by Erin Anderson
Exclusive to OnlineOnslaught.com

It's happened to all of you at some time or another. You'll be enjoying an episode of Raw or Smackdown! when some blissfully ignorant non-fan will walk in the room and say those six annoying words that plague every wrestling fan's existence:

"Why do you watch that crap?"

You're immediately put on the defensive, and forced to explain the backstory of the angle or match that you're watching. By the time you're done making whatever idiocy on your screen sound like reasonable entertainment, the aforementioned non-fan will roll his or her eyes, sigh, and throw off a "whatever" before going back to ignoring the show and thinking even less of you, your intelligence, and your sense of what is entertaining.

It is an interesting question, though.  Why do we watch this crap? Its popularity and relevance to American pop culture has dwindled in the past few years; the days of everybody and their brother owning a 3:16 shirt are over, and nWo apparel is now more of a novelty item than anything else. A vast majority of the public just doesn't "get it" anymore.

That's not to say that the general public is oblivious to how physically demanding wrestling is for the participants involved. Sure, you can still find the jackasses following the "It's all fake" mantra, but more and more people are at least grudgingly acknowledging that yeah, these guys (and girls) are athletes. This probably has something to do with wrestlers being on talk shows, Mick Foley's books becoming best-sellers, the success of Tough Enough, and documentaries on the subject like Wrestling With Shadows. I read Roger Ebert's review of the documentary Beyond the Mat, and he had this to say about it:

It is a show, yes. "Beyond the Mat" makes no secret of the fact that every match is scripted and that the outcomes are not in doubt. But we knew that. What I didn't fully realize, until I saw this film, is how real the show is. Just because you script a guy being thrown out of the ring doesn't mean it's painless when he bounces off a table and onto the floor. You can't bleed unless you're cut. And sometimes things go wrong; a wire cage mesh breaks, and a wrestler falls maybe 20 feet to the mat. That hurts.

Roger Ebert, always a master of understatement. But he makes his (and my) point well enough: most people today recognize the legitimate pain wrestlers must work through. So yeah, the general public knows that it fucking hurts to take a bump or a chairshot -- they know it's more "real" than what people originally gave it credit for. So why do so many still refuse to watch? Perhaps it's because the scripted nature of the action makes it too fake for most viewers, despite the legitimate suffering of the competitors.

Or maybe the reality of the pain is exactly what turns so many people off to wrestling in the first place (and probably explains why WWE's fan base is overwhelmingly male). Several of my female friends can't stand the sight of blood; big bumps and chairshots make them cringe and change the channel, no matter how sexy the performers might seem to them. It even happened to some of the fans last week when a retired Mick Foley got the ever-loving crap beat out of him on Raw.

On the whole, though, this is mainly a female problem, one that I somehow managed to avoid. Just last year, I had the opportunity to give a five-minute speech in my public speaking course at school. Naturally, I chose wrestling as my topic, complete with a highlight video from the TLC 4 match as my visual aid. My professor (who was female) made a face as I ran the video; I asked her if it looked too fake for her tastes. "No," she replied. "It looks too brutal."

Generally, guys don't have that same aversion to violence that women do, which probably explains why they make up the majority of wrestling's fan base. But male non-fans do have a massive aversion to the soap opera-style storylines -- which, admittedly, can be enormously (and embarrassingly) stupid. The acting couldn't exactly be described as top-notch, either. But honestly, they're not any worse than what you'd see on Passions, The Young and the Restless, or General Hospital, and it still surprises me that more women aren't into wrestling specifically for the storylines and (occasionally) good-looking men.

In spite of all this: the gratuitous and sometimes over-the-top violence, the scripted matches, the inane storylines, the substandard soap-opera acting… we still watch. Why?

I'll tell you why: the gratuitous and sometimes over-the-top violence, the scripted matches, the inane storylines, and the substandard soap-opera acting.

You love it. You know you love it.

The violence and in-ring action are what draw us to the WWE product. We love it for the same reasons the non-fans despise it. When done well, a great match really could be considered a work of art -- a look at the Angle-Benoit match from this year's Royal Rumble or the surgical precision of Rey Mysterio's high-flying is proof of that. It's just another form of storytelling, no different from a movie or television drama… except for the sweaty men in spandex beating the crap out of each other.

The scripted nature of wrestling is part of the reason that Internet wrestling columnists and message boards on the topic exist in the first place; it gives us all a chance to bitch and moan about the decisions of the booking committee, or praise them when we think they've done something right. If the endings and storylines truly were real, we couldn't complain about the creative direction of the company. We also get to squabble with each other about it on message boards and in chat, and let's face it: flame wars are fun. Pointless, maybe, but still fun.

While the violence may draw us to the product, the storylines are what keep us watching, laughing, cheering, and occasionally swearing at our televisions. I watched the WWF as a child, but didn't start following as an adult until one fateful Monday night when I was flipping channels, and stopped when I saw Steve Austin and the Rock standing in the middle of the ring. They were singing an awful rendition of "Margaritaville," finished the song, and then shook hands. I was confused, but amused at the same time. But then… the Rock stopped and stared Austin straight in the eyes.

"The Rock will never forget," came the words, right before he Rock-bottomed Austin through the canvas. The crowd went nuts, and I felt an urge to cheer myself, even though I wasn't quite sure why. I did know that I wanted to find out what the hell the Rock was talking about, and why he and Austin hated each other. I tuned in again the next week, and haven't stopped watching since. That night, it dawned on me that wrestling really had gotten a bad rap. The acting was just fine (and on that particular episode, damn funny) and the action looked good. I didn't care that it was scripted. It was compelling. It was entertaining.

Now I pity the people who shun professional wrestling. Who, fan or not, wouldn't have found humor in the odd pairing of Booker T and Goldust, or the memorable promos between the Hurricane and the Rock? Who, fan or not, wouldn't marvel at the acrobatics of Rey v. Psicosis from the '96 Bash at the Beach? Who couldn't appreciate the verbal abilities of the Rock or Jericho?

A lot of people don't, simply because the stigma attached to professional wrestling prevents them from tuning in. They're missing out on something that we get to enjoy every week; we can, for lack of a better term, live vicariously through our heroes in WWE. Who wouldn't love the chance to rebel against authority and beat the shit out of an evil boss? Stone Cold Steve Austin did it. What guy wouldn't love the chance to beat up his girlfriend's asshole father on occasion? Triple H did it. What American wouldn't love to shut up (the hard way) a bunch of smart-assed Canadians with a fondness for bashing his beloved country publicly? The Undertaker did it.

Professional wrestling is an unusual form of entertainment in that we keep tuning in week after week, no matter how bad it may get. We all survived Katie Vick and Al Wilson and kept coming back for more, because we knew that the next week could bring us some terrific comedy, compelling drama, or breathtaking ringwork. We know that someone, be it a technician like Benoit or Angle, a high flyer like Mysterio, a legend like Flair, or an entertainer like Austin or Jericho, is going to make the show worth watching. We've seen moments like that recently: when Flair made us believe that he could beat Triple H for the title, when Brock and Big Show collapsed the ring last week, when Foley verbally ripped Randy Orton to shreds, and when Kurt Angle informed that Shelton Benjamin and Charlie Haas were "outta here!" WWE gets it right more often than we give it credit for.

Why do we watch? Because we love it.

E-MAIL ERIN
BROWSE THE BROAD'S ARCHIVES

Erin Anderson is an Atlanta native and a student at Georgia State University. Since writing about wrestling didn't go over too well with her English professors, she vents here at Online Onslaught.

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