Why isn’t wrestling, as it is performed in schools and in the Olympics, a major professional sport like boxing is? I think the competition would be intriguing enough without all the dramatics.
Wrestling is a very interesting sport, but to be a popular spectator sport a sport needs to be either a popular participation sport, or it needs to be visually interesting.
Wrestling is a neat sport but not a lot of people do it, and it’s not very interesting for the casual fan to watch. Boxing is a visually impressive sport; I mean, guys are punching the hell out of each other, and it’s usually obvious to even the most casual fan which boxer is better. Wrestling, to the uneducated eye, is pretty dull. The techniques just don’t lend themselves to being a big spectacle.
I’d agree with this. I’ve only ever seen wrestling on television during the Olympics. I found it incomprehensible and therefore boring.
Indeed, and the best matches tend to be the least interesting ones to watch. Great matches involve a long, slow defensive struggle in which each wrestler struggles mainly to not make a mistake or allow his opponent an opportunity.
Mismatches however can have lots of scoring and be somewhat exciting to watch, if not particularly dramatic.
I’ve found that high school wrestling is much more exciting to watch than collegiate and collegiate moreso than Olympic.
It is, outside the US. It took me many years before I realized that Hulk Hogan wrestling was the only kind there was in the US. Long before that, I had wondered what word you used for “real” wrestling, since the word “wrestling” was busy.
One more detail, wrestling has many variations and different rules and scoring from level to level. This works to divorce the casual fan even more than it already does. I wrestled for about 6 years in school yet I really can’t claim to completely understand Olympic wrestling, both Greco-Roman and Freestyle.
I remember watching a documentary about professional wrestling. They tried traditional wrestling first, but after the match took several hours and bored everyone to tears, the “fake” version arose pretty quickly.
I have this memory of some Olympic wrestling champion on a talk show a couple of decades ago, debating someone from the professional wrestling milieu, trying to sell using the word “rassling” for pro wrestling so that the word “wrestling” could be left for the purists.
Amateur wrestling referee, and inept competitor, here.
Part of the problem is that the rules are difficult. In the US, we use a different rules system for colleges and high schools than the Olympics use. As a result, for example, my dad watched the Sydney Olympics after watching me in high school and wondered why Olympic wrestlers would “just get tired and lay down.” He didn’t understand that being put on the mat is a punishment for passivity, because in the American system, stalling gets a warning and then they start docking you points. Same thing with different moves having different point values in the American and international systems - in America, a takedown is a takedown is a takedown and it’s worth two points. Internationally, an American two-point takedown can be worth 1 or 3 points, or it could win the match outright (under the old rules, what is essentially a total victory throw was worth 5 points).
The fact that the international federation changes the rules regularly and completely doesn’t help, either - the sport is currently on a two-out-of-three-falls system where three two-minute mini-matches are wrestled. That’s great for novices and schoolboys, where one big mistake can end the match, but it’s an awful system for men and women competing at the highest levels.
It’s too directly connected with Greek naked activities.