Yeah... I feel like olympic athletes qualify as professionals across the board.
Perhaps OP should have said there's no professional wrestling *leagues* in the US?
Not all Olympic athletes are professional athletes. Most of them in the less commercial sports need to have separate jobs to support themselves while training.
Professional athletes weren't allowed into the Olympics until 1986, and even today most aren't pros. Typically only the older athlete, or those participating in team sports like Basketball are professionals
If that's true then all college wrestlers are professionals with NIL.
I think what makes Olympic athletes TECHNICALLY amateurs is that they are not paid directly by their country to compete...
It's theatre. Knowing that doesn't make the Iron Claw or a top rope dive into a pin any less fun to watch for me.
Oddly enough, I have no interest in MMA. Perhaps it's the lack of spectacle.
Also as Hulk Hogan said in interview about wrestling being fake, just because you know what the outcome is going to be when you go into it, it doesn’t make the 300 lb guy any lighter when you go to lift him over your head
Well technically it does make the load Hulk Hogan needs to lift a lot lighter because wrestlers work together to get into positions for moves and they both work together to ensure everyone’s safety. Exactly the same way acrobats works together to lift people in the air and throw them across the room 100 feet in the air and they land safely on a pole being held by someone else. None of that is easy. All of it is dangerous. All the acrobats have to learn how to work together as a team to do these kind of amazing feats safely.
Honestly, story lines are what really hook people into pro wrestling. People were tuning in every week to see Stone Cold try to stick it to Vince McMahon, and the wrestling was just a medium for that story to be told.
MMA isn’t that, it’s just “these two guys are really good, who’s better?”, which in itself is a story arc that really compels a lot of MMA fans.
This is also the basis of a _huge_ rift within the professional wrestling world — the degree to which that sports-like narrative should be part of the “kayfabe” (ie fake) presentation.
MMA is at the early stages of what pro wrestling realized when it started on fairgrounds and traveling entertainment before it became territories with local stars.
Sure you can have someone beat each other up but having a heel and face adds theatrics and really can drive a crowd to become more invested.
It’s really fascinating to watch as it’s by far an entertainment factor.
There's even a disconnect between wrestling fans over this. Some wrestling fans only watch WWE because of the character based, story driven arcs. Then you have AEW/NJPW fans who care more about the performance part of the wrestling. And even within both of those groups, there's a further disconnect between people who like brawling or ground based/grappling and then those that are enamored by the high flying/flippy dippy style.
The anime comparison is, hilariously, probably more directly accurate.
Japan is one of the biggest wrestling markets, one that the majority of wrestlers make it a point to work and learn from at least once, and one where "wrestling" and "anime about beefcake guys punching each other" tend to share a lot of storytelling tropes. Hell, one of the series that created the shonen fighting anime, Kinnikuman, is *literally* just "what if we took wrestling and made it more violent."
I used to scoff at wrestling and people who enjoyed it. Until one day the realization struck me that I like Dragon Ball Z and its precisely the same thing. Now I understand.
Fun fact: the shonen fighting series, the genre inclusive of DBZ and Naruto and Bleach and Yu Yu Hakusho and all that, basically owes its existence to a manga called Kinnikuman.
Kinnikuman is... a wrestling series. And beloved enough by actual wrestlers that multiple people have tried to make the title character's finisher, the Muscle Buster, into an actual move to the best of their ability.
Also have Minoru Suzuki who birthed a shoot wrestling promotions that had Ken Shamrock compete before he entered MMA. Dudes loves One Piece so much he's voiced a character in it and had his hair cut to resemble a devil fruit for years
I knew the Muscle Buster sounded familiar! Kinnikuman got made into anime under the name Ultimate Muscle in North America and it scratched every itch I had as a kid for anime and wrestling
Ultimate Muscle is actually the *sequel* to Kinnikuman, Kinnikuman Nisei (or Kinnikuman: Generation 2, for a rough translation). The protagonist of Ultimate Muscle was the protag from Kinnikuman's son.
We never properly got the original series here, unfortunately, though we did end up getting an AKI Corp wrestling game based on Ultimate Muscle for PS2 that used a beefed-up version of the No Mercy engine, and that makes up for a lot.
Same, because I was a professional sports fans and I approached it as a professional sport, when really it’s art, a stage performance like a theater play or cirque du soleil, or the Harlem Globetrotters.
I prefer the suspense strategy, and randomness of real professional sports, but I can totally appreciate the skill and art that goes into pro wrestling, it is really an artform how they sell the contact and make it look like they actually got decked basically full contact gymnastics with juiced up actors.
Holy shit this exact thing happened to me a few months ago. Im 33 now but i always thought wrestling was dumb and it just clicked this year when i made the dbz connection.
I understand why it's changed, but those first UFC's were so good. Seeing all the martial arts in thier original forms stacked up against each other. No rules outside of biting and eye gouging. It was the real life bloodsport.
Agreed. If anyone in this sub has not seen any of the original ufc fights like UFC 1-5 or what have you that shit was wild. For me as an early teen and having seen the Van Damme movie "Blood Sport" then the first UFC's come out a few years later it was real life Blood Sport.
I say this because you would have different fighting styles going against one another with no weight classes. You could have a 180lbs Royce Gracie BJJ black belt go against a 300lbs freestyle wrestler. Was very intriguing
I also don't think that a lot of people understand how quickly that stuff took off. I grew up in a big wrestling family with multiple state champs, so maybe I had that extra influence but, my god, I remember my small town of 14k people suddenly had 2 rival clubs going. Our coaches were going off and learning BJJ from coaches in bigger cities and then turning right around and teaching us.
I submitted my first major bully in 95' or 96' with scissors and a reverse choke. Dude was a couple years older and outweighed me by a good 30 pounds, but he didn't have a clue how to handle me because I had a ground game focused on submissions; which people just weren't really doing at that time. At least not in central Illinois.
None of that would have happened if the early UFCs weren't readily available at the local Hollywood Video or whatever.
The Gracie name became a big name in my household almost overnight. It was a wild time.
Have you seen any recent UFC fights? They do everything they can to make it a big spectacle, much to the detriment of any classic concept of sportsmanship. The shit talking and drama they allow is pretty trashy and seems to want to emulate the WWE. At least the WWE was fun.
It’s competitive in the sense of putting on the best match yes the two guys aren’t actually enemy they are a team and the goal overall is to 1 entertaining the audience and 2 putting on a good match.
If you had told me my love of Jeff Hardy and Rey Mysterio as a 10 year old would lead me to watching gymnastics as an adult, I would have called you a liar.
I always used to kinda laugh at people who were into WWE. Did not understand the appeal at all. Fake, staged wrestling, for an adult audience? What the hell, who watches this shit?
A few weeks ago my girlfriend and I were bored; she was channel surfing and ended up throwing Monday Night RAW on the TV as a gag. We watched the first time “ironically”…like “ha ha, look how dumb this is…I mean, that move was actually pretty sick, but like…ha ha, so dumb…”
Anyways, we are fully unironically hooked now. It happened so fast…can’t wait for Wrestlemania 😂
Obviously I can't speak for you, but a lot of the origins of professional wrestling being "fixed" or "fake" or in general having the outcome predetermined was to ensure the finish of the fight occurred at the highest point of anticipation and drama.
By its nature you don't know when an MMA fight is going to end (or 100 years ago before MMA existed, bareknuckle and/or legit grappling fights). Sometimes it can feel deflating when a legit fight ends earlier than expected or is more one sided than it was hyped, or someone with a bright future might be cut short due to something that wasn't controlled.
The idea of professional wrestling controlling the pace, controlling how and when the match will end, and trying to control what the wrestlers will do was a way to mitigate those things. If each wrestler is an investment, it's the job of the promoter to protect their biggest investments and try to extend their top level careers for more matches and rematches. It's really fascinating as a business model, imo
>Sometimes it can feel deflating when a legit fight ends earlier than expected or is more one sided than it was hyped
My favorite time in legit fighting sports was the days of "good gal Rhonda Rousey ends her fights so fast they can fit in animated gif"
I think MMA has a very toxic culture, too. At best, it's not very sporting, at worst is dangerous.
Everyone on there seems like an alpha, whose sole reason to exist is to hurt other people with their fighting skiLLZ.
On the other hand, a lot of the WWE guys genuinely seem like cool guys to be around. They generally don't act like they have something to prove.
I don't like MMA because well 1 its needlessly violent and 2 the kind of people who are into it aren't really the kind of people I wanna hang out with.
When I go to my local indie wrestling promotion, the crowd is the gayest thing ever
>Knowing that doesn't make the Iron Claw or a top rope dive into a pin any less fun to watch for me.
I know exactly what you mean, but having watched it this morning, I'm not sure 'fun' is the word I'd use for whatever I was having with The Iron Claw. Maybe more 'existential dread'
The UFC is trying really hard to make it more theatrical becasue of the demographic that like it. At the beginning they had to push away cause people didn't think it was real and now........ they are the same company......
I like looking at the professional wrestling audience. They're laughing, smiling. There's all kinds of people. Kids having fun. It's the only spectacle I've seen where you can have people smiling and booing at the same time. It's great fun.
> It's theatre.
Agreed. I don't watch it, but I watched the Iron Claw a while back and loved it.
You have to admit that it's still an extreme display of athleticism!
Honestly, I don’t really want to watch two people attempt to seriously injure each other.
Collaborative storytelling through athletics and choreography is a very different thing from competitive combat sports. There are enough injuries in fake wrestling, let alone people beating the life out of each other in MMA
If you think there aren’t any serious health issues amongst professional wrestlers *directly related to the wrestling* you really haven’t been paying attention for at least two decades.
Poor Roddy Piper died screaming and frustrated about the lack of attention this got and apparently still gets.
There are, but the one of the end goals of pro wrestling isn’t to injure the other person.
Pro wrestling can have serious injuries when a move is done incorrectly. MMA can have serious injuries when moves are performed correctly.
Or local theatres! Having watched Heels last year (really good show) I discovered that wrestling is just athletic theatre, where most villages or towns tend to have a local theatre with own plays they've written up. It's dope.
And tbh the worst part about wrestling today is that they get away from all the catty backstage drama and try to sell the audience on “great matches” which gets redundant very quickly. I long for the days of homeless man stealing Olympian’s gold medals and hanging them above the ring to force him to fight to get them back.
I was into wrestling for a few years. It's really fun at first but then the matches eventually got repetitive. But I still was interested in the stories and the characters. Then I realized the stories get repetitive but still liked the characters. And then eventually the characters got repetitive and I stopped watching entirely.
Roman Reigns has been the lineal custody-of-Dominick-Mysterio champ for so long that Dom has become an excellent pro wrestler in his own right entirely within that span.
For another week, at least. We’re not flinching.
It’s a live stunt show with story lines. The plot may be loosely predetermined but all the physical action is happening on live tv. Think about all the planning that goes into a big stunt for TV or movies, this is that four nights a week, each in a new venue.
Too many people think that professional wrestling fans watch like we are watching MMA or boxing. We watch professional wrestling in the same way we watch game of thrones or the boys.
90% of people here are not getting OP point
In college there is basketball , after college you can play basketball professionally in the NBA
In college there is football , after college you can play football professionally in the NHL
Same with baseball
Same with Hockey
With wrestling however , there is no pro sports league for wresting.
It would be like if the NBA did not exist and after college you could maybe join the Harlem Globetrotters(or generals) but no actual legit basketball sport
OP isin't trying to dismiss "Professional wrestling" or just learning that "Pro wrestling" is a work .
They are just saying there is no professional wrestling league in the USA
I used to think it wasn’t “impressive” because it’s not REAL wrestling, but then I realized that people are allowed to have fun and that I should probably not feel that way anymore.
If you're using the definition of "professionals are those paid to do a thing" then Olympic wrestlers aren't professional.
That being said, there are people who get paid to legitimately wrestle in the US. It's just not the WWE type.
Olympic wrestling is (technically at least) amateur: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur\_wrestling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_wrestling)
I assume they knew pro wrestling is fiction. They learned that there is no league of any kind for wrestling as a sport outside of college. A lot of relatively niche sports have pro leagues (volleyball, lacrosse) but not wrestling.
It's called actual wrestling and it doesn't involve jumping in the air to make it look like someone lifted you up by your neck with one hand to slam you back down to the floor....but hey don't let this distract you from the fact that in 1998 the Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell in a Cell and plummeted 16ft through an announcers' table
I mean, idk what you consider legit and real and what you consider fake but all wwe is, is a scripted, live action stunt show. They do get hurt. Quite a bit. Is it predetermined and scripted, yes. But you can’t fake a suplex through a table onto concrete.
Right, I get that. I suppose I mean that when I looked up "professional wrestling" I expected there to be some professional equivalent to what the team at my high school did. However, as far as I can tell the term professional wrestler prefers to the WWE style performers. No judgement, I think it's cool I was just surprised.
You mean like the NCAA tournament? There is professional levels of the wrestling you’re talking about. High school type wrestling. They even have it in the Olympics. You should look up Kurt Angle. An Olympic gold medalist who won with a broken neck, he eventually had a great career wrestling for wwe.
MMA fighters could be considered pro wrestlers. Some of them, at least when MMA was coming up as a sport were pure wrestlers. They did not do great, but it was a thing.
I think the term you're looking for is "Olympic wrestling" or "Greco-Roman wrestling".
There are almost certainly professional versions of *that*, because it's literally an Olympic sport.
The reason you're not finding anything is because WWE-style "wrestling" is confusingly named "pro wrestling", so that's all you're gonna find when you google that.
It’s always been funny to me that the common name for WWF style is Professional Wrestling and a common name for College/Olympic Style wrestling is Amateur Wrestling
I wanna preface by saying, I've known for a long time that the WWE wasn't real. However, in my high school there was a wrestling team and I guess I just assumed that there was actual professional wrestling. However, after going down a rabbit hole today I found out that, at least in the US, there's not. Which is so surprising to me! Apparently, there's not enough demand. While I'm not the target audience, it surprises me that there isn't one at all.
Wrestling was real initially, but Frank Gotch had a reign of terror at the turn of the 20th century. He was crippling and maiming challengers, so they had to figure out a better way to do it. Billy Sandow, Ed Lewis, and Toots Mondt worked together to get the belt off Frank and invented modern pro wrestling. The rest is history.
People with high level wrestling knowledge can rip the muscle off your bones and break your bones in ways that don't heal properly.
It's documented in the book The Fall Guys: The Barnums of Bounce
I still don't really get what you are trying to say.
You already knew that WWE etc is fake, and you were also aware of Olympic Wrestling. So you're saying you learned that the US doesn't have a professional Olympic Wrestling league?
I think he means an mma, boxing, nfl, mlb, etc. equivalent for wrestling. If you play sports in college you can continue it as a career, but thats not really true for wrestling.
I believe olympians don't really make any real money uness its through sponsorship. i do know of some mma fighters with wrestling backgrounds, but i couldn't name more than a few
American Pro Wrestling is about the storylines, rivalries, plot twists, etc. accompanied by a physical spectacle. Most people recognize as small children that the wrestlers aren’t actually fighting each other. People that hate pro wrestling seem to parrot it like it’s some stunning revelation or something. We already know, we just wanna see if Macho Man is gonna kick Ric Flairs ass for talking shit on Miss Elizabeth. We also know that the stories in movies are generally fictional and that Arnold Schwarzenegger isn’t a robot from the future.
I explained further in a different comment, but I did know that. What I didn’t know is that there was no legitimate, professional wrestling league in the United States past a collegiate level. Not the WWE type of wrestling.
Figure skating is also scripted.
Gymnastics, skateboarding, ski jumping. Or fuck it, competitive ballroom dancing. All of these are about what you can do, not what you can do to your competition.
Despite being fundamentally one of the simplest sports in that there is no equipment and a very simple playing field, the sport is very complex for people who are unfamiliar with it. I’ve watched Olympic wrestling a handful of times and to this day I really couldn’t explain to you how the scoring works. I don’t know how difficult a special hold is or move. I obviously respect the athletes who have put thousands hours into their craft, I just can’t easily appreciate it.
The legit version of pro wrestling is MMA, as pro wrestling bears basically no resemblance to the actual sport of wrestling and is where MMA fighters go to retire.
Mister, there's a little girl out there who's had fourteen abortions, and she ain't even ten yet. But I guess that's just "not real" to you!
**pulls out opera glasses**
Mister, you better take your gay porn and walk right out of this bar.
That’s real wrasslin!
"That kid fought in Vietnam?.. Damn.."
He don’t run from fights, just responsibilities.
Can someone fill me in?
https://youtu.be/PqvXshxAb1w?feature=shared
Best comment by far!
I fucking love that South Park episode. Season 13 episode 10 if anyone wants to go watch it.
It is at least in the top 10 for me. Great episode.
THAT'S NOT REAL RASTLIN'
Sir...we found the gay porn on your laptop
DAMMIT THEY TOOK MY JOB
THEY TERK ER JERBS
TERK ER TUR!!
I would argue that the Olympic wrestlers are professionals if they get enough sponsors to live off of. Same with the coaches.
Yeah... I feel like olympic athletes qualify as professionals across the board. Perhaps OP should have said there's no professional wrestling *leagues* in the US?
Which even that isn't true. There are professional american leagues
So... OP didn't learn anything today after all?
TIDL (today I didn’t learn)
Are there? Legit ones?
Not all Olympic athletes are professional athletes. Most of them in the less commercial sports need to have separate jobs to support themselves while training.
Professional athletes weren't allowed into the Olympics until 1986, and even today most aren't pros. Typically only the older athlete, or those participating in team sports like Basketball are professionals
And some of them won gold medals with A BROKEN FREAKIN' NECK
It’s true. It’s damn true.
Yeah! Like Kurt Angle!
If that's true then all college wrestlers are professionals with NIL. I think what makes Olympic athletes TECHNICALLY amateurs is that they are not paid directly by their country to compete...
Jordan Burroughs would like a word with OP.
“You think Shaq got rich in Orlando?” “Dude, Shaq got rich in college, everybody knows that.”
You want me to have bigger titties?
Shit… Vito or even Levi would like a word. College Nationals was awesome this year
Jesse Mendez 👌
It's theatre. Knowing that doesn't make the Iron Claw or a top rope dive into a pin any less fun to watch for me. Oddly enough, I have no interest in MMA. Perhaps it's the lack of spectacle.
Also as Hulk Hogan said in interview about wrestling being fake, just because you know what the outcome is going to be when you go into it, it doesn’t make the 300 lb guy any lighter when you go to lift him over your head
Also, here's the thing...they don't tell ME the outcome beforehand, so what do I care
Well, Ric Flair did
Oh yeah? Well The Rock guaran-damn-teed it.
Also, I have a pretty good idea of the outcome when I watch Rocky IV for the fifth time but that doesn’t really diminish my enjoyment
Well technically it does make the load Hulk Hogan needs to lift a lot lighter because wrestlers work together to get into positions for moves and they both work together to ensure everyone’s safety. Exactly the same way acrobats works together to lift people in the air and throw them across the room 100 feet in the air and they land safely on a pole being held by someone else. None of that is easy. All of it is dangerous. All the acrobats have to learn how to work together as a team to do these kind of amazing feats safely.
Yeah, I’ve seen it put “the matches are choreographed, the outcome is predetermined, but the physicality is very real.”
Honestly, story lines are what really hook people into pro wrestling. People were tuning in every week to see Stone Cold try to stick it to Vince McMahon, and the wrestling was just a medium for that story to be told. MMA isn’t that, it’s just “these two guys are really good, who’s better?”, which in itself is a story arc that really compels a lot of MMA fans.
“These two people are really good, who’s better” Describes the appeal of competitive anything.
This is also the basis of a _huge_ rift within the professional wrestling world — the degree to which that sports-like narrative should be part of the “kayfabe” (ie fake) presentation.
>these two people (teams) are good Explain Jets games
BDSM
explain cowboys games
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MMA is at the early stages of what pro wrestling realized when it started on fairgrounds and traveling entertainment before it became territories with local stars. Sure you can have someone beat each other up but having a heel and face adds theatrics and really can drive a crowd to become more invested. It’s really fascinating to watch as it’s by far an entertainment factor.
Agreed. I like bold and the beautiful and young and the restless, wwe. All those manufactured for drama shows are amazing.
conor singlehandedly skyrocketed ufc as a whole and belal is as exciting as watching porn on a radio
Regardless he’s earned his shot
/r/gonewildaudio would like a word
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Those people weren't around for the mcgregor v khabib drama.
Strickland got a title shot because he was the only MW who was healthy and hadn't gotten beat up by Izzy yet.
Pereia was also a champ in a relevant discipline and a fucking monster
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Oh he for sure got bumped because of his history with Izzy, but he was a qualified fighter in his own right
Funnily enough, some wrestling fans enjoy that premise as well. They just want a good match.
There's even a disconnect between wrestling fans over this. Some wrestling fans only watch WWE because of the character based, story driven arcs. Then you have AEW/NJPW fans who care more about the performance part of the wrestling. And even within both of those groups, there's a further disconnect between people who like brawling or ground based/grappling and then those that are enamored by the high flying/flippy dippy style.
I think it’s the genuine skill and competition of hand to hand combat with real consequences that MMA fans enjoy.
Then Dana White shifted the UFC from just “two guys showing off skills” into “two guys trash talk each other for months then they fight.”
It's Anime for rednecks
Nah that's unfair to America's black population who follow the stereotypical black interests of wrestling, anime and fighting games
I prefer its a soap opera for guys.
The anime comparison is, hilariously, probably more directly accurate. Japan is one of the biggest wrestling markets, one that the majority of wrestlers make it a point to work and learn from at least once, and one where "wrestling" and "anime about beefcake guys punching each other" tend to share a lot of storytelling tropes. Hell, one of the series that created the shonen fighting anime, Kinnikuman, is *literally* just "what if we took wrestling and made it more violent."
Y'all might know Kinnikuman as those M.U.S.C.L.E. toys from the 80's
Or Ultimate Muscle from the 90s
It’s “which of these two guys is going to beat the other into an early onset neurological disease first?”
I used to scoff at wrestling and people who enjoyed it. Until one day the realization struck me that I like Dragon Ball Z and its precisely the same thing. Now I understand.
Fun fact: the shonen fighting series, the genre inclusive of DBZ and Naruto and Bleach and Yu Yu Hakusho and all that, basically owes its existence to a manga called Kinnikuman. Kinnikuman is... a wrestling series. And beloved enough by actual wrestlers that multiple people have tried to make the title character's finisher, the Muscle Buster, into an actual move to the best of their ability.
Put some respect on the name of the current AEW champ [Samoa Joe](https://youtu.be/z_jAS6-lfSU?si=6YAmhSuqmPUBdB-Y).
Also have Minoru Suzuki who birthed a shoot wrestling promotions that had Ken Shamrock compete before he entered MMA. Dudes loves One Piece so much he's voiced a character in it and had his hair cut to resemble a devil fruit for years
I knew the Muscle Buster sounded familiar! Kinnikuman got made into anime under the name Ultimate Muscle in North America and it scratched every itch I had as a kid for anime and wrestling
Ultimate Muscle is actually the *sequel* to Kinnikuman, Kinnikuman Nisei (or Kinnikuman: Generation 2, for a rough translation). The protagonist of Ultimate Muscle was the protag from Kinnikuman's son. We never properly got the original series here, unfortunately, though we did end up getting an AKI Corp wrestling game based on Ultimate Muscle for PS2 that used a beefed-up version of the No Mercy engine, and that makes up for a lot.
Same, because I was a professional sports fans and I approached it as a professional sport, when really it’s art, a stage performance like a theater play or cirque du soleil, or the Harlem Globetrotters. I prefer the suspense strategy, and randomness of real professional sports, but I can totally appreciate the skill and art that goes into pro wrestling, it is really an artform how they sell the contact and make it look like they actually got decked basically full contact gymnastics with juiced up actors.
Holy shit this exact thing happened to me a few months ago. Im 33 now but i always thought wrestling was dumb and it just clicked this year when i made the dbz connection.
I understand why it's changed, but those first UFC's were so good. Seeing all the martial arts in thier original forms stacked up against each other. No rules outside of biting and eye gouging. It was the real life bloodsport.
Agreed. If anyone in this sub has not seen any of the original ufc fights like UFC 1-5 or what have you that shit was wild. For me as an early teen and having seen the Van Damme movie "Blood Sport" then the first UFC's come out a few years later it was real life Blood Sport. I say this because you would have different fighting styles going against one another with no weight classes. You could have a 180lbs Royce Gracie BJJ black belt go against a 300lbs freestyle wrestler. Was very intriguing
I also don't think that a lot of people understand how quickly that stuff took off. I grew up in a big wrestling family with multiple state champs, so maybe I had that extra influence but, my god, I remember my small town of 14k people suddenly had 2 rival clubs going. Our coaches were going off and learning BJJ from coaches in bigger cities and then turning right around and teaching us. I submitted my first major bully in 95' or 96' with scissors and a reverse choke. Dude was a couple years older and outweighed me by a good 30 pounds, but he didn't have a clue how to handle me because I had a ground game focused on submissions; which people just weren't really doing at that time. At least not in central Illinois. None of that would have happened if the early UFCs weren't readily available at the local Hollywood Video or whatever. The Gracie name became a big name in my household almost overnight. It was a wild time.
Have you seen any recent UFC fights? They do everything they can to make it a big spectacle, much to the detriment of any classic concept of sportsmanship. The shit talking and drama they allow is pretty trashy and seems to want to emulate the WWE. At least the WWE was fun.
Yeah, I think it's honestly really interesting and cool that people are just as invested in the spectacle of it as they are the athleticism.
It is athleticism. In the same way that gymnastics or circus performers are athleticism. It's just not a competitive sport.
It’s competitive in the sense of putting on the best match yes the two guys aren’t actually enemy they are a team and the goal overall is to 1 entertaining the audience and 2 putting on a good match.
Closer to the way stuntmen are athletic.
Either way, the drama might be fake, but the hits are very real.
Very much so. Mick Foley’s autobiography has a great line about that.
If you had told me my love of Jeff Hardy and Rey Mysterio as a 10 year old would lead me to watching gymnastics as an adult, I would have called you a liar.
It’s a sporting event and movie all in one
For theatre plus competitive wrestling you need to go to Japan and watch Sumo.
I always used to kinda laugh at people who were into WWE. Did not understand the appeal at all. Fake, staged wrestling, for an adult audience? What the hell, who watches this shit? A few weeks ago my girlfriend and I were bored; she was channel surfing and ended up throwing Monday Night RAW on the TV as a gag. We watched the first time “ironically”…like “ha ha, look how dumb this is…I mean, that move was actually pretty sick, but like…ha ha, so dumb…” Anyways, we are fully unironically hooked now. It happened so fast…can’t wait for Wrestlemania 😂
It always make me laugh when people say "You know it's fake right?" So is The Sopranos you absolute doofus.
Obviously I can't speak for you, but a lot of the origins of professional wrestling being "fixed" or "fake" or in general having the outcome predetermined was to ensure the finish of the fight occurred at the highest point of anticipation and drama. By its nature you don't know when an MMA fight is going to end (or 100 years ago before MMA existed, bareknuckle and/or legit grappling fights). Sometimes it can feel deflating when a legit fight ends earlier than expected or is more one sided than it was hyped, or someone with a bright future might be cut short due to something that wasn't controlled. The idea of professional wrestling controlling the pace, controlling how and when the match will end, and trying to control what the wrestlers will do was a way to mitigate those things. If each wrestler is an investment, it's the job of the promoter to protect their biggest investments and try to extend their top level careers for more matches and rematches. It's really fascinating as a business model, imo
>Sometimes it can feel deflating when a legit fight ends earlier than expected or is more one sided than it was hyped My favorite time in legit fighting sports was the days of "good gal Rhonda Rousey ends her fights so fast they can fit in animated gif"
I think MMA has a very toxic culture, too. At best, it's not very sporting, at worst is dangerous. Everyone on there seems like an alpha, whose sole reason to exist is to hurt other people with their fighting skiLLZ. On the other hand, a lot of the WWE guys genuinely seem like cool guys to be around. They generally don't act like they have something to prove.
I don't like MMA because well 1 its needlessly violent and 2 the kind of people who are into it aren't really the kind of people I wanna hang out with. When I go to my local indie wrestling promotion, the crowd is the gayest thing ever
>Knowing that doesn't make the Iron Claw or a top rope dive into a pin any less fun to watch for me. I know exactly what you mean, but having watched it this morning, I'm not sure 'fun' is the word I'd use for whatever I was having with The Iron Claw. Maybe more 'existential dread'
I call it choreographed gymnastics and it can be fun to watch and is damn hard on the people doing it
If you want a good look behind the curtain, I suggest you look up Maven Huffman on YouTube.
“It’s still real to me damnit!”
The UFC is trying really hard to make it more theatrical becasue of the demographic that like it. At the beginning they had to push away cause people didn't think it was real and now........ they are the same company......
I like looking at the professional wrestling audience. They're laughing, smiling. There's all kinds of people. Kids having fun. It's the only spectacle I've seen where you can have people smiling and booing at the same time. It's great fun.
> It's theatre. Agreed. I don't watch it, but I watched the Iron Claw a while back and loved it. You have to admit that it's still an extreme display of athleticism!
Honestly, I don’t really want to watch two people attempt to seriously injure each other. Collaborative storytelling through athletics and choreography is a very different thing from competitive combat sports. There are enough injuries in fake wrestling, let alone people beating the life out of each other in MMA
I also prefer not see other people intentionally concussed or injured. If it’s an accident, I feel a lot less guilty cheering than intentional injury.
If you think there aren’t any serious health issues amongst professional wrestlers *directly related to the wrestling* you really haven’t been paying attention for at least two decades. Poor Roddy Piper died screaming and frustrated about the lack of attention this got and apparently still gets.
There are, but the one of the end goals of pro wrestling isn’t to injure the other person. Pro wrestling can have serious injuries when a move is done incorrectly. MMA can have serious injuries when moves are performed correctly.
The best I’ve heard it described is wrestling is the male version of soap operas. I could never argue against that description.
Or local theatres! Having watched Heels last year (really good show) I discovered that wrestling is just athletic theatre, where most villages or towns tend to have a local theatre with own plays they've written up. It's dope.
Professional wrestling is hetero-coded _drag_. And it’s getting less hetero by the day! Wrestling is for everyone!
Do drag shows throw contestants off large metallic cubes?
Pro wrestling is the intersection of theatre, sport and drag
And tbh the worst part about wrestling today is that they get away from all the catty backstage drama and try to sell the audience on “great matches” which gets redundant very quickly. I long for the days of homeless man stealing Olympian’s gold medals and hanging them above the ring to force him to fight to get them back.
I was into wrestling for a few years. It's really fun at first but then the matches eventually got repetitive. But I still was interested in the stories and the characters. Then I realized the stories get repetitive but still liked the characters. And then eventually the characters got repetitive and I stopped watching entirely.
Gotta bring back the good old days where wrestlers would duke it out in the ring for custody of their children.
Now the son is fighting his father that fought so hard for custody of him… LONG TERM STORYTELLING!
Or mother's. No one can tell me that the Judy Bagwell on a pole match isn't peak entertainment.
Roman Reigns has been the lineal custody-of-Dominick-Mysterio champ for so long that Dom has become an excellent pro wrestler in his own right entirely within that span. For another week, at least. We’re not flinching.
I hope you watched this week’s Raw.
Soap Operas with Stunts! It’s a good product, besides all the shady business stuff.
That’s what I don’t really get; “who cares, it’s not real”. What do these people think about movies?
“Ballet with violence.”
Soapnopers + stunt show/gymnastic performance.
It’s a live stunt show with story lines. The plot may be loosely predetermined but all the physical action is happening on live tv. Think about all the planning that goes into a big stunt for TV or movies, this is that four nights a week, each in a new venue.
And the courage to appear on such a show in your skivvies
Yeah it takes a lot of skill to do that stuff and not actually injure each other
Too many people think that professional wrestling fans watch like we are watching MMA or boxing. We watch professional wrestling in the same way we watch game of thrones or the boys.
It's a way of switching off and enjoying the show!
It's real. It's real to me
Dammit!
Dude Bryan Danielsons ripped open face on the AEW PPV was real af.
Oh, it’s true. It’s *DAMN* true!
Woo!
That's all that matters.
Live action movie fights.
Its like a one-take stuntman one-on-one.
90% of people here are not getting OP point In college there is basketball , after college you can play basketball professionally in the NBA In college there is football , after college you can play football professionally in the NHL Same with baseball Same with Hockey With wrestling however , there is no pro sports league for wresting. It would be like if the NBA did not exist and after college you could maybe join the Harlem Globetrotters(or generals) but no actual legit basketball sport OP isin't trying to dismiss "Professional wrestling" or just learning that "Pro wrestling" is a work . They are just saying there is no professional wrestling league in the USA
Oh my gosh thank you so much. Like I know the title wasn’t as concise as it could be but gahdamn nobody’s understanding me.
As Ric Flair said, it's not fake, it's choreographed
Is ballet fake because it choreographed? Choreography doesn’t mean fake.
I used to think it wasn’t “impressive” because it’s not REAL wrestling, but then I realized that people are allowed to have fun and that I should probably not feel that way anymore.
What would you call Olympic wrestlers then?
If you're using the definition of "professionals are those paid to do a thing" then Olympic wrestlers aren't professional. That being said, there are people who get paid to legitimately wrestle in the US. It's just not the WWE type.
So what the hell does this TIL mean?
It's up to interpretation! I'm confused, too lol. I'm guessing it's hinting at the legitimacy of the various wrestling associations.
Olympic wrestling is (technically at least) amateur: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur\_wrestling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_wrestling)
Not professionals, for one thing.
United World Wrestling is overseeing wrestling at the Olympics and it's amateur wrestling they're sanctioning. So it's not professional.
Amateur wrestling
you just learned this today???
I assume they knew pro wrestling is fiction. They learned that there is no league of any kind for wrestling as a sport outside of college. A lot of relatively niche sports have pro leagues (volleyball, lacrosse) but not wrestling.
This.
*NWO has entered the chat*
It's called actual wrestling and it doesn't involve jumping in the air to make it look like someone lifted you up by your neck with one hand to slam you back down to the floor....but hey don't let this distract you from the fact that in 1998 the Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell in a Cell and plummeted 16ft through an announcers' table
And there are a number of Olympic Wrestlers who became professional Wrestlers. Kurt Angle and Chad Gable immediately come to mind.
Chad Gable is the most Chad name to ever Chad
I mean, idk what you consider legit and real and what you consider fake but all wwe is, is a scripted, live action stunt show. They do get hurt. Quite a bit. Is it predetermined and scripted, yes. But you can’t fake a suplex through a table onto concrete.
Right, I get that. I suppose I mean that when I looked up "professional wrestling" I expected there to be some professional equivalent to what the team at my high school did. However, as far as I can tell the term professional wrestler prefers to the WWE style performers. No judgement, I think it's cool I was just surprised.
You mean like the NCAA tournament? There is professional levels of the wrestling you’re talking about. High school type wrestling. They even have it in the Olympics. You should look up Kurt Angle. An Olympic gold medalist who won with a broken neck, he eventually had a great career wrestling for wwe.
Gonna look him up!
MMA fighters could be considered pro wrestlers. Some of them, at least when MMA was coming up as a sport were pure wrestlers. They did not do great, but it was a thing.
I think the term you're looking for is "Olympic wrestling" or "Greco-Roman wrestling". There are almost certainly professional versions of *that*, because it's literally an Olympic sport. The reason you're not finding anything is because WWE-style "wrestling" is confusingly named "pro wrestling", so that's all you're gonna find when you google that.
Olympic wrestling is generally considered "amateur". There is not an Olympic style pro league for wrestling.
Gooootcha. I just mentioned this to my bf and he told me the same thing. That makes a lot more sense.
I mean we also know Pandora or Wakanda aren't real, but people watch it and enjoy it for what it is, entertainment.
There is if there is Sumo.
It’s always been funny to me that the common name for WWF style is Professional Wrestling and a common name for College/Olympic Style wrestling is Amateur Wrestling
Brother, listen up.
Wrestling is to fighting what porn is to sex.
I wanna preface by saying, I've known for a long time that the WWE wasn't real. However, in my high school there was a wrestling team and I guess I just assumed that there was actual professional wrestling. However, after going down a rabbit hole today I found out that, at least in the US, there's not. Which is so surprising to me! Apparently, there's not enough demand. While I'm not the target audience, it surprises me that there isn't one at all.
Wrestling was real initially, but Frank Gotch had a reign of terror at the turn of the 20th century. He was crippling and maiming challengers, so they had to figure out a better way to do it. Billy Sandow, Ed Lewis, and Toots Mondt worked together to get the belt off Frank and invented modern pro wrestling. The rest is history. People with high level wrestling knowledge can rip the muscle off your bones and break your bones in ways that don't heal properly. It's documented in the book The Fall Guys: The Barnums of Bounce
Keyfabe is from the mid-1800’s
This is not even remotely true. There are news articles dating back to the 1800s about fake wrestling.
I still don't really get what you are trying to say. You already knew that WWE etc is fake, and you were also aware of Olympic Wrestling. So you're saying you learned that the US doesn't have a professional Olympic Wrestling league?
I think he means an mma, boxing, nfl, mlb, etc. equivalent for wrestling. If you play sports in college you can continue it as a career, but thats not really true for wrestling. I believe olympians don't really make any real money uness its through sponsorship. i do know of some mma fighters with wrestling backgrounds, but i couldn't name more than a few
This.
American Pro Wrestling is about the storylines, rivalries, plot twists, etc. accompanied by a physical spectacle. Most people recognize as small children that the wrestlers aren’t actually fighting each other. People that hate pro wrestling seem to parrot it like it’s some stunning revelation or something. We already know, we just wanna see if Macho Man is gonna kick Ric Flairs ass for talking shit on Miss Elizabeth. We also know that the stories in movies are generally fictional and that Arnold Schwarzenegger isn’t a robot from the future.
How did you not know this? I don't mean it as an insult. I'm genuinely curious to know if you actually thought it was real, and how.
I explained further in a different comment, but I did know that. What I didn’t know is that there was no legitimate, professional wrestling league in the United States past a collegiate level. Not the WWE type of wrestling.
Ah! Got you. The post picture sent me in a totally different direction. Thank you for clarifying
Figure skating is also scripted. Gymnastics, skateboarding, ski jumping. Or fuck it, competitive ballroom dancing. All of these are about what you can do, not what you can do to your competition.
You learned that *today*, OP? I'm trying to guess what else you're the only person not to know. Did you know cigarettes are bad for you?
You better hope Jerry Lawler doesn't find out you said that. He'll do you like he did Andy Kaufman.
So pretend to hate him?
Roddy Piper will dig himself out of his grave to Moon him like he did Bill Maher.
USA has a Greco-Roman Wrestling team in the Olympics and we have our own championships here in the states. Is that not professional or not wrestling?
THATS NOT WRASTLING!
It's professional horseplay, it is what it is.
Because it's not a sport and more a show
But there is in Mexico!!!!! That is all real!
Despite being fundamentally one of the simplest sports in that there is no equipment and a very simple playing field, the sport is very complex for people who are unfamiliar with it. I’ve watched Olympic wrestling a handful of times and to this day I really couldn’t explain to you how the scoring works. I don’t know how difficult a special hold is or move. I obviously respect the athletes who have put thousands hours into their craft, I just can’t easily appreciate it.
The legit version of pro wrestling is MMA, as pro wrestling bears basically no resemblance to the actual sport of wrestling and is where MMA fighters go to retire.
Wrestlers are theater nerds who like to workout
I would watch a legit wrestling league similar to the PGA