I would think that professional wrestling sprang somewhat from the real sport of wrestling, with hucksters along the way making stuff up and making the sport fake. But who thought of the idea first, and how long as wrestling been around?
Could not this sport be made into something real, where two people go into a ring and beat the hell of out of each other, with fists, kicks, or even jumping the top rope. The man who lays on the mat for 10 seconds loses, or a pin by a victor for a three count. I have heard and seen tough man competions, why not do those? No chairs, sticks or foreign objects, a barroom fist and kick brawl.
Why do people watch wrestling if it is staged? That is the reason why I do not watch it.
Lastly, has there ever been a case of two wrestlers who really hated each other and were not play acting when they were beating the crap out of each other?
There are a few really good documentaries done on this recently, that explore all of your questions and more.
The first is called “Beyond The Mat”, adn the title of the other one escapes me at the moment, but it’s narrated by Steve Allan (I think). I know I saw it on A&E; perhaps their catalogue will list it.
The short answer is the Wrestling has almost always been “fake” or had predetermined outcomes. Except for a brief period at the begining of the 1900’s when it was a real sporting event, wrestling has always had a predetermined outcome.
The reason is because real wrestling is frightingly boring. Matches would last for hours with nothing but rest moves. No one wanted to watch it. I suppose you could jazz up the rules, and you’d end up with something like UFC, but that is exceedingly brutal, not many people would/do watch that.
Yes, occasionally wrestlers “shoot” or go at it for real. There are several accounts of if over the years, but usually if one wrestler starts that, the other gets the hell out of there. Why risk your livelyhood (injury) over someone elses grudge? In recent years there have been several fake shoot angles, where the wrestlers and promoters dropped hints that it was really “real” but was all still predetermined. General rule, if you see it on TV, it’s scripted.
As to why people watch scripted wrestling, ask yourself why people watch scripted television at all. It’s fun, they are often good storytellers, and the athletisism, while scripted, is certainly real.
Wrestling or ‘Catchen’ goes back till the 19th century at least, theTimeline (Link is in german sorry) of Genickbruch.com goes back to 1873 where the first documented case of a masked wrestler appears. Back in that days Wrestling wasn’t staged, or at least by far not as much as today.
For your interest in a more ‘real’ way of fighting, there are the various ultimate fighting leagues that indeed are pure shotfights like the UFC and Pride, especially with the early matches your urge for blood and injuries will be greatly statiated with them.
Back to wrestling, today most of the stuff is staged, but there have been a couple of famous incidents (shots) in the last years that were not staged at all. Again I can on spot only provide links in german.
I believe the first faked wrestling started with Ed “Strangler” Lewis. He was the wrestling champion and was so good no one could beat him. It was hard to get big money matches since no one figured he could lose. He figured out that he could make more money if he intentionally lost a match and then beat the guy in a rematch.
There are fights like you describe and are called Mixed Martial Art matches and they are very big in Japan. The problem with them is that they are so grueling and the risk of injury is so high that a fighter usually only fights a couple of times a year. The WWE sometimes runs 4 shows in a week.
The reason people watch wrestling even though it is fake is the same reason people watch ER even though the people on it are not doctors. The show is entertaining because of the athleticism, the charisma of the wrestlers and the storylines.
There have been isolated incidents where a wrestler gets mad and punches or kicks an opponent during a match. Ken Shamrock did it to Mr. Hughes a couple of years ago, Kevin Nash did it to Pierre Oulette a while ago. It is very rare because of the risk of injury and is considered unprofessional. Hardcore Holly and Brock Lesnar had an incident occur in a match recently and it ended up in a broken neck for Holly. If wrestlers have a beef with one another and want to fight they do it backstage. There are numerous examples of this with Savage vs Hogan being the most famous. Goldberg and Jericho have recently had a tussel backstage.
For a short time our local paper actually printed the “results” of local pro wrestling matches in the sports section. Maybe they did it in repsonse to requests from readers. This was back in the early 70’s.
I believe it was in the Pro Wrestling Torch newsletter where I read a good article on why it evolved into being “fixed.” In the early 1900s, wrestlers would go from town to town and fight. Things were exciting at first, but as the wrestlers learned each other’s styles, they learned what to gaurd against. This eventually lead to matches where they were just lying together on the ground gaurding against their opponent yet too cautious to make a strong offense. The crowds started dwindling, so they “fixed” that problem…
History repeated itself when the UFC first came around about ten years ago. The fights were brutal at first, but more and more of the contests ended up with both guys basically lying on the mat being too cautious to be aggressive. The UFC wisely chose to mix up the rules creatively so that this sort of thing could be prevented.
As for guys shooting on each other in the ring, it’s rare but it happens. It’s usually just a case of one of the guys being uncooperative or working stiff (as in hitting harder and using more force).
The then-WWF had a “Brawl For All” tournament a few years ago that featured real matches between the wrestlers that chose to participate. The results weren’t pretty. Savio Vega’s career was effectively ended due to an injury sustained in the tournament. The whole idea was to use the tournament to get Steve Williams over with the crowd, as he was thought by management to be a shoe-in to win. Imagine their surprise when mid-carder Bart Gunn tore him to shreds. Williams’ career in the WWF never recovered. Gunn later lost spectacularly to Butterbean in a real fight, thus killing his own WWF career.
And I’ll just repeat what others have said about why we watch it - the same reason we watch any fiction that we like. It’s entertaining. I don’t know why non-fans can’t understand that. (Maybe because they look at it like it’s supposed to be a sport and we look at it like it’s supposed to be a soap opera with testosterone?)
The Steve Allen one is called The Unreal Story of Professional Wrestling. I watched it on A&E this morning. According to this documentary, modern wrestling was “real” up until the Great Depression for the reasons Telemark outlined. It’s just boring. Until then, most matches went lasted anywhere from 30-90 minutes or more because the wresters were on the ground grappling with each other and unable to break each other’s holds effectively. Imagine having two or three matches in a row like that…your hind quarters would really be sore after a while and honestly, it’s not that fun to watch.
Eventually, wrestling fell out of favor with the public. Then television came along and it led to a renaissance of sorts with more emphasis on the spectacle than the technical wrestling ability of the wrestlers themselves. It became less about who was the better athlete and more about who the crowd liked or disliked. The classic “good guy vs. bad guy” archetype.
Why do people watch anything other than documentaries at the movies or on TV? Most film and TV are not real either. It’s fiction, and a lot of fiction is entertaining even though it’s not real.
For my husband and I, it’s all about the action. The matches may be pre determined, but most wrestlers are some of the best conditioned and athletic entertainers in the world. Most of them can take more punishment in three minutes than the average athlete can take over the course of a season, IMO. For example, off the top of my head, I can think of a few examples. Mick Foley, who wrestled as Mankind/Cactus Jack/Dude Love had an infamous “Hell in a Cell” (cage) match in which he was thrown off the top of a 20 foot steel cage onto the annoucer’s table beside the ring, dislocating his shoulder in the process and shooting a tooth up though his lip into his nostril. And then he went on to finish the match (correct me if I’m wrong here guys, been a long time since I’ve seen it). Anyway, he’s had hundreds of injuries in his career and he has half an ear because of a mishap with the ring ropes.
Triple H suffered a detached quad muscle during a match with Chris Jericho. The muscle actually detatched from the kneecap and rolled up like an old-fashined window blind as he described it. I remember watching this match as it happened live on TV. He was limping a bit, but I never suspected his injury was that serious. Anyway, he got back up and finished the match several minutes later. That resulted in major surgery and many months out of the ring for him.
Those are just two examples, but most of the top pro wrestlers in the WWE have had major injuries that required a siginificant amount of time off for recouperation.
So, even thought it’s staged, it doesn’t mean that the wrestlers aren’t putting their careers on the line each and every time they get into the ring. *
*[sub] Unless it’s HHH (lately) or Hogan or Big Show or Flair or…oh, nevermind…[/sub]