A Beginner’s Guide to Pro Wrestling

1. A Beginner’s Guide to Pro Wrestling

2. Pro wrestling was nearly impossible to avoid in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. Stars like The Undertaker, Stone Cold, The Rock, Hulk Hogan, and Macho Man Randy Savage were key figures in the pop imaginary - their ubiquitous catchphrases were became the background noise for the zeitgeist, making these larger-than-life fighters analogous to how superheroes seem to function in our contemporary cultural landscape.

3. Wrestling is still popular - millions of people tune in to watch RAW and Smackdown Live! every week, but it's not as big as before. Certainly WWF, now WWE thanks to some copyright difficulties, did themselves no favors by creating a product that was overtly sexist, racist, and increasingly inscrutable to outsiders. • But suddenly, almost out of nowhere, the wrestling industry has undergone a massive revolution: Even at the highest levels of the medium, the buffoonery and bigotry that once defined professional wrestling are being revised to welcome. to new fans of all kinds. Plots are getting interesting and accessible again, and new athletes tell fresh, and sometimes incredibly experimental and emotionally moving stories.

4. As with any niche subculture (punk rock or comics or drag or anime), coming up with the kind of unwritten rules of these worlds can be a bit difficult. Because professional wrestling in general has a history of being socially defamed and because it often attracts social outcasts, there is a sense of fierce protection about who can or cannot let in. • Fortunately, if you are curious and have a healthy thirst for violence, we are here to help you understand the basics of professional wrestling culture. But let's start with the most obvious question first:

5. What is professional wrestling? • Is it an art form? It's a sport? Where he came from? And of course everything is fake, right? • Professional wrestling evolved into its own kind of hybrid medium or genre of entertainment from carnival culture, from which the first professional wrestling shows emanated. Like many attractions at the carnival, wrestling was a quick scam to get as much money out of customers' hands as possible and to some extent that mentality still exists in business today, but now on a scale. massive, global and corporate. . Staged fights were local attractions with a veneer of authenticity, generally quite simplistic when it came to the stories, to capture the low attention span of attendees who could easily have fun with some other crafty game, feature, or character.

6. So yes, fights in professional wrestling are planned in advance, but that doesn't mean they are fake. People in the ring are actually making those moves and are often seriously injured as a result. The winner of a match (and sometimes the movement sequences) is orchestrated before the wrestlers step into the ring, but wrestlers must be prepared to switch years-long narrative arcs on the fly if someone is injured or determined Political or interpersonal situations are changing. That means professional wrestling is a kind of living, breathing serial narrative. Most fans will never know which parts of the stories are real and which parts were staged, and that's part of the fun. Learning about the backstage intrigue behind what you see on screen or in the ring is just as compelling as the show itself.

7. It is ironic that with the popularity of what has been termed "immersive theater" in avant-garde circles, professional wrestling has been left out of the conversation, as professional wrestling was perhaps one of the earliest and most popular examples. of this kind of experimental experience. narrative. Professional wrestlers often use alter egos or act like exaggerated versions of themselves, even when not in the ring, they often go out of their way to make sure they never break character or reveal the secrets of the business, as wizards won. it does not explain their illusions. • When professional wrestling started, it was impossible to tell longer stories because most people watched the fights while they were at the carnival, and that was it. However, when professional wrestling companies began operating as their own attractions outside of the carnival world, they began to develop local heroes and villains (babyfaces and heels, respectively) who could help the crowds invest in the observer and lead to the people to the shows every month week. And now that wrestling is on television, it is possible to tell even more complicated stories, sometimes incredibly labyrinthine, multidimensional, surreal, experimental and complex, spanning literal generations.

8. It is true that at one time the fighters and people who ran the industry worked harder to maintain an illusion of reality, at a time known as kayfabe, but with the pervasiveness of news reports and social media it would be impossible to achieve that. Kind of deception on such a grand scale in a contemporary setting. Now almost all wrestling fans are informed and watch wrestling not despite how "fake" it is, but because they are intrigued by the characters, costumes, drama, and action. The wrestlers will continue to act like the real thing during the show, in the same way that characters in a movie don't often recognize that they are in a movie. Why were they going to do it? • So: wrestling is a narrative art form that requires athletic ability. It is a live, immersive, postmodern combat theater in the round, which absolutely requires audience participation.

9. It's not all WWE • A big mistake people outside of the wrestling industry make is to think that World Wrestling Entertainment, run by CEO Vince McMahon (who has also played a caricatured version of himself in many wrestling stories over the past decades) , is the only wrestling company in the world. It's true that WWE tries to act like the end of professional wrestling, and its ubiquity is a consciously created media narrative that the brand has purposely fostered for years, to create the illusion that they have no real competition. • But WWE is one of literally hundreds of wrestling companies operating in the United States and beyond for aew wrestling news. It is certainly the largest of all companies in the world, but it is not the only one, and it is far from the only one that matters.

10. WWE is basically the American idol of professional wrestling. It's the most common, accessible, and widely appreciated example of professional wrestling, but it's also silly, laborious, and not exactly diverse in terms of style or innovation. In truth, the athletes who compete in WWE are incredibly talented, as are all American Idol singers, but it is only a small sample of the types of wrestling that really exist in the world. It's the corporate, radio-ready, sanitized pop music of professional wrestling. If someone said they don't like music because they don't like American Idol, you'd think they're crazy, and the same goes for WWE and professional wrestling. • At the corporate level, hardly anyone can compete with WWE. A new company called All Elite Wrestling, started by Cody Rhodes (the prodigal son of a legendary professional wrestler named Dusty Rhodes, who had been scorned by Vince McMahon, you see how Shakespearean this is?), Was created in 2019 and it could be from WWE. The first threat in years, but even they can't go head-to-head with the billion dollar franchise when it comes to scope and scale. Meanwhile, companies such as New Japan Pro-Wrestling, Consejo Mundial de Lucha Libre, and Lucha Libre AAA operate outside of WWE boundaries in other countries where wrestling is popular (Japan and Mexico) and have gained more cult following among diehard fans in America

11. The politics • Unfortunately, there is no way to divorce the art of politics, and wrestling is no exception. There are a handful of major political issues plaguing the wrestling industry right now. • Probably the most important is work. Considering the immense physical toll that wrestling or wwenews takes on a person's body, one would think that wrestlers would be fairly compensated for their efforts. This is far from the case even at the highest level - in WWE, wrestlers are hired as independent contractors, meaning that the wrestlers themselves pay for health care expenses (and even travel!). In the indies, wrestlers are often paid between $ 50 and $ 500 for a match, and sometimes nothing at all. This is evidently embarrassing, considering how fighters literally risk their lives in every fight, and considering how an injury can leave a fighter on the sidelines for months, if not years. The first signs of unionization are beginning to emerge in the industry, but many believe that large-scale collective bargaining attempts would completely ruin the company, as operating costs would suddenly become incredibly high, especially for independent companies.

12. About Us • For over 30 years, the staff of The Wrestling Page have been covering pro wrestling news in some capacity or another.  The Wrestling Page is a definite read for those interested in behind the scenes happenings of pro wrestling, wrestling news and results. • Website - https://www.thewrestlingpage.com/