People here have compared wrestling to Lost or CSI or Die Hard. I have never met anyone who considered any of those real. I have met several people over the years that thought wrestling was real. :rolleyes: So I won’t buy the everyone knows it’s fake argument. Most or some, but not everyone.
As far as the story lines go, from the very small amount of time I have watched, they are nothing more than a soap opera. Soap, pure and simple. Soap operas for rednecks. Not my cup of tea. I don’t like Days of our Lives, so guess what, I don’t like wrestling.
If you do, fine, but don’t expect me to be at all interested in tomorrow’s cage match.
And more to the point, it’s bad in the same way soap operas are bad. The writing is awful and the acting is terrible. I look at wrestling fans the same way I look at people who enjoy shitty movies and television shows. Nobody here would hesitate to criticize a bad movie, play, or TV show, yet when wrestling is critiqued, everyone acts like it’s unfair. If there was another TV show as bad a WWE that was on several times a week, it would be just as deserving of the scorn people have for it.
When you say wrestling is crap, that’s you giving your opinion. Hell, for the most part, I agree - there’s little I still like to watch, but there are some things that come up I enjoy (such as Melina entering the ring, but I digress…) However, when you (global you) say wrestling is crap and the viewers are idiots because they don’t know its fake, you’re making personal insults and people, including me, will take umbrage at that.
ETA: Say LotR or Buffy is crap, and you’ll get an even larger backlash.
Some people believe that no plane hit the Pentagon. Says more about the company you keep.
Likewise, don’t expect me to care about the AI or Survivor winner, or whether Paris and/or Britney are in jail or not. Different interests all around.
Which suggests that the rest of the year, it’s not reported as fake. Unless I’m missing the point here.
Yeah, but when F. Murray Abraham is listed in the newspaper and they mention he has an Academy Award for Best Actor, they don’t imply he won the award for writing “Veni Sancte Spiritus” in B Flat Major. The award actually says actor on it.
When they say that so-and-so won the Wrestling Heavyweight Championship Title, the very name of the award implies that he achieved the award by wrestling. He didn’t — and I think that’s deceptive. That’s okay within the context of wrestling itself, but I don’t think other news media need to be complicit in that deception. As a news consumer, I’m not asking for entertaining lies. I’m asking for entertaining truths.
The rest of the year, it isn’t reported at all. At least, not in any national news outlet nor the NYC local outlets.
Technically, he did win the award for professional wrestling. The winning of the match may have been forecast, but the path that was taken to get there wasn’t. Professional wrestlers have to earn it. Now, I will give you that the gold medal professional wrestler Kurt Angle won in the Olympics for amateur wrestling is very different from the World Championships he won, in that the former was a true one-on-one competition, while the latter was a steady climb where he earned the right to be the face of WWE.
Wrestling produces slightly better TV ratings than the food prep area at your Wendy’s would, had it been televised.
I have a friend who used to be a part-time wrestler in a local promotion called Southern Championship Wrestling. Now he works for the county election board. When he dies, I don’t think “SCW Tag Team Champion” is going to appear in his obituary either.
On the other hand, I would suggest that Dave Thomas’ obituary probably made a passing mention of burgers.
No body knows their audience better than the wresling promoters. They give them exactly what they want. It changes with time and follows trends very well. During Iraq 1 they had an Iraqi wrestler to hate just in time.
Kaufman regognized what the audience was and tweaked them. He knew how to make them react and did a great job of it. The audience may not always know how well it being pandered to but it works great.
There is no appeal to intelligence. It is emotional. They want people to get upset and mad . They do right on cue.
I don’t watch wrestling, but the condescension in this and the parent thread is frustrating. Whether you are a fan or a hater, the wrestlers’ on-stage personas and over the top storylines are a marketing wet dream. Here are some stats for the snobs:
The Broadway musical Cats grossed an estimated 350 million dollars after playing for 21 years.
Yeah, the snobs are really going to be inpressed by the update that wrestling is more profitable than Broadway, seeing as how snobs always corrolate artistic merit to profitability. :rolleyes:
Look, many of you have to come to grips with what this thread is. Stop being fucking martyrs about how picked on you are. This thread was opened in the pit to fight about the merits of professional wrestling. That’s exactly what the detractors (like me) are doing. I’ve never once threadshitted in any CS wrestling thread; hell, I’ve never even read one of them, much less posted to one. If people do that, then your martyr act will have some traction. Pulling that “woe is me” crap here is a bullshit tactic.
The vast majority of college athletes – even the ones who win national championships – are failed athletes because they weren’t good enough to turn pro. Just like the vast majority of highschool athletes (even on teams that win state championships) are failed athletes because they weren’t good enough to make it on a college team.
Don’t name Deion fucking Sanders as an example by proxy of how successful pro wrestlers are as athletes. What, did Deion’s success leach onto them by osmosis?
I defy either of you to name a single successful pro athlete in pro wrestling. A guy who played on an NCAA team who wasn’t good enough to get drafted or become an undrafted free agent is pretty much the exact opposite of a “successful” athlete.
Another way to go would be to name a pro wrestler who made a successful transition to a real sport. Brock Lesnar is probably the closest one, and he was a complete bust in the world of real sports.
As for Michael Jordan, anybody will tell you that he was, in fact, a failed baseball player. He was a successful basketball player, though, so he wouldn’t qualify as a failed athlete. Wrestlers aren’t good enough to crack the lineup in any sport, so as I said before they roid up and play make believe in the WWE.
In defense of pro wrestlers, someone rattled off a list of various (non-wrestling) accomplishments. You forgot “Governor of Minnesota.” Regardless of what you think of his time in office, Jesse “The Mind” Ventura did indeed get elected to be friggin’ governor.
I’ve met people who thought that soap operas were real and they hated the characters who behaved badly, to the point of sending hate mail to the characters, not the actors. There are people who really believe that magicians are actually tapping into something spiritual when they make someone disappear. It’s not a large percentage of the total audience, but they exist. There are many magicians who keep the “act” going long after they are off the stage.
The acting and writing in pro wrestling is over the top and exaggerated because those are the rules of the genre. Do you complain about the exaggerated gestures in old silent movies or Kabuki theater? No, they are the accepted conventions of the genre. Also, the wrestlers are playing to large stadium with thousands of people in the seats; subtle gestures don’t go over well.
I haven’t watched wresting in many years, but I appreciate what these guys and gals do and the genre as it’s own form of entertainment. Part of the entertainment is the way they play with the line between what is real and what is fake. 99% of the audience knows it, and the other 1% is under 10 years old or exceptionally dim. It’s like watching a magic show; you know he’s fooling you but it’s exciting, interesting, takes skill and training, and there are nice looking bodies all around to distract you.
Not an inclusive list, as I can think of at least two others off the top of my head.
Ken Shamrock, Steve Blackman, and Tank (something) moved from Ultimate Fighting to wrestling, but none really went far as wrestlers also need a personality, which all 3 lacked.
Marc Mero was a 3-time Gold Glove winner.
NCAA wrestling lacks a professional league to graduate into. There are quite a few NCAA wrestling champions and standouts - some of them have even shown personalities!
Due to its scripted and cooperative nature, wrestling is a good fit for athletes, usually football, after suffering an injury that precludes them from continuing in a purely competitive sport. Wrestlers will work around legit injuries. Bill Goldberg in interviews has said (and I’m paraphrasing from years back) that he’s wrestled with injuries that would end an NFL career.
Were you hoping nobody would actually read the article, or something?
A guy who hadn’t played organised football since high school almost made the Vikings roster, despite nursing a moderate groin injury throughout camp, and you call him a complete bust?
You know, I heard Steve McMichael was a pretty good lineman for the Bears back in the day… even went to a few Pro Bowls, they say. But wait, he went on to be a pro wrestler, so he can’t have been an actual athlete, right? He probably just roided up or something.
I read all the articles. What immediately strikes me is the way the wrestling dramas are recounted as factual, which gets a big :dubious: from me. I realize Wiki isn’t the last word in . . . well, anything, but it is ostensibly factual.
Again, it’s the completely credulous way – apparently credulous way – that all this stuff is taken at face value as “real” that really strikes me and ultimately escapes me.
Bill Goldberg’s injuries DID end his NFL career: he was forced to retire from football because of a torn abdominal muscle.
The Rock lost his starting spot at Miami because of a shoulder injury, to Warren Sapp, of all people. Rocky never sniffed the field again, for obvious reasons, and thus went undrafted.
