Take up thy wrestling boots and walk - The Appraisal, Part One
Submitted by Pt2 on Friday, February 3, 2006 at 9:39 AM EST





Welcome once again to the column that doesn’t know and whose ass had better call somebody, Take up thy wrestling boots and walk. I’m the columnist who has three characters for you, Pt2, back once again from the transcendental highway of sexual rapacity that is my week to talk about the sport of kings, professional wrestling.

I plan on doing an extended piece of work over the next few columns – with any luck, it shall become my wrestling magnum opus. I couldn’t think of a decent name, so I’m going to call it “The Appraisal”, since that is in essence what it is. Pro wrestling is one of the only branches of the entertainment industry to never be really studied, with any kind of academic thought – I hope to change that (although it will be written much like a normal column, not an essay) and make an effort to help understand the myriad world of wrestling a little better.

So, here we go. I hope you enjoy it.


I’ve never understood people who watch sports, but don’t support a specific team. And before those of you who change your team every year start giving me e-mails, I know all the arguments that go something along the lines of “why should I support a team based on geographical location?” or “I’m more interested in individual players than the teams”, but those arguments have only really brought it down from hatred (in some cases; I still maintain a certain distaste for people I suspect are “glory hunters”) to more of a state of confusion. It hasn’t really cleared anything up for me. And here’s why.

I remain confused by these people that do change their allegiance every few years claiming that they can enjoy the sport in the same way that those of us who experience the sport at all the different levels do. For an example, I’m an Aston Villa fan, and if you start talking to me about sport, you tend to find that out pretty quickly; I’m not shy about it. I’ve been a fan of the club for over a decade now, and in that time I’ve seen us top the Premier League for six months, and I’ve seen us flirting with relegation. I’ve seen us win competitions and I’ve seen us humiliated by teams that shouldn’t have a chance in hell. As a consequence of all the losses to the likes of Helsingborg, and Wycombe, Doncaster and Burnley, I actually fully appreciate the highs, much more so than many fans my age that support say, Manchester United, who have grown up winning everything, and as a result are only ever satisfied with victory – satisfied with it, but not happy, or ecstatic, and they don’t find themselves jumping around like an idiot because it’s made them that happy.

Now, you may be wondering when I’m going to get to the wrestling, since this has all been about Football up to now. Well, I’m going to get to the wrestling now. Had a long time to wait, didn’t you?

Anyway, all this has made me think about wrestling, and more specifically, it’s status as “Sports-entertainment”. Like it or not, avoid the term if you want, but that is what most people would describe it as, if asked. But let’s not forget, Sports-Entertainment isn’t a real concept, it’s a piece of jingoism coined by Titan towers in the eighties as a way to boost profits. Sport and Entertainment are incompatible, as summed up by Alan Durban (Manager of Stoke City football club) when he said “If you want Entertainment, go and watch clowns.” Now if I wanted entertainment I wouldn’t go and watch clowns, but you get what he means. Makes sense too. Supporters of Sports teams are not often interested in performance, instead being satisfied with results, and if that result is only achieved by being boring for the length of the game…. Most fans in most sports, most real fans that actually put money into their game of choice, will take it. Also, how many fans want the star player of the opposition to miss the game through injury or suspension, compared with how many people going to watch something in the entertainment field want the star of the show to be absent?

So if Sports and Entertainment go together like Electricity and toddlers, what actually IS wrestling?

The problem lies in the fact that on the surface at least, it does combine elements of both. There can be no doubting the athleticism that goes on inside a wrestling ring. I want to remind everyone that regardless of anything you read here, at no point am I arguing that wrestlers are inferior athletes – in some cases I think they are some of the most athletically gifted people you’ll ever see.

But the presence of athleticism doesn’t necessarily make it a sport. To tie it back to what I was saying earlier, about the drama of it all. Well, a sport has drama at several levels – there is the drama of say, the Superbowl – the biggest prize in your sport. Then there is the drama of the bottom of the table dogfight, where one team is determined not to drop a division, or not to come last again this year. Sport is unpredictable, and as such there is drama all the way through it. It rarely seems to work the way it should on paper, and for example, how many times have you seen a boxing card in which the main event is a dull mismatch while one of the fights of the year is on the undercard, or how many times have you seen a Stanley cup final that is a major letdown after the playoffs that brought both teams there?

It happens, because you never know what is going to happen and when in sport. Most football fans in England will probably admit in may, that they haven’t seen a better game all season than the recent Liverpool vs. Luton FA cup tie, despite the team you expected to win advancing and it being of little overall importance in the grand scheme of the championship, or the champions league, or even of the FA cup itself, since it was only an early round match.

Entertainment doesn’t work like that, because it has the luxury of a script. Drama does not permeate at every level in an unpredictable fashion, in the same way it does in sport, because there isn’t that desire to know if the guys at the bottom of the table can put on a grandstanding effort to beat the guys at the top, because guess what? A guy with a pen decided the destiny of everyone in the story. I think it’s probably a key reason why films about sport, with very few exceptions, are almost always unpopular with mass audiences – if you don’t count the kids, and I don’t, because your opinions don’t matter if you haven’t developed a critical faculty yet. If Mighty Ducks 3 is the most clever movie you’ve ever seen, then I’m not going to trust you with an awards ceremony. Nuff said.

Sport has it’s variety of dramatic forms, the ins and outs of races for championships and minor victories, and wrestling does it’s best to capture the feeling of some of that: but in reality, wrestling is scripted. It does have a structure. Even when it doesn’t seem to be structured, that’s really just people doing a bad job. Every decision in wrestling is taken by people not to give the whole thing a feeling that this is a sport, but to lead you down the path to the moments like the main event of wrestlemania, which almost always seem to feel more like a movie than any real sporting event. Lets be honest, in a “sports” match at Wrestlemania XXI, someone with the size and experience of JBL doesn’t lose to John Cena – but that doesn’t have that grandstand feel does it? So instead you get that bit that feels more like a moment in Rocky – the same bit that you got at Wrestlemania XII, XIV, X-8, X-9 and XX and probably many more before – I’m not complaining, but it’s not really all that close to the reality of a sport, where more often than not the plucky underdogs go as far as they can, only to be beaten by a side that’s, you know, better.

Wrestling doesn’t do that – it builds you up to have the maximum effect. Everything is structured in a crescendo, to get you feeling about their characters (another key thing, you don’t have characters in sports, you have sportsmen), and when they have you feeling the way they want, they utilise the plot to make you enthralled. Not a million miles away from a movie really.

This all brings me to the way in which we watch wrestling, with a sport in mind. The closest major professional sport you could compare it to would, I imagine, be boxing, because wrestling has been a fixture much longer than the world of MMA, so they could have had no ideas about parodying that. No, we’ll use boxing as a metaphor for the time being.

In Boxing, the crowd have their favourites. Usually the home town boy, but often it’ll come down to individuals and their own personal opinions. They’ll follow that fighter, and assuming he doesn’t do anything stupid, they’ll always think fondly of him, even when he’s too old and getting knocked about on the undercard instead of battling bravely in the main events. It’s not that different to the rabid sports fan who supports a team – as long as the team don’t do anything bizarre then the team will always be special to the fan.

I find myself asking more and more as I get older, do you really have that in wrestling? I’m self confessed that I have no great loyalty to any wrestling “team” since I’ve spent great portions of my life watching WCW, WWF, ECW, NWA-TNA and many other promotions. But to wrestlers themselves, the major part of the show and the ones I’m supposed to get behind?

In some cases, I think there are. I think the presentation of wrestling as a sport, combined with the lifting of the veil on wrestling that allows us, in some cases, to know of personal ambitions and aspirations have come together to give us people in the business that we can’t help but get behind. The most obvious answer that comes to my mind is Chris Benoit. Everyone I know wanted Chris Benoit to win his world title, and were all delighted when his reign was a success. And knowing what it meant to him, was watching him at Wrestlemania XX basking in what he had acheieved that different to watching the hometown boy pull on his teams jersey and head out to represent the team he used to watch? Benoit daydreamed about wrestling at Wrestlemania as a kid in much the same way that player x, the quarterback for team y, used to sit thirty feet away from where he is now playing.

But people like Benoit are few and far between. Everyone has their sentimental favourites that they follow closely regardless of their role, but the reality of the situation is that most wrestlers are seen by most fans based more through their role on the show than through any attributes they possess. For wrestling this is, frankly a good thing. Wrestlers turn heel/face all the time, and without the willingness of most of the crowd to be told the story, this would never work. Everyone would just cheer for who they liked. Instead, the majority cheer for who they are supposed to cheer for… with the exception of people like Captain Charisma, Christian Cage, who frankly is too damn good not to cheer.

Take John Cena, as an example. Now, you might be the biggest John Cena fan in the country, but if he’s got a nothing match against someone you know can’t wrestle, there is a pretty big chance that you will be less likely to watch that match than a bout between Cena and say…. Kurt Angle. Not only that, but say a heel turn happens – history suggests that you (and this is a general you, not a specific one, I’m talking fans in general here) will be quite happy to see Cena lose his matches and get his arse kicked up and down on every RAW from now until Summerslam.

Not exactly the same way a sports fan behaves is it? In fact, you could say it’s the opposite, because a change in the way a team plays (say they become really aggressive and like to break the rules) won’t drive away the hardcore fan, and even if it did, they certainly wouldn’t change allegiance and support the opposition. Just doesn’t happen amongst real sports fans.

Instead, with the few exceptions of people like Chris Benoit and many would argue Shawn Michaels, the way you follow a Wrestler seems to compare much more closely to the way you follow an actor: I’m not sure if it’s a great example of irony or not, but I’m going to use the Rock as an example now.

When the Rock is a good guy, you cheer him on and want him to win the title and yadda, yadda, yadda, you know the drill. When the Rock is a bad guy, you enjoy his work even though you ultimately want him to lose in the end, in much the same way that you watch a movie with an actor you enjoy playing the villain. To watch it any other way is stupid, because it undoes the plot – the author has the ability to TELL you who is the admirable character, worth cheering for, in a way that sportsmen can’t command. In wrestling, you cheer primarily only who you are told to cheer for, and it is a minority (although a growing one, I concede) that don’t follow the herd. Although if asked, most people in an audience would say that yes, they enjoy the matches of Chris Jericho more than those of John Cena, during their feud who got the cheers? Well, most of them. OK? Cena, wasn’t it?

It all boils down to this: Despite their natural athletic ability, and they do have that by the bucketful, professional wrestling is not an athletic contest – because it is not a contest. It is not a sport, and “sports entertainment” is a fallacy. Instead, it is another branch of the entertainment industry. Why then is wrestling considered lower, a more crass form of entertainment than others? That’s what I plan on looking at in the appraisal: part 2. Hope you’ll join me for that.

But I also hope you’ll join me for my next column, which will feature a defence of the YBTB championship, as Random Guy #5 defends against possibly his biggest challenge to date, new LOP main pager BC (and many congratulations to BC on his callup).

Also, don’t forget to get over to www.wrestlingfanshof.co.uk and nominate your favourite wrestlers for the spring induction.

Thanks for reading, take care.

Pt2









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