Introduction

So called "professional sports" have never been interesting to me ("team spirit"), but pro-wrestling has intrigued me for as long as I can remember. I never cared about competition, I just wanted to watch something interesting, and to a young child who believed in the drama of the WWF, ECW and WCW, that fulfilled the desire.

I've been hearing it for as long as I can remember: "Wrestling is fake durrrr." Scripted, fixed, and choreographed, absolutely. To say it's fake is pointedly ignorant and offensive if I took it personally. I ask these same people, "Do you know the Simpsons are just drawings and not an actual family?" I'm well aware that the Undertaker isn't actually the living dead or that Sgt. Slaughter wasn't really a GI Joe and that they're not really punching each other (unless it's Terry Funk) and that the winner is known before the matches. The most shocking thing to learn about wrestling as a child, though, is that these guys don't really hate each other or want to do harm, it's just fictional conflict, like any novel or movie. That's all the show is really, just a theatrical play with the setting a wrestling league. But so many naysay and brush it off with these 3 idiotic words. Now I realize they feel the need to point out the obvious to quiet their own insecurities of being complete phonies or feel smarter by saying what everyone knows because it's "cool" somehow. It's called "using your imagination" as you do with any good story, you get lost in it and allow it to be real in your head. That's what makes it fun and interesting. How can you call what someone does "fake" when they spend 300 days a year in a ring pushing their physicality to the limit in precise motions integrated with various forms of bodily harm? Their business is filled with more blood, sweat, tears, broken bones, torn muscles, and concussions than you could imagine, coupled with the ever-growing list of dead wrestlers, a rate with far more frequency than "real sports". It seems it has far more to with real life than inane office jobs pushing buttons all day, people fighting their own humanity manifested in business attire and meaningless conversation in attempt to fulfill some sort of contrived social decorum.

That part needed to be defensive, just a blanket response to accumulated offensives mounted against my particular interest over the years. I'll give it to you: wrestling is fucking goofy. It's absurd, childish and melodramatic. At the same time it tells a great epic tale, one that is still being written today. It parallels ancient myth, replete with archetypal but imaginative and developed characters. By having the dynamic of two different worlds, the show that we all see and the hidden mechanics behind it all, profound stories can be told and extreme passions can erupt between performer and audience, what any worthwhile piece of performance art does. So enough of the past spite, my real attempt here is to approach professional wrestling with a more scholarly, objective, and historically/philosophically integrated viewpoint. This is a general overview of the business (as it's not technically a sport, but extremely athletic) as I see it. I have so many topics on my mind to be covered, ranging from wrestling's mythic parallels, the evolution of the business since I started actually watching it, the stylistic connection between hardcore wrestling and hardcore music scenes, the world of Japanese pro-wrestling (something I've been oddly obsessed with since I was 11 or 12), those who have ruined and who currently are ruining the business, and quite a few others. I imagine each topic will be it's own post; I'm a geek, I have a lot to say about nothing.


"They have to believe it." - James Cornette (will be quoting him a lot)