Sadly, in real life, there’s never a turnbuckle around when you need one.
In my limited experience with fighting (witness to a handful, and part of a very few), for “regular” guys, the most important characteristic is willingness and ability to act quickly without holding back. If one guy hesitates, or isn’t willing to use his full strength immediately, then he’ll be very quickly overwhelmed by another who doesn’t hesitate and brings his full strength and effort to bear.
Professional wrestlers now are probably marginally less well prepared for a real fight than formerly, unless they have a legitimate background in folkstyle and/or catch wrestling. However, waaaay back in the day, Lou Thesz was one of the first professional champions, and he was selected because this was before TV (and PPV) and wrestlers had to tour the country doing exhibition matches, often against locals. Thesz would often be matched against some local with the understanding that they would put up a show for a while, and then the local would lay down.
The danger was that the local would get ideas above his station in life, and try to actually win. Thesz was a very good catch wrestler, and very well prepared to show who was at the top of the food chain if the local hero tried to put over a cross.
Going even further back, one of my sports heroes Yukio Tani was one of the first people to tour vaudeville doing jujitsu challenge matches against all comers, and rarely lost. That’s different from the current faked shows, but vaudeville is part of how the fakes originated. And Bad New Brown was a pro wrestler whose real name was Allen Coage, who was national judo champion and Olympic medalist.
I trained with a second- or third-tier level professional wrestler many years ago, and he was big, very strong, and had some legitimate grappling skills even before he started judo.
It can be done.
Regards,
Shodan
Here’s Austin Aries punching a “fan” in a tussle outside a venue. Maybe faked for the show but he looks like he can handle the drunken attack pretty well: Austin Aries Knocks out a fan after the ROH Show. - YouTube
There are numerous cases where fools decided to get in a fight with a pro-wrestler. There’s no doubt an unskilled fighter, or even lightly skilled fighter would be in trouble against a pro-wrestler, not to mention any other well trained athlete. What is in question here is how well they would fare against skilled well trained fighters. Most would hold their own quite well, but only a few could compete on the level of top MMA fighters. They certainly are capable of surviving in such situations, and a few have made a transition into MMA, but as mentioned earlier the accumulation of injuries seriously hampers many pro-wrestlers. MMA fighters have done much better working it the other way and moving into pro-wrestling because it pays better.
As others said above, it helps a lot, and some would argue that being able to survive a fall is probably the single biggest advantage they would have.
After all, there are actual martial arts systems (judo and wrestling, for two), which are essentially based on the notion of “make your opponent fall down so he hurts himself”. Knowing how to fall disrupts the second part of that plan.