Was the wrestling real to you?
July 5, 2016 7:46 AM   Subscribe

As I was drifting to sleep last night, I came up with the half-baked theory that professional wrestling didn't appeal to me as a kid because the wrestling part was so obviously fake, and I could see that it was obviously fake because I regularly wrestled with other kids on the playground at school. (For example, you don't take your attention off your opponent for a millisecond, let alone a minute.) Is my theory, that exposure to real wrestling reduces the appeal of professional wrestling, true?

If you loved wrestling as a kid, did you believe it was real? Or did the reality on the mat not matter? And did you wrestle with other kids, formally or informally?

What I didn't realize as a kid was that the wrestlers were fighting together, working hard to put on a dangerous gymnastics show without permanently injuring their partner-opponent in the ring.

I also had no idea about the meta-game of winning attention and popularity; it took me years to realize that existed as a layer over rule-bound competitions even in real life, let alone in what appeared to be an explicit example of a rule-bound competition on TV. So that could be an alternate explanation: I couldn't enjoy the meta-competition, because I didn't know it existed.

Which explanation is better?
posted by clawsoon to Media & Arts (2 answers total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: Sorry, as framed this is pretty much chatfilter. -- LobsterMitten

 
I was very snobby about wrestling being fake until one day, many years ago, it dawned on me that wrestling is nothing but soap operas for men, the same way real soap operas are for women. (Generalizing of course.) They both fill the same need. After that, I was always fine with the fakeness.
posted by Melismata at 7:54 AM on July 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


I was totally into WWF as a kid in the 80s. I absolutely thought it was real when I started watching at around age 6. I think I twigged to the charade when I was about 9, and the appeal wore off very quickly after that.

Later, in my early twenties, I was able to rediscover the sport and enjoy it for the athleticism and spectacle.
posted by 256 at 7:55 AM on July 5, 2016


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