A Wrestling Apologetic

Ask anyone who’s a fan of professional wrestling about their conversations with non-fans, and they’ll all tell you the same thing — they’ve all had a near-identical conversation about their favorite hobby. It goes like this:

“Oh, you actually like that stuff?”

“Yes.”

“But you know it’s fake, right?”

“Well, ‘fake’ is a funny word for ‘predetermined outcome,’ and furthermore…”

“Wow that’s a lot okay thanks.”

“Yeah cool I mean you asked me about it but whatever.”

I’ve had this conversation a hundred times. I know people who’ve had this conversation a hundred times. I know a hundred different essays that start this way about this conversation that those writers have had a hundred times. It’s nothing new to say that professional wrestling is misunderstood by the general public; however, the fandom of professional wrestling is just as misunderstood. It’s easy to pass judgment quickly and call the fanbase a bunch of childish rubes, and maybe some of us are…but not for the reasons by which we’re being judged. If you really wanted to criticize a fan of professional wrestling for their fandom, you’d probably have to ask them first how to do it.

Humans are drawn to narrative. We relate to one another through narrative, we explain ourselves by narrative, we understand our politics our world and our gods via narrative. We are comfortable when we can ascribe stories to our lives that are neat and tidy and explicable; we despair when events cruelly defy narrative explanation. We are ever in search of meaning, often ascribing it to that which has none, and often this ascription is in the form of a story.

The entertainment we consume reflects our species’ obsession with relaying and receiving stories. In the form of fiction, we consume books and television and movies that are entirely fabricated reflections of our reality, be they speculative, sensationalized, or true to life. In the form of non-fiction, we fictionalize historical figures to make them more human and more relevant to our own contexts. Even when we consume that which is “reality” — in the form of reality television or live sports — we still feel a need to give it a narrative, either in the form of editing (in the case of reality tv) or in the form of completely artificial narratives (in the case of sports). No matter what form of entertainment we consume, we want to believe in what we are watching — that it has a purpose or meaning that connects it to the larger world of our experiences.

In terms of the entertainment of pro-wrestling, it’s helpful to draw a distinction between “belief” and “that which encourages you to believe” or perhaps “that which makes you wish to believe.” It’s not entirely unlike a normal television show or movie. What wrestling fans are looking for is not reality in a wrestling match, but certain indicators of realism. To a wrestling fan, the question “don’t you know it’s fake?” is utterly irrelevant. I don’t ask people when discussing Harry Potter or Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead whether they’re aware that they’re consuming fiction because it would be a silly question. Nor do I ask a sports fan to explain why they hate their rival team, because they would tell me a lot of long tales about how their team and its fans had “wronged” them in the past, creating a story in which they cast themselves as the protagonist to their rival’s antagonist.

Being entertained by pro-wrestling is a fusion of these two impulses, the need to consume narrative and ascribe it to real-life events. It’s loosely scripted (or booked) like a TV show, but it’s also a live sports event where, theoretically, anything can happen. Both of these impulses make it work as what it is, but the former used to be much better hidden from the fans. Arguably, this also made professional wrestling a more interesting and unique form of entertainment than it has become, even though it remains very popular today. Furthermore, even today when pro-wrestling is at its best, it’s usually because it’s done so well that fans forget how much they know about the booking and scripting of the actual matches they are watching. They become lost in the narrative that is being told in the ring.

In the era of the internet and “smart marks,[1]” it is much more difficult task to make people forget, however momentarily, that they are not watching a real combat sport between two men, and that the two men are, in fact, working together to present this appearance. It didn’t used to be quite so difficult. Before people were “smart” to pro-wrestling, it was a pretty believable endeavor. Two men in a ring wrestle to see who is the stronger grappler. Pro-wrestling and boxing actually share a similar origin, and while boxing is viewed as the more legitimate sport of the two exhibitions, both have a history of having fixed outcomes (often in the service of gambling), and both were originally carnival side shows.

That wrestling embraced being fixed (albeit behind the scenes) while boxing trended towards “legitimate” sport is unimportant in terms of narrative. Imagine, for instance, that all sports were fixed, that is the outcomes were predetermined based on the most compelling storylines that would “draw” the most money. Would people stop watching? What if they never wise to the fixing? Arguably, people would still watch to see their favorite players perform incredible athletic feats in the name of their town, school, or city.

They would also likely never want to know whether or not the sport was fixed, because something about the knowing, something about being in on the fix would make the competition — or the illusion of it — less entertaining. In the case of wrestling, there used to be a time where ignorance really was bliss, or rather, when willful ignorance really was wilfull bliss.

This era was best explained by the art — or the code — of “kayfabe.”

Combat sports are the story of conflict. It’s why, on a visceral level, we can never escape the satisfaction of true one on one competition. It’s why most sports highlights, even in team sports, tell the story of one on one competition. The big hit, the posterizing dunk, the homerun all pit individual athletes against one another with one true victor. No one can claim the success or own the failure but these two men.

This sense of conflict is heightened in combat sports. In amateur wrestling, one person imposes their will on another. In boxing or martial arts, the man left standing is the man who is on that night the superior combatant. It’s truly like nothing else in terms of drama and is why — despite our best nature — we are still drawn to sports like boxing or MMA in spite of the violence. This conflict is storytelling at its most basic yet profound: two persons have the same goal but cannot share the prize. To quote Highlander, a movie that understands this premise perfectly, “there can be only one.”

This idea of one superior combatant, a last-man standing, is a story worth telling and we’ve been telling it as a species since we started telling stories. From Gilgamesh to Achilles and Odysseus to Superman, we envision the kind of hero we would hope to be conquering that which we fear or fear to become. These heroes embody our values and common cultural beliefs and when they triumph, we triumph. They reflect the best of us and show us to be right-footed in our beliefs and aspirations as individuals and peoples. It is an idea ancient and primal.

Without hyperbole, this is what’s at the core of storytelling in professional wrestling. Nothing can work in the medium without this basic conflict. The audience needs to believe that at the end of the match there is one superior combatant who has played out the classic story of conflict in the ring. The nice thing about conflict between people is that it comes in many forms and can be told in many ways, even in combat. We love to see a hero defeat a villain. We love to see a villain gain an advantage over a hero. We love to watch two noble heroes fight for supremacy. We love to watch two villains foil each other’s plans and be undone by hubris. We love narrative, and few forms capture this basic narrative better than professional wrestling.

Key to this narrative is the ability to tell the kinds of stories to which people respond. Most people don’t watch combat sports just for the technical abilities of the fighters; they watch because they’ve been sold a story. Perhaps two technical strikers will face off, or perhaps two styles will clash in the ring, or a power-puncher will face an evasive point-fighter, or even more compelling: perhaps one guy has run his mouth leading up to the fight, or is a horrible person outside the sport, and we just want to see him get what’s coming to him. We want poetic justice to be enacted on a grand stage so that we can believe that bad things happen to bad people, at least for one night even though we know better.

In order to tell this story in professional wrestling, we have to develop a reason for the audience to care. The early bookers of professional wrestling understood that moving from carnival sideshow to large-scale exhibition meant booking the matches in a way that would elicit audience response. They needed wrestlers who the audience could root for, and more importantly, foils for these heroes. Thus, the “babyface” and “heel” were born.

An easy explanation of babyfaces and heels would be to compare them to heroes and villains, and while this is mostly correct, the terms get a little more complicated during the in-ring storytelling. Instead, babyfaces and heels are more about positioning and actions within the ring during a match. For instance, if two villains are facing off against one another, it’s a less powerful story to wish for the arena to explode. Instead, what kind of angle or investment should the audience have in wishing one villain would topple the other? If both are unlikable before the match, how can we get the audience to cheer one and boo the other during the match? The answer is a matter of positioning. Perhaps one wrestler uses dirtier techniques, cheats to win, is far more gruesome, or is a complete coward. This kind of positioning of the two wrestlers within the ring is how the story is signaled non-verbally to the audience.

Of course, most matches are much simpler than this. The tried and true formula of the babyface versus the heel has always worked and will likely always work. A wrestler who works hard, does the right thing, and wants to win a fair fight versus an overrated, arrogant cheater who only cares about winning whatever the cost. It’s a recipe for success in drama and storytelling, and the degree to which promoters of wrestling and wrestlers themselves took this recipe seriously is what makes wrestling a uniquely compelling form of storytelling.

The short answer to the question “why do people believe pro-wrestling is real?” is simple: they don’t…at least not entirely. The question of how fans react and interact with professional wrestling is an entirely different subject, but the reason they keep returning to it has to do with why it was believable for so long. That reason is the code of “kayfabe.”

While the origins of the term are widely disputed, it has been around almost as long as professional wrestling in the 20th century. Loosely defined, it is partially a code of silence among promoters and wrestlers, and partially an agreement to portray the wrestling business as a legitimate competition at all times to those outside the business.

Wrestlers have long wrestled under “gimmicks,” or characters. Sometimes the gimmick is almost identical to the wrestler, and other times it’s far crazier (see: The Undertaker). But no matter the gimmick or the promotion, the code of kayfabe was universal. It meant promoters treated the product as a legitimate athletic competition. It meant a wrestler did not talk shop with non-wrestlers. The most important part of kayfabe, however, was the agreement to live one’s gimmick in the public sphere. If wrestling was to be believed, it had to be sold outside the ring as well as inside. This meant that if Ric Flair was walking into a bar to get a drink, he was walking in as Ric Flair, the stylin’ and profilin’ Nature Boy, not as Richard Morgan Fliehr. He kept kayfabe as long as he was in the public eye.

It’s akin to method acting, but imagine the lengths to which a wrestler would have to go to be in kayfabe any time he went in public. This meant that even if your best friend was a wrestler, if he was a heel and you were a babyface, you were not allowed to travel together, be seen talking together, or interact in public unless it was to further a feud between the two of you and add to the storyline and anticipation of a future match. Many wrestlers traveled by car between towns in different territories (regions run by different owners) and heels and babyfaces never travelled together. If you were outside your own home, you lived your gimmick entirely.

This sounds crazy, but it was the one sure way to ensure that people believed that wrestling, which was entirely fixed, was as believable as it could be. It makes sense, really. If you want crowds to believe that two men hate one another, you can’t very well have them eating burgers together in the same Cadillac between towns.

Kayfabe is what made the life of a wrestler a crazy life to live, but also what made wrestling such a unique form of entertainment. If entertainment reflects or imitates real life, wrestling purported to be real life, drawing no distinctions between the in-ring entertainment product and the life that exited outside of it. There have been a plethora of problems that arose from this lack of distinction, but it has also fueled some of the most creative and intriguing storytelling in any medium.

It’s tempting to say, then, that wrestling was entirely fake and was simply doing a very good job of pretending to be real, but that wouldn’t capture the full picture, either. Because wrestling is a business, and because it was for most of the 20th century a very competitive business, competitions between in ring talent and promoters often spilled into the in-ring storylines. Most of the time, wrestling is what is called a “work”; that is, the wrestlers are “working” the crowd into believing that the match is real. They are working together to give the illusion of combat. However, sometimes the wrestlers had other ideas about how things should go, and in a sport that portrays itself as combat, it was not unusual for works to turn into “shoots,” or real, in-ring fights. Sometimes shoots were as simple as a guy hitting to hard or “snug,” but other times two wrestlers really didn’t like each other, and once the first punch was thrown, it was a real, honest to goodness fight that ensued.

Promoters also wanted their wrestlers — especially their champions — to look strong, so they quickly recognized the need to have capable fighters and wrestlers as their champions in case another promoter decided to “go into business for himself” or renege on the original agreement of who would win and lose a certain match for a certain championship belt. These wrestlers came to be known as “shoot fighters” due to their actual grappling and fighting prowess and were usually entrusted with the promotion’s championship because they could protect it.

For a long time, many fans thought that wrestling was likely fake, but that some aspects of it were real. This was due to the uncertainty that kayfabe created, and the uncertainty that the dynamic of works and shoots created as well. It would not be uncommon for fans to compartmentalize the card; the first three matches are for the kids, but the last match, that’s the real one. Those guys hate each other. It sounds silly, fans have always been more-or-less invested in the storylines, believing or not believing them to a varying degree.

The death of kayfabe is an entirely different essay, and within that essay are even more essays. Suffice to say: it’s not a thing anymore. Wrestlers often refer to themselves as “performers” or “sports entertainers.” If you look them up on Twitter, you’ll sometimes see their real names. In public events, they’ll call themselves by their in-ring name, but all pretense is dropped for public relations and autograph signings. This means that even a bloodthirsty, no-good cheating heel will smile for photos with kids most of the time.

This doesn’t seem like a big deal, especially since everyone is “wise” to the business now. Maybe it’s not. But it certainly takes away one of the main things that made professional wrestling the most interesting mediums for storytelling: a form that let the story bleed into reality, making the implausible believable.

How pro-wrestling survived beyond the era of kayfabe is anyone’s guess, and it almost didn’t. As to what draws people to pro-wrestling, despite it being pre-determined, is likely still the narrative that people have always responded to. But wrestling has also learned a few new tricks to respond to the “smart” fans in the audience. “Working” the crowd now means something entirely different. The main goal used to be convincing the audience that the pre-determined fight was real; now, the audience is wise to the game. Now the goal of a work is convincing the audience that aspects of the fake fight are real, such as injuries, feuds spilling onto social media, and misdirection fed to eager internet fans intended to mislead the audience.

It has become more difficult to surprise the audience, but not impossible. And I think fans now tune in hoping to be surprised or shocked by the thing they love and know so well. Most fans watch for fear of missing something and seeing it on the internet later. They watch for the unique moments that live storytelling can tell. In a tv show, the characters are fake, the setting is fake, and the fights/stunts are fake as well. In pro-wrestling, the characters are fake, the setting is real, the fighting is fake, but the stunts are very real. It still manages to tell a story in a format that is unique unto itself. While tv shows and movies seek to capture you in the false reality of a story, and sports try to capture you in the false story of a reality, pro-wrestling relishes ambiguity: to be story, to be reality, to be neither and both at the same time.

[1] In wrestling a “mark” is someone (like in a con job) that the promoter or wrestlers were trying to convince that wrestling was real, sometimes to illicit ends like fixing gambling, but certainly in order to sell tickets. A smart mark is someone who knows they’re being “worked” but is still entertained by the product.