that could make lightning happen.
Though they entirely ruined everything after that moment, the moment itself was something wonderful.