Pro Wrestling Deserves Your Respect

I love pro wrestling. I'll explain why you may love it too.

If I had a nickel for every odd look I've ever gotten upon admitting to be a fan of professional wrestling, I wouldn't have any money problems for the rest of my life.

People give me the look as if to say: "You're successful. You've got your degree. You're making $44 per hour. Why would you want to mix yourself up in that carney business?" They do not literally say these words, but much like modern dance recitals, or punk rock concerts, or Japanese anime shows, pro wrestling carries a stigma along with it that causes people to not like to admit that they're fans.

If you frequent modern dance recitals, you're a starving artist. If you indulge in the punk rock scene, you're a militantly self righteous DIY person who refuses to enjoy even one day in their life. If you spend your free time watching Japanese anime, you're surely hiding a waifu body pillow in your bedroom and are harbouring plans for a full time move to Japan.

These are all stereotypes that exist. I think in 2023 we can all acknowledge that stereotyping is a bad thing, but this does not stop it from also applying to professional wrestling.

I've been a sports fan my entire life. This is clearly evidenced by the existence of this blog, but I'm going to surprise you right now. Take a guess when I watched my very first NFL game. Surely by the level of depth included in my analyses, you'd figure I came out of the womb watching football right?

Wrong. I waited until 2013 to watch my very first NFL snap. That leaves years and years at the beginning of my life unaccounted for, but I've claimed to be a lifelong sports fan. Since you can clearly tell where this bit is going, I'm going to come out with it.

My fandom of professional sports began with professional wrestling.

That's right. I said sport. I've spoken with people who will go to their grave claiming wrestling is not a sport, but I beg to differ. They consistently parrot the same talking points over and over and over as their excuse not to respect professional wrestling, none of which I can sympathise with. In fact, I think these same talking points can apply in other disciplines that are without doubt considered to be sports. Why should pro wrestling be any different?

From here I have to go off on my first tangent, which will serve as the whole of my argument throughout this piece.

To be frank, WWE is not pro wrestling.

Pro wrestling is a sport, which features interviews and promo packages and interesting people and their stories, all in an attempt to get you to buy the right to watch them fight. This is no different than MMA, pro boxing, or any other professional combat sport from other parts of the world. Along the way, none of this is scripted, which is where WWE loses me.

They have loudly and openly claimed to the US government for years to not be pro wrestling, and to instead be 'sports entertainment'. Leaving aside that the NFL, NBA, etc. are all sports entertainment and this is not a phrase that means anything, they do it for a reason. Pro wrestling is a sport, and sports require regulation.

To this day, even after how far we've come, pro wrestling is regulated in certain US states. Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, etc. all have pro wrestling commissions that pro wrestling companies have to answer to when trying to put on a big show in Indianapolis, Louisville, Baltimore, etc.. Of course, WWE is not regulated, because they have sufficiently convinced their government that they are not pro wrestling.

Of course, what the truth is and what corporations say to get out of paying for regulation are two wildly different things. For example, my house has a nearby luxury trailer park (culture is different up here in Canada) that keeps eight overnight camping lots on the premises to convince the government that they are still a campground for tax purposes. This is clearly a luxury campground, regardless of what the government believes, so why do I go along with the US government's belief that WWE is not pro wrestling?

One word. Script.

Contrary to popular belief, nothing that happens on a pro wrestling show is scripted. As I mentioned before, they are sports programs featuring interviews and matches from people in an effort to get you to buy the big matches. Again, this is no different than any other combat sports TV show. The UFC television cards, small boxing promotions, and a pro wrestling TV show all serve the same purpose. They feature matches between (mostly) unimportant people looking to get noticed to fill the time in between interviews and/or promo packages featuring the real stars, whom you have to pay to see fight.

The WWE instantly lost the plot on this when they admitted to scripting their interviews. In my eyes, this is all it took for them to make the jump from a sports television show to a reality TV show about pro wrestling. Pessimists like me will tell you that there is likely an element of scripting in UFC interviews too, but they haven't been caught doing this, nor have they admitted it, so they'll skirt by for now.

Just keep this in your mind for the rest of this piece. The WWE is a reality television show about pro wrestling. It is not a pro wrestling TV show. From here, when I use the words 'pro wrestling,' it will not include WWE programming past their first use of the word 'script' (roughly 2003 or so).

Moving on.

What are the actual criticisms of pro wrestling as a sport? As a lifelong fan, I've heard the works, but I've never been able to understand many. Take this ride with me as I take you through some of the more common ones I've heard.

1) The fights aren't real

This is the first one all people jump to when they're looking to criticize pro wrestling. They think that just because the fights are not real that the whole presentation is invalidated, but let me pose a question: why do you think the fights aren't real?

Below are two pictures. I'd like you to compare them for me.

This is pro wrestler Ilja Dragunov, clearly wearing wounds of war.

This is boxer Floyd Mayweather following his match with Miguel Cotto, showing almost no signs of having been in there facing any opponent at all.

Can you tell me which of these men was just in a real fight again?

If you have a mental block against pro wrestling because the fights aren't real, I implore you to reconsider. In a 2017 interview, former pro wrestler and MMA fighter Ken Shamrock was asked which sport was tougher on his body. Without any hesitation the immediate reply comes: "pro wrestling." If Ken Shamrock (former UFC heavyweight champion) thinks that pro wrestling fights are harder on his body than MMA fights, then who are you or I to judge?

Quite frankly, I believe that people who think pro wrestling fights are fake have never even seen them in person. When I was a kid (like all wrestling fans), I would play wrestler with my friends in the backyard. This entailed giving and taking pro wrestling moves to see which were 'real,' as even when I was a kid this perception was already out there. As I quickly learned, all of these moves are very very real, and I was taking them on a surface much softer than a wrestling ring.

If you still think pro wrestling fights are fake, I implore you to take another look at Ilja up there. Look at those brutal welts from taking open handed strikes to his chest over and over and over again. Try to envision the pain shooting through his chest every time he tries to move.

That pain is not fake.

I implore you to look into who Ken Shamrock is. Perhaps as a visual aid, turn on an MMA fight. You can see an MMA fighter, and you can see how much pain they're in while they're fighting. As you're watching all of that pain build up in both combatants, keep in the back of your mind that according to Ken Shamrock (again, a former UFC champion, a man who ought to know) pro wrestling matches are even worse.

Once you've completed that exercise, I dare you to approach me, or any other pro wrestling fan, or any other pro wrestler, and tell me that the fights are fake. No different than any other sport, the broken bones are not fake. The torn ACLs are not fake. The surgeries are not fake. In terms of physicality, if pro wrestling is fake, then what is the NFL? Have you ever told an NFL player that the physicality in their game is fake?

I didn't think so.

2) The competition is fake

The genesis for the above point comes from this one. People hear that pro wrestling fights are fixed and automatically assume: "why would you have a real fight to lead up to a predetermined ending?" This is an incorrect assumption on many fronts, not all of which I care to address.

Quite simply, the answer to the question is because that's how fixed fights work.

The prevalence of the discrimination against pro wrestling from this exact angle is because the general (non-combat sport fan) public does not understand the prevalence of fixed fights in 'real' sports. Anybody who's ever seen Cinderella Man knows that fixed fights used to happen all the time. Anybody who's ever seen a suspiciously awful decision in the modern day knows that they still do happen all the time.

Believe me folks. Dana White and all the boxing promoters have their ways of ensuring that they get the winners they want. Fixed fights are dramatically more common than you believe. According to Dave Meltzer, an analyst at the forefront of the MMA scene at its beginning in the 90s, believes that "close to 80 percent" of all MMA fights were fixed in an effort to build stars and get the sport off the ground.

Fixing the fights to build stars. Does that sound familiar to anybody?

I'm trying very hard to make this a piece that builds pro wrestling up rather than tears other combat sports down, because I'm a combat sports fan. I watch MMA on the regular. I'm a big boxing guy. That's what qualifies me to tell you that if you consider those ‘sports’, then there is truly no precedent to exclude pro wrestling from the club of recognized ‘sports’.

As mentioned above, the US government considers pro wrestling a sport. What has that organisation ever accomplished?

There is one more point to make here, and it will again use the UFC as a basis for comparison. The point is that there is competition in pro wrestling. You're just looking in the wrong place for it.

Much like MMA, wrestling is both a sport and an art simultaneously. As such, in these two sports in particular, people are worried as much about the art form as the sport.

On NFL shows, people don't talk about how entertaining the game was, because it doesn't matter. People care which side won, and which side lost, and that's really it. On an MMA or wrestling show, the entertainment value of the fight is talked about just as much as the outcome, because these are art forms that also happen to be sports.

Don't believe me? Watch this clip of UFC fighter Brandon Royval literally breaking into tears because he didn't believe his fight was entertaining enough to earn himself a bonus.

Right. Did I mention the UFC gives out bonuses for entertaining fights?

Just like MMA fighters, pro wrestlers compete with each other to have the most entertaining fight of the night, because when they do they'll move up the card, and when they do that they'll make more money. Be it MMA, boxing, wrestling, or a back alley fight club, fans want to see entertaining fighters. If fans don't want to see you, you'll never become champion, even if you’re undefeated, because you'll never be given a chance by the promotion to fight for it. This is true in all combat sports.

As a result, there is competition in pro wrestling. The fans are the judges of who gave the prettiest looking performance. In this way, wrestling is no different than MMA, or even figure skating, diving, or any other visual sport where looking pretty is the key.

3) It's too melodramatic

This is the best criticism so far in terms of accuracy, because wrestling is melodramatic. However, it's no more melodramatic than any Netflix shows, movies, or interpersonal dramas going on in the world around it.

Wrestling more than any sport (aside from possibly competitive dancing) is a product of the society surrounding it. Due to the structure of the sport, wrestling has the opportunity to pander to any audience it likes. It has the luxury of being able to change with the times. As a result, in the aftermath of the pandemic, when the popularity of all sports was cratering, pro wrestling was actually seeing a slight upward shift in popularity.

If you dislike melodramatic (or as I've heard it called, soap opera) wrestling, then I suspect you also dislike almost all modern movies, TV shows, and culture in general. In 2023, it's a melodramatic world out there. Wrestling is melodramatic because the people involved are melodramatic, and if society goes in a different direction that will change.

Allow me to give you an example.

In the Reagan era 1980s, people wanted to cheer for perfect humans. They wanted superheroes with no weaknesses. That's what the North American public could get behind. Coincidentally, watch an interview clip from a wrestling show in 1988.

This is a man that's upset that his friend chose money over him, but it doesn't get him down, because he's Hulk Hogan, and nothing can get him down. There is no grudge here. He's fighting his former friend Andre the Giant because he deserves punishment from a moral standpoint, much like a movie from this era. The villain does something morally reprehensible, and the hero sets out to punish him for it, without malice, and without any consternation.

Skip ahead to 1995, the grunge movement has swept through North American culture, and now people want their heroes to have problems just like they do. The age of the super hero in wrestling is gone. Unlike the 80s, people now want to relate to their heroes. From this point of view I present to you Cactus Jack:

This is a man expressing extreme regret at turning down a higher paying job at a bigger promotion because of his hatred of that place, and going back to the small time, much like a modern MMA fighter turning down a UFC contract to go be the top guy at Bellator or an NFL player requesting a trade and ending up in Jacksonville, and begging his friend (Tommy Dreamer) not to make the same mistake because the fans that supposedly love you so much will turn on you in a heartbeat.

This is clearly not a flawless man in the mold of Hulk Hogan, but much more of a star of the early 90s allowing his regret to eat him up, much in the way the youth in the aftermath of the 80s drug boom did. This much more relatable form of speaking to the public transitioned into becoming the man everybody wanted to be. The late 90s was the height of anti-establishment thinking (with generation X and smashing things and all that), and to go along with that, I present to you Steve Austin.

In just one and a half minutes, Steve disrespects the bible. He disrespects a wrestling legend being carried out of the ring. He disrespects the tournament he's just won, and he disrespects the WWF world champion. This style of human being able to be seen as the good guy is confined to a very specific time period, but boy did it work in the late 1990s. Never before or since had such blatant disrespect been a bigger rallying point in society than it was at this very time, and Steve Austin was there to reap the benefits of the mountains of fan support his disrespectful personality gained him.

Undeniably, Steve Austin would never work today. You just can't disrespect your opponents so blatantly and obviously with modern sensibilities being what they are, and still expect people to cheer for you. In order to get that reaction today, you have to be much more of a kind and caring human. More than ever before it's okay to show lack of belief in yourself, as long as you commit to keep trying. Never is this better evidenced than in this 2021 CM Punk interview.

In this clip, Punk (nearing the end of his career) is talking to the world about he and MJF's (Maxwell Jacob Friedman) rivalry. All the while he's detailing all the bad things he's done in his career and wondering aloud whether he or Max is truly the bad person. In the end he's trying to be a good guy, but can't conclusively tell himself that he is.

This type of morally ambiguous thinking is very characteristic of the modern world where people are forced to constantly self reflect due to social media and incessant background checking forcing people to think about their current and past selves all the time. Much more than at any other time in history.

The key point here is there is nothing fake about any of this. I'll repeat there are no scripts for wrestling interviews. These are all just people that are products of their times. Hulk Hogan is too perfect to work in 2023. Nobody would relate to him. Steve Austin is too disrespectful to work in either the 80s or the 2020s. Punk's wavering self image wouldn't make people cheer him in 1996, but it does now. Cactus Jack was speaking to a disenfranchised subculture that ceased to exist for much longer.

Nothing was scripted or fake about any of these moments I've just shown you. These are just people that are products of their time in history. The very interesting part about wrestling is that I could likely tell you your date of birth based solely on which of these segments entertained you the most.

After viewing these four segments, which fight did you most want to see? Did you want to see Hulk Hogan punish Andre for taking the money? Did you want to see Cactus Jack beat some sense into Tommy Dreamer? Did you want to see Steve Austin complete his quest to be world champion so he can flaunt it like you know he would? Or did you want to see Punk vs MJF in the battle of the bad guys?

I guarantee at least one of these fights intrigued you. I know this because these are some of the greatest wrestling segments of all time. Even if they didn't, then perhaps pick one from a time that's more your speed. I guarantee wrestling will have suited you at some point.

In conclusion, if you don't like today's 'melodramatic' wrestling, give it a few years. The people in it will change as culture changes, and people will continue getting mad at each other for different reasons. Eventually, you will find a story between two people that hooks you.

4) Lack of Realism

The fourth and final criticism that most often comes up is that pro wrestling is not realistic. In response to that I ask you this: How do you know what's realistic in a sport you don't watch? I once saw a bull rider stay for five full seconds on the back of a bull that was being particularly nasty. I thought it was the best thing I'd ever seen.

That is until I realized that you have to stay on for eight seconds to even qualify for a score.

Once you realize what is and isn't realistic, then your perspective on realism begins to change. For example, a commonly cited issue people have with pro wrestling is that the athletes are sent out there to give speeches with no interviewer. Even in the four legendary clips I've just shown you, two did not feature an interviewer. People claim this to be unrealistic and that it would never happen on a sports program.

I don't believe this to be the case, because wrestling has a different interview culture than other sports. In all other sports, the interviewer will dictate what is spoken about, and how long the interview will go. In wrestling, a wrestler will go out on their own with instructions from the promotion not to swear and to speak about their opponent for however much TV time they have available. Sometimes it's 37 seconds. Sometimes it's six minutes. No different than hockey or football or whatever sport you'd like, the length of your interview depends on how charismatic of a human you are.

If you just think about it for a few seconds, this setup is not all that different from the traditional interviewer setup. If they cuss or wander off topic, the TV cameras cut away. The promotion will fill their time with replays or promo packages or whatever they have on tap, just like if an interview with an interviewer goes off the rails.

Wrestling segments do take a little while to get used to, but once you realize the way it's done, it's really no different than a traditional interview. Anybody commenting on the lack of realism in wrestling talking segments has no basis in my eyes. Where they do have something of a point is in the wrestling matches themselves.

I'll put it to you straight. If you're watching a wrestling match that doesn't look realistic, you're watching a bad wrestling match. As I've said before, nothing in wrestling is scripted, so if anything looks planned, then it's bad. That is definitional.

I must admit that there is a prevalence of this in modern wrestling, which is the reason why many people have given up and stopped watching, but there is still some good stuff out there.

There are still wrestlers you can watch and expect a fight. In specific I'll mention Gunther (formerly WALTER) in the WWE. His wars with the above mentioned Ilja Dragunov are legendary and I highly recommend you go out of your way to watch them. Non-WWE options include people like Samoa Joe, CM Punk, Darby Allin, MJF, and even women like Deonna Purrazzo.

In short, wrestling is never going to fool a trained fighter into believing in its realism, but it can certainly fool you and I into losing ourselves in the matches. It doesn't do it nearly enough for my tastes these days, but it can still do it.

5) Conclusions and recommendations

Now that the four main criticisms (no real fights. No real competition. Too melodramatic. Not realistic) of pro wrestling have been debunked, I believe that I (on behalf of all pro wrestling fans and athletes out there) have at least earned some of your respect back for this sport.

We've gone over how wrestlers are athletes who are also interesting people who come up through the ranks because they're topical and trendy and people like them. They use their popularity to try to sell their big fights, like people in pro sports do. These fights are not fake, and not choreographed. They are indeed fixed fights, but that's never stopped anybody from watching an MMA event.

In closing, if you want to see interesting people who are also pro athletes with huge egos (which is why they're perpetually mad at each other. Put a camera in a football locker room every week and surely you'll see some pro wrestling style six month feuds go on) fighting each other, there is no better spot to come than pro wrestling. It has its niche, and there are millions of people around the world who watch wrestling every week.

I know WWE is trying to run its brand of non-wrestling wrestling into the ground, but there are and will always be smaller promotions out there doing good wrestling shows that are worth your time to watch. Just like in any other sport, there are great athletes doing never before seen things out there, if you'd only seek them out.

I've never been one to be an advertiser, but just recently has come along North American pro wrestling's greatest hope in a while. Its name is All Elite Wrestling.

Like any smaller promotion in any sport, this promotion features tons of bad stuff. However, it does do one great weekly show titled 'AEW Collision'. If you're looking to give wrestling any kind of a chance, and are tired of the childish WWE presentation, I highly recommend to start here. It eschews most of modern wrestling's silliness in favour of a much more grounded and real feeling presentation, designed for the 2023 sports fan.

If you've already given up on pro wrestling due to some past indiscretion it's inflicted upon you, I feel your pain. I gave up on watching it too, but now that it's in much better shape, I came back. This is no different than giving up on an awful 4-12 football team, and coming back once they're playoff calibre. Try it. Try out Collision. Try out Japanese wrestling if you want a less sensationalized bend on wrestling that isn't catered to an American audience.

If all of this has left any impression on you, please give pro wrestling some respect. There's great people both involved in it and involved in watching it. No other pro sport on Earth has the same stigma associated with watching than wrestling does, and it doesn't deserve the stigma it gets. If you perhaps know any fans, let them know it's okay to enjoy one of their favourite sports. It's not a trashy sport for trashy people. It's in fact a very entertaining sport for people that perhaps enjoy a bit of dramaticism.

It's not a lie to admit that pro wrestling has heavily influenced my storytelling style on here, and I'm very confident in saying that if you enjoy my articles you will enjoy wrestling. It's no coincidence that everything that is written about on this blog has a compelling tale behind it. I don't have that discerning of an eye for good stories. No better than yours. I've just learned how to present them in a way that (hopefully) causes you to care about a party involved.

If indeed I have learned that skill, I've learned it from pro wrestling, and it deserves your respect.

Thank you for reading.