Realities of Wrestling

“There’s always been a stereotype I think as far as your average pro wrestling fan. They’re dumb, they never graduated college, one tooth in their mouth, dragging their knuckles on the floor. Obviously we know that’s not true,” says The Solomonster, host of the Solomonster Sounds Off podcast on SEScoops.com and fan of wrestling since 1987. “But the perception of wrestling fans has always been negative. I don’t know if that will ever change.”

Fair enough. But I ask why it has to be that way? I was a 7-year-old wrestling fan back in 1998 in what is considered a boom period for the industry. For WWE, it was the Attitude Era, an era defined by gritty wrestling, provocative (arguably inappropriate for a young kid like me) language and storytelling and over the top charades.  Between WWE and rival wrestling promotion WCW, lots of people were watching.

With my favorite superstar The Rock’s departure from the company around 2003 and my priorities turning elsewhere, I grew apart from wrestling. This occurred only for me to come running back to it all early last year, with more passion for the product than I ever had before. But something was different. There seemed to be less of a buzz. Certainly fewer people were watching—TV ratings and PPV buyrates support that. WCW has now been gone for more than a decade, and WWE has seemed to grow complacent and lose fans in the absence of any real competition.

This is all secondary to me, though. What I’m most interested in is having more than just a basic understanding of why people don’t and have never liked wrestling. Instead of making sweeping generalizations and stereotyping non-wrestling fans in a way that perhaps some would do to us, I want to know the reasoning behind wrestling being this sort of social taboo. So I ask, again—what the hell is wrong here?

“You see these grown men, undressed very ridiculously, doing some theatrical overreacting,” says 24-year-old writer for WrestleZone.com and creator of the wrestling talk show Chairshot Reality Justin Labar. “Some people—whether it’s a homophobic thing, whether they think it’s ‘oh god, there’s two guys rolling around’ or whatever, whether they are just too much of an alpha male and they’re like ‘oh you can obviously tell that it’s not real’—there’s just some people that just get turned off by it, for whatever reason.”

Professional wrestling, of course, has always been scripted and staged. The athleticism and some of the injuries are real, but to try making an argument beyond that would be, well, to lose touch with reality. Enter Mixed Martial Arts and the UFC, a sport based on men brutally fighting each other. That is very real, and its growing popularity may be hurting wrestling’s overall image with the casual fan, or non-fan.

“When you see two guys that are legitimately hurting each other, then you’re like ‘okay, well I know those guys (who are wrestling) aren’t legitimately trying to hurt each other so what’s interesting about it?’ It’s like people don’t want to give it a chance to get to understand the art and entertainment aspect of it,” LaBar says.

While LaBar makes mention of the fake and homophobic aura that surrounds wrestling, Editor-in-Chief of the sports blog WithLeather, who writes the weekly wrestling column The Best and Worst of Raw, says that society has gotten over those things. A wrestling fan since he was born and a self-described “abused girlfriend who keeps coming back no matter how bad wrestling treats me”, 31-year-old Brandon Stroud believes that being a wrestling fan in the early 90s was much more difficult than it is now. As a whole, he feels that people are over wrestling being considered gay or fake. He thinks the problem, however, may be people taking the product too seriously instead of viewing it as a form of entertainment, like television or film.

“I feel like if you don’t allow yourself some level of suspension of disbelief—like you don’t accept it as real as any other thing—then you can’t really enjoy it,” he says. He supports his point by providing a rather ingenious example. Try to follow along with him on this one.

“When you watch Rosanne, you don’t get pissed off because Rosanne and John Goodman aren’t actually married, right? But when you watch the show, you’re like ‘OK, Dan and Rosanne are married,’” he quips.  “That’s what you have to do with wrestling, it’s like wrestling is real as any TV show you’re watching is real. You just kind of have to believe in it. I feel like some people don’t have that disconnect to know that they’re doing that.”

Then there’s the problem of TV-PG. It’s what some wrestling fans like to constantly whine about. It’s an easy out for them to attribute all of modern day WWE’s problems—that the company is marketed towards kids and a more family friendly audience in general, therefore the product is watered down, goofy or insulting to our intelligence.

Diehard, loyal wrestling fans will always stick around. Whether the product is good, bad or atrocious, they will be there to either rejoice or complain. And when it comes down to it, the TV-PG tag slapped onto each episode of Monday Night Raw makes little difference in the quality of the product. Not to open up a whole other can of worms, but how good the WWE’s product is—or any wrestling promotion’s product, for that matter—more or less relies on the competency of the people writing the shows and making the decisions behind the scenes, coupled with the talent of the performers. However, while the “PG Era”, as is it so notoriously came to be known, is a ridiculously overstated “problem”, it also cannot be ignored when you consider the people who don’t religiously follow wrestling.

I imagine a non-wrestling fan flipping through the channels and coming across WWE programming. They give it a chance for a couple minutes, and what they take away from their momentary viewing is a WWE Diva with obscene flatulence problems, or a guy in a onesie, pretending to be Italian, putting a decorated sleeve over his arm and calling it the “cobra”. Yes, these are things that happen on a regular basis. And unfortunately for those unaccustomed or unappreciative of wrestling as a whole, these may be some of their lasting impressions.

 

Solomonster, for one, recalls two instances in particular that he says didn’t necessarily make him embarrassed to be a wrestling fan, but made him embarrassed for the company. The first is long-time WWE poster boy (who for years has been hated by millions of older, “diehard” wrestling fans because they believe he is simultaneously the poster boy for the PG Era) John Cena spray painting the words “JBL is poopy” on opponent John Bradshaw Layfield’s limo. Pretty juvenile stuff. The second moment was when former WWE wrestler Carlito Colon ran into a wall while chasing the company’s beloved leprechaun Hornswoggle around the dressing room.

“I know why they do that sort of stuff because they are trying to appeal to a kid’s audience, which is kind of funny because if you look at the numbers, there’s actually far fewer kids watching now than there were in the Attitude Era,” Solomonster points out.

I can attest to this, seeing as though I was a wrestling fan in elementary school. So were my friends. We would watch every week and then coax our parents once a month or so to fork over their money so we could order whatever pay-per-view was on that given Sunday. Did we mind the outrageously offensive storylines and frequent 30-minute matches that ended in both opponents bloodied? No. This was why we watched, why we were so entertained. The scandalously-clad females and sexual innuendo-laced dialogue didn’t hurt, either. I still remember the line, “Even a 747 looks small when it’s flying into the grand canyon.” We weren’t entirely sure what it meant back then, but we still thought it was hilarious.

I don’t know, I keep marveling over this period of time during my youth. I loved the Attitude Era, and wrestling fans in general rely on nostalgia to keep them going. Stroud, however, much more of an experienced wrestling fan that I ever will be, made sure to put me in my place. The most loyal of wrestling fans, Stroud clarified to me that the Attitude Era was no different, no better, than any other period of time in wrestling.

“Wrestling’s always sucked d***,” he puts it, um, lightly. “If you [convince yourself] that it’s worse now than it used to be—I don’t know, I’ve been sort of railing against that train of thought for years because I used to be like that. But wrestling’s been exactly the same as it’s always been.”

Stroud doesn’t seem a pessimist about wrestling, though. He’s watched enough material inside and outside of WWE to understand the psychology of the wrestling fan. He’s more of a realist. And though he contends that wrestling has always been this special kind of awful, he also maintains that people are rooting for it to be successful.

“I feel like people want to like wrestling, I do. There are people who go ‘it’s fake’ and then they just dismiss it, and those people are never going to change. But I feel like a lot of people who don’t watch wrestling want to like it. They want it to be good,” he says. “Why devote this much TV this often every week and websites and videos and movies and everything to this thing and then have it not be good? Why not make it be good, and then have this stuff?”

LaBar agrees with these sentiments.

“There’s a lot of people that I think are fans of somebody or at some point were fans or they liked something they saw, but because it has become the ‘oh, pro wrestling is fake’, it’s something that they’re not gonna open up and admit.”

 

I always figured that wrestling was mainstream during the Attitude Era days. Now that less people are watching, I struggle to figure out where WWE went wrong and what the minds behind the business can do to appeal to a larger part of society again. And that’s exactly where I’m wrong. Maybe WWE—or wrestling as a whole—was never meant to be mainstream. With a film studio and their superstars frequently on news broadcasts and late night talk shows, the WWE brass certainly does try. But it’s really just a different breed of entertainment. It’s just something that people either like or don’t.

Looking back on the Attitude Era, maybe it was less about people being true wrestling fans, and more about the lifestyle of the 90s.

“It was just kind of an odd thing, just where society was at,” LaBar says. “The whole Jerry Springer, South Park, Generation X kind of thing. It was just clicking at this time. You even look at the music at the time—that was just the culture, that was just what was in.”

All the same, I’ve come to realize that being a wrestling fan is no different now than it was when I first watched. Maybe it was just my childhood naiveté that allowed me to believe what I was watching was cool. Sure, there was a time when it was more popular, but in retrospect, it wasn’t ever actually an accepted thing.

“Being a wrestling fan isn’t very different ever,” Stroud says. “Being a fan in one of the boom periods makes it sort of more socially tolerable.”

“That’s one of the things that I think has always stayed constant, is the way people kind of snicker and they look at wrestling fans,” Solomonster adds. “I’m not really sure you can do anything to change that.”

So I’ve established what it’s like to be a wrestling fan, and that the criticism will stay the same. Does that mean it’s OK for people to judge and stereotype fans, though? I suppose I have no problem looking at it from Stroud’s perspective.

“I think there are two schools of thought on that. I think first of all, yeah they do (have the right to judge) because most wrestling fans are morons. They are; it’s true. The second point of view on that is that if you look at any group of anyone who likes anything as a whole, they’re morons. Because most people are stupid.

“At this point, once you get to a certain age, you stop letting stuff bother you.”

Daniel Feingold can be reached at dfeingold91@gmail.com.