In defense of professional wrestling - long

The BBQ Pit
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In response to this thread.

First, if you wish to pour bleach into your eyeballs, let me the first to offer you a fresh bottle.

When I logged on today, I was actually hoping to find a wrestling thread, given the news about Chris Benoit which broke this week.

God knows why. I should have known it would mostly be people screaming, “but it’s FAAAAKE!!!”

Look, we fucking know it’s fake.

Do you sleep more soundly after watching CSI, knowing that Grissom has put another bad guy behind bars? Of course you don’t- you know it’s fake (feel free to replace CSI with the TV show of your choice). And yet you watch.

Why? Why the fuck do you watch it? You already know what’s going to happen. We’re only halfway through the season; of course character X can’t die yet. Why watch a movie? They’re generally blatantly unrealistic. How come none of the aliens in Independence Day noticed that the fighter that just docked with Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum on board had been missing for 40 years? Perhaps they were wrestling fans, and thus too low on the evolutionary scale to catch details like that. The willing suspension of disbelief works with wrestling just as with any other quasi-realistic art form. Deep down inside I know that muscular blond guy doesn’t REALLY want to hurt the slightly less muscular dark-haired guy… but he says he does, and he does a pretty good job of making it appear as though he is, so what the hell, I’ll play along for the next ten minutes.

I surmise from your name that you’re a hockey fan. Why? It’s mostly fighting anyway; wrestling should be right up your alley. Why the fuck are you poking fun at wrestling, when you happily watch an hour of grown men on goddamn ice skates?

Of course, wrestling is lowbrow. It appeals to the lowest common denominator, right? Inbred types and knuckle-draggers all.

Screw you, budday. When I was in college, I went to frat parties, even though I knew damn well that a) they were predictable, and b) they’d be full of morons. Why’d I go? Because they were fun. For a couple of hours a week, it was enjoyable to chug beers, make monkey noises, and try to get laid. Actually, I was always trying to get laid… it was just easier at frat parties.

But I digress. You freely admit that you can’t/won’t watch more than three seconds of it. I would venture to suggest that said admission would be a good reason not to offer an opinion upon the topic. How can you judge something you know nothing about?

Those of us that do watch will tell you that the point is precisely that you DON’T know what’s going to happen, even if it’s scripted. Sure, I can predict the outcomes of perhaps 80% of the matches on a given telecast. What makes it entertaining is the 20% I predict wrongly, and wondering if this match is the one with the twist. Hell, I predicted 75% of NFL games correctly last season; I should stop watching, I guess.

Does that piledriver really hurt? Not much, but it looks cool, and I know from experience how difficult it is to do it correctly. Plus, some of it really does hurt. You try falling six feet onto anything harder than a bed, and tell me how it feels.

Wrestlers gain fan support in several ways. The easiest is being funny. Worked like a charm for The Rock and others. If you’d been watching him in his prime, you’d have laughed too. Smackdown Hotel was one of the ten funniest things I’ve ever seen. Same goes for The Rock and Mankind doing “This is Your Life”. Other wrestlers just wrestle well. Yes, there really is a difference. Hulk Hogan’s wrestling style is genuinely boring; basically, a lot of punchkick with the occasional bodyslam.

The top workers, on the other hand (workers=wrestlers, in the sense of actually wrestling) can be awesome to watch, if you give them a chance. Casual fans never liked Chris Benoit, because he a) wasn’t funny, and b) was generally just not a sympathetic character. People just don’t like Canadians, I guess. Still, those who appreciate such things will all tell you that he was one of the top five in-ring talents of the last twenty years. Inasmuch as these things are quantifiable, I could rank wrestlers by in-ring talent as easily as ESPN ranks shortstops.

Anyway, all this is a meandering way of getting to my main point, which is as follows:
Yes, wrestling can be simple and predictable. It doesn’t have to be. You can enjoy great things on multiple levels- a movie on, say, both plot and number of cool explosions. Wrestling can be enjoyed the same way- lots of yelling and cool entrances for the kids; lots of tits for the males aged 21-34; wrestling, the actual in-ring performance, for anyone who stops to appreciate it. Just because you haven’t found your ring at the circus doesn’t mean there isn’t one for you. But don’t you fucking dare to take shots at those who have- there isn’t an interest in your life that isn’t indescribably lame on some level; just because ours happens to be an easy target, you’re not impressing anyone when you take a shot at it. So fuck off.

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:applauds:

By the by, I always liked that Mick Foley (aka Mankind) titled his second book Foley is Good (And the Real World is Faker Than Professional Wrestling).

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This is what drives the mockery. You’re comparing professional wrestling to MLB, the NFL and NHL. Don’t do that. Professional wrestling is a bastardization of what sports are all about.

The WWE is basically nothing but failed athletes who can’t cut it in any real sport roiding up to preen, pose and play make-believe for an audience of teenage boys.

Pro wrestling is the Keanu Reeves to any real sport’s Chuck Norris.

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So…you’re saying pro wrestling is the retard to any real sport’s other retard? Sorry, maybe different comparisons would have made it clearer to me.

To me, it’s not that wrestling’s “fake” that makes it worthy of mockery; it’s the fact that it’s so goddamned moronic. Sure, you can say “there isn’t an interest in your life that isn’t indescribably lame on some level”, but there ain’t a whole lot of things that are so blatantly indescribably lame (horrible “acting” and “storylines”; anachronistic macho bullshit from the screaming threats to the frat-rat-level t&a), and that use that lameness as a selling point. Aside from Andrew Lloyd Weber, I mean.

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Professional Wrestling is a theatrical art that doesn’t appeal to everyone. That doesn’t mean it’s a failure.

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I think you’re missing an important point. You might as well scoff at Cirque du Solei because it’s not a real sport.

That would be naive. They’re excellent athletes. No, what they do is not a sport. But it’s an impressive-as-hell performance.

Maybe you’ve only tuned in for a few seconds and saw muscular people posturing. It’s much more than that though. These guys have to pull off some pretty amazing and dangerous stunts every night in front of live audiences.

Think “athletic performance.” If the style isn’t your thing, don’t watch.

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Really, sorry to say, even though I agree with you 100%, you’re wasting your time. There is such a widespread misunderstanding of wrestling, and prejudice against rasslin’, that you just won’t change the majority’s point of view. I don’t know if they’re still reeling from discovering that the Tooth Fairy isn’t real, but they have that snotty belief that if they know the ‘truth’ about wrestling, that makes you a moron for not knowing it.

And you know what - that’s fine, because some things aren’t for everyone. To be brutally honest, I’m not sure I want something I enjoy to be appreciated by a person who is such an aesthete that they believe that a mocking comparison between Keanu Reaves and Chuck Norris is deemed pertinent, witty and worthwhile.

I actually don’t compare wrestling to movies or TV shows - most of which involve the actors putting their bodies through absolutely NOTHING. It’s more like going to see a ballet, and then bitching about the dancing, because the dancers have a team of choreographers and composers who have plotted their moves. I love ballet, and I love wrestling, because they’re both extreme examples of human movement, of turning physicality into something that has not been conceived of before, and of performers putting their muscles and sinews and organs on the line for their art.

I guess the world’s full of fundamentalists who get bent out of shape if someone gets their kicks from something ‘unapproved’ or ‘lowbrow’ or whatever. That crack in the other thread - some turkey putting a person down for liking wrestling and Queensryche - shit, man, I thought we were adults, and were mature enough to realise that fun is hard to find in this world, and when you find somethat that makes you smile, anyone who wants to stomp on that is just an arsehole. Fuck 'em. I bet they still think that the ‘Beatles vs Stones’ debate is worth raising their fists over.

So like I said, Really … give it up. It’s a losing battle.

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Chuck Norris was a champion professional…uh…martial artist? Fighter? Whatever you call it. Keanu Reeves pretended to be a martial arts master in the Matrix movies. Does that clear it up for you? Their intelligence had nothing to do with my analogy. (I agree with the rest of your post, btw.)

I would if Cirque du Solei fans compared it to actual sports. But I’ve never in my life heard anyone make that comparison. The OP, on the other hand, compared professional wrestling to actual sports. Thus the mockery. If he instead compared professional wrestling to Cirque du Solei, then I’d have no beef with his rant.

I would point out that simply putting your body on the line for a grueling and/or dangerous performance intended to engage and entertain an audience is NOT in and of itself an admirable thing. Look at David Blaine, for example.

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…maybe you should re-read the OP? He compared the enjoyment wrestling fans get from watching wrestling to the enjoyment other fans get from watching television drama’s or sports events.

You chose to drag out three statements and quoted them out of context to create an arguement that nobody is trying to make. I suspect that you have done that because arguing the point that Really Not All That Bright actually made: “that Wrestling Fans like watching wrestling because we really like to watch wrestling, and that something you enjoy, when compared to wrestling, can look quite silly as well”, is something that is really hard to argue with unless you start creating your own debating points out of thin air.

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Actually, it’s mostly full of people looking at the OP, and the other people screaming ‘but it’s fake!’ and replying ‘yes, we know, so what?’

And getting ‘it’s FAKE!’ as a response.

It’s really a pointless argument.

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No more than sports movies are bastardizations of what sports are all about, those are all fake and scripted too.

Pro Wrestling is not a competitive sport, it is a sport themed performance. All the fans know* it’s a performance, so I don’t understand the need to remind them that it’s “fake”. For a time, maybe 30+ years ago, the industry maintained that it was all real, but those days are long gone.

*Maybe little kids think it’s real, but they don’t count. One little kid last night asked my wife during a backstage tour if Gaston stabs The Beast with a real knife, he needed to be reminded that Musicals are not real, as if the living Candelabra wasn’t clue enough.

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Professional Wrestling: costumes, choreography and a high degree of athleticism. It’s like figure skating or gymnastics. Why shoudn’t it be a sport?

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Because it’s non-competitive?

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I agree, it’s an athletic endeavor, but not a sport. To be honest I like Sports Illustrated’s definition of sport. They define sport as “an athletic competition in which defense is employed.” Which discounts things like competitive swimming and track and field as sports, because while they are definitely competitive, the contestants aren’t really competing against one another directly.

I think it’s important to make the distinction between athletic competitions and sports, none is “more valid” than the other, but an athletic competition is more about seeing who can perform the greatest feat, a sport is about beating the other team or the other contestant directly.

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Of course it’s competitive, it’s just that this weeks performance is what determines your standing in next week’s event. The outcome of today’s event is preordained, everybody knows that, but how well you perform is judged by the WWE folks to decide how you will do in the next competition. What, you think they toss a coin to decide who wins?

Having a popular persona and wrestling style is very competitive, there’s always someone trying to move up a notch.

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Now, if someone was going to judge the individual matches for quality of performance, and designate a winner (from all the matches that day), THEN it would be a sport/athletic competition. How good was the suplex? Did he hold vertical long enough? Did they strike the mat at the same time? Extra points for the “out of the ring full backflip with a twist crash into the scorer’s table” move.

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Well, the WWE roster is chock-full of NCAA amateur champions, non-failed athletes from other sports (there are two former FSU football players whose numbers were retired; one is Deion Sanders, and the other is on the WWE roster right now- you figure it out), not to mention former MMA champions. Unless, of course, you don’t count MMA either, because it’s kind of like wrestling, and wrestling is FAAAKE?

Professional wrestling is hardly a bastardization of sport; it’s a representation of a fictional sport. Did you watch Major League and complain that it bastardized baseball? It was scripted too.

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Pro Wrestling is like the worst combination of musicals, soap operas, and mob movies – unlikable characters, plots that take waaaaay too long to resolve, and a central conceit that is so unbelievable and artificial it is painful to watch.

That said, the only real leg for others to criticize it on is its glorification of violence, and there are plenty of other media that do this as well.

On the other hand, I’d bet there are plenty of pro wrestling fans that would make fun of anyone who likes ballet despite the fact that it also requires heaps of athleticism.

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Also Warrick Dunn, Fred Biletnikoff, Ron Sellers, Charlie Ward, Chris Weinke.

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I agree with the OP completely. I grew up watching wrestling with my dad and grandpa and have a lot of fond memories about it. But even as a kid I knew it was all fake, even when my own grandpa argued otherwise. I watched it quite a bit until a few years agon when the WCW broke up, and catch one every now and then anymore. That being said, the way I describe it is that it’s like a soap opera for men (and some women, my wife still likes Sting). If you can just watch it for the sheer entertainment value of it, then go ahead and watch it. If you can’t watch it because you think it’s too cheesy and badly acted, then change the channel, there’s plenty of other stuff out there to watch. I think it’s just something that too many people get in an uproar about. Sheesh, simmer down people, if we all liked exactly the same things, this world would be a pretty boring place indeed.

just my two cents