In Praise of Professional Wrestling

It’s bronzed, glistening, rippling, creaking, groaning, spandex fightporn and, personally, I love it.

A call from a friend:
- You’re the only one I can talk to about it

- I know, haha, I quite like that in a way though
- I just downloaded Summerslam

- Oh man it’s good
- Yeah that TLC match

- Good God, through the announce table
- I know, fuck. That’s the highest Ladder I’ve ever seen

- So good
- So Good

- etc.
- etc.

At present I spend my spare time rigorously rekindling my 9-year dormant love affair with sports entertainment. Stereotypically the penchant of weirdoes and fourteen year old boys with brains more warped (by a potent speedball of pre/post pubescent hormones) than any of the ridiculous, oiled bodies paraded and collided live on television at least twice each week.

Personally, I like watching the torsos of men pushed to bursting point by prescription painkillers, steroids and international superstardom; a heady, frothy, refreshing manshake to be sure - but why? Why do I love it so?

It seems trite to compare professional wrestling to the gladiatorial combat of ancient Rome. However, I believe that the association extends farther than the obvious two men in an arena fighting for the entertainment of a crowd. Both are romantic, both are poetic. The thorough edit of history at the hands of educated men has romanticised the brutality and savagery from gladiator fighting like gold panned from the silt of a river. All that remains is the glory, the age-old noble fight between trident and tiger: good and evil. Gone is the gore - the entrails and agony - polished to superficial reductionist sheen. The mortal pantheon.

Wrestling is History Now. It is reigns, defeats, legions, feuds, alliances, tyranny, mutiny and legacy; broadcast into your home. It takes the entire spectrum of human existence; the trials, tribulations, victories, defeats; the noble and the dastardly, skill, deftness, accomplishments, incompetence; strength and weakness; the dizzying highs and unparalleled lows; out of the humdrum of day to day life; takes them out of the annuls of history; and places them smack down in the middle of the squared circle: the wrestling ring. Not only that but it then proceeds to have this bastard highlight reel of life and history acted out by oiled, bronzed, millionaire Adonises. Amazing.

Aah, but it’s fake. No, it is fictitious, it’s scripted and choreographed - it is epic performance, it is theatre. World Wrestling Entertainment is the everyman’s Iliad. Wouldn’t you rather watch a real fight? No. Real fights can be won or lost in split seconds. A pummelling flurry upended by a slip and a swift uppercut. The script in wrestling means that it never becomes a meritocracy. This immediately distances wrestling from the competitive nature of professional sport. Instead it resides in a realm of poetic allegory. Re-telling tales as old as time: tales of triumph and of tragedy, the virtues of perseverance, the pitfalls of vanity and the multiplicity that is man. The script fuses fighting with melodrama; every high is vertiginous, every low; crushing and all are premeditated and planned. Let me know my destiny so I can dutifully act out my demise. Wrestling milks the tension in a pastiche patchwork of Mexican stand-offs, missile command countdowns and busses that can’t drop below 50.

That the violence is pretend and predetermined means that, by and large, no one dies. This in turn means that the most audacious, luxuriantly bitter rivalries and concrete allegiances can develop; the likes of which History wouldn’t have the balls (or the marketing savvy) to dream up. Wrestling takes History, Superplexes it through a fireworks factory; body slams it into tanning booth before giving it a Coke, a Pepsi, a Dr Pepper, a Mountain Dew and a Red Bull, a steroid injection in the arse and pinning it for a 3 count on a bed of hyperbole.

Wrestling is a triumphant homage to the splendour and glory of battle, a slick hyperbolic drama and a microcosm of human life and emotion... Failing that can’t we at least agree and call it Eastenders for boys?

Image by Luke Norton