Since Wrestlemania there’s been nothing but stories about John Cena winning an amazing 17th title, blah blah blah… It’s a “History making moment”, yadda yadda yadda…
Like…of course he did. It’s the storyline. It’s quite literally “in the script”.
This isn’t an achievement. Why is this in my sports news next to last night’s hockey scores instead of next to an article about who was the bitchiest on the lastest episode of Real Housewives?
I get it. I loved Wrestling growing up. Back when we all WERE pretending it was real; Macho Man, Hulk Hogan, The Undertaker, etc… But I thought at some point they steered into the whole “entertainment” aspect when most of us grew the hell up and clued into the absurdity of it all.
Have you listened to any sports commentators? They all talk about <insert current game on tv> as if it’s the most important, world-changing event ever, and every little detail had some significance.
My god, baseball is a game for (as Brits would say) boffins. Fans of the game could put meth-head ravers to sleep. I’ve worked on more exciting spreadsheets for business planning.
And football has become just as bad, with the incessant pre-game/post-game commentary examining every nuance of a play - “I’m pretty sure if the inner aglet of his left shoe had moved the other way, we’d be talking about a completely different game”.
Bread and circuses, appealing to our base nature. The difference between WWE and “actual” sports on tv is only a matter of degree.
I don’t watch wrestling, and I haven’t heard anything about it beyond this post. We must hang out in different circles.
Wrestling isn’t Wrestling
I remember liking that video the first time I saw it. If I remember correctly though, the creator of that video had quite a few sexual abuse allegations against him and I wasn’t really into it after that came to light.
I had no idea. Thanks for enlightening me. I’ll forgo referencing Landis from now on. Learn something new everyday…even if the new knowledge is old and awful.
It’s a soap opera with fighting. Of course fans are talking about the characters and the story. Nobody talking about anything that happens in a soap Opera will add that it’s just fiction, they’re talking about the events.
I mean, you see the same kind of thing with scripted television where there’s no kayfabe at all. We recently got the season finale of Daredevil Born Again, and there were all kinds of posts/comments/etc talking about how satisfying/bad ass it was to see Daredevil and Punisher beat down a bunch of cops. We all know it’s scripted fiction, but it’s still fun to watch.
Counterpoint- all sports are silly. That’s why they are called games.
I don’t dunk on wrestling fans anymore because people are free to enjoy whatever they want. But it’s always been like this. It didn’t change - you did. Personal growth!
I agree to some extent, but there’s an important difference between sport and performance. WWE is categorically separate from say, BJJ. Sure, they both have guys rolling around on the floor, and they’re both kinda silly, but one is a real competition with rules and skill while the other is a predetermined show.
I don’t think all sports need to be contests, that’s just the most common association people have. Surfing and rock-climbing are still sports even if you never enter a competition.
There’s definitely a grey area. “Sports” is a spectrum from competitive team based games, to any recreational activity that requires athleticism.
In this case my point is that wrestling presents itself as a competitive sport, while that aspect of it is fake.
not disagreeing with you - I find performative “wrestle drama” absolutely, mind numbingly pointless. my preference is to participate in (and ocassionally watch) unscripted combat sport.
however… I have trained competitive martial arts for decades (muay thai, bjj, others) and most of these “wrestling” participants are pretty skilled athletes. it takes training to turn combinations of techniques designed to injure into something reasonably harmless. there is a pretty fine line separating sparring from a fight.
I know you know this, but its still useful to remember that these players are actors as well as athletes and that can obviously be pretty inviting for a lot of viewers.
Yes that’s the reality. I was just rage baiting meatheads for fun. Tee-hee. Nobody’s perfect.
Okay, so as a teenager I was a super nerd and got into swords. I took olympic style fencing lessons first, then got into the ren faire and also did some stage combat. Sadly, I have health problems and I couldn’t keep my knees in place, and had to quit. The difference between those is probably the same difference between WWE style wrestling, and BJJ. One is done with choreography, one is a competition.
They’re both sports. I don’t understand why people think the choreography somehow means it doesn’t have skills or rules? It was the same skillset, different rules. Stage combat was unpadded and used heavier weapons that left more bruises when we fucked up the choreography. They’re different, sure, but the amount of overlap is underappreciated.
there’s an important difference between sport and performance
Sure. Namely, that sports tend to be “competitive” while performances tend to be entirely about spectacle. But to claim that Simone Biles is a Real Athlete while Britt Baker isn’t, because one of them does her leaps and tumbles and flexibility stunts at Olympic sanctioned events and the other does it during AEW matches… you’re really ignoring the substance for the pastiche.
What one might argue “ruins” wrestling is all the phoney accolades various performers receive. Claiming you’re “The Best Wrestler” in a staged performance is meaningless, because its clearly a scripted fight. At the same time, very few people showing up to a nationally televised event are anything less than exceptional in athletic talent. And the exceptions are primarily there for their exceptional comedic talents.
Not all sports are games, if you cant quickly grab some friends and head out to play it, its not a game.
Yes I know. Real sports have “motor” in front of them. lol
If your game doesn’t involve traveling above 100mph and pulling more than 2g it’s not a sport 😤
That’s not the definition of a game, though.
Loads of games need co-ordinated access to specific resources, from chess to the 2001 release of Halo. Doesn’t mean they’re not games.
The line between games and sports is entirely arbitrary, and changes from person to person.
All sports are games. Not all athletic competitions are sports.
What athletic competition would not be a game if all sports are games? I mean, honestly, what is the difference you see between “sport” and “athletic competition”?
You can extend or contract “game” as much as you want, but I can’t think of a definition of game that would encompass all sports but not all athletic competitions (if there really is a difference).
Track and field events are not games.
Gymnastics or any kind of event involving a choreographed routine. Diving. Really any kind of race.
I don’t consider all athletic competitions to be sports.
Why track and field events not games? They have rules, can be won or lost, and can be played casually if you think that is a requirment.
Take shot put, hammer throw, and javelin, for example. The game is who can throw the object in a certain way the furtherest. I could play a shot put game with some friends at a river bank by drawing a line in the sand and seeing who can huck the heaviest rock on the shore the furthest.
There’s a reason they call them Olympic Games.
Really any activity with some structure is a game if it is play and not “real”, even better if it can help practice a skill useful in life. There is a difference between a running race (a game) and running for your life from a bear (not a game). Between MMA and a street fight. Between war games and a shooting war.
Nah. Those aren’t games. The rules are often quite loose. You’re often not even directly competing with anyone else. Like, one person acts, and later another person acts and the results are compared. Your opponent’s actions don’t affect your results. Those field events don’t even necessarily have a set order to act on… people just wander in and out making their attempts, it’s mostly them competing with themselves.
You could run a race asynchronously as well, but time constraints prevent that.
Games have action, AND reaction. They have strategy. Throw things harder isn’t a strategy. Run faster longer isn’t a strategy.
The rules are quite loose? Why else would they have eagle eyed officials watching closely to disqualify athletes for infractions.
Games can absolutely be played asynchronously. Games can have scoring systems instead of head-to-head.
Would you say pinball is not a game?
I didn’t think I needed to get out the dictionary definition of game, but I hope this clears it up… Definitions from Oxford Languages: “noun, a form of play or sport, especially a competitive one played according to rules and decided by skill, strength, or luck.”
Living in the western world - I hear nothing about Wrestling…
Same. US defaultism strikes again. I don’t think I have ever heard anyone talk about wrestling in my life
Wrestling has a significant presence in Central America, Japan, and Europe. Presumably other regions as well but I really don’t follow the sport so my experience is all second-hand.
Real wrestling yes.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWfeskasuOjBfZ5WxG66bvBeI8XQtNHA5
Sports theater as well.
God that’s cringe.
Where in Europe?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_wrestling_in_the_United_Kingdom
Quick little history of the last century in the UK.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_professional_wrestling_promotions_in_Europe
Active circuits are pretty much everywhere.
That’s not significant at all. The viership is practically non existent. I’ve lived in 3 inches different countries in Europe plus the US. Not once have I’ve seen wrestling make the news anywhere in Europe. It’s extremely fringe.
Most sports never make the news. Even in the US it’s pretty fringe except for the wrestlers who transition to Hollywood, like John Cena or Dave Bautista. Though it had a heyday from the Hulk Hogan era through Stone Cold and The Rock when people were much more aware, generally. I don’t know anyone who watches but I know a bunch of people who used to watch.
Nah, at least this once it’s definitely not a US defaultism thing.
As an American, this is the first time I’ve thought about pro wrestling in a very very long time.
it’s not a point of US defaultism, it’s that nobody in our respective social circles can give a shit about wrestling lol
I live in the US and also never hear about wrestling.
Yeah, I think this says more about OP’s information bubble.
This isn’t an achievement. Why is this in my sports news next to last night’s hockey scores instead of next to an article about who was the bitchiest on the lastest episode of Real Housewives?
Because wrestling is a huge business and it has a lot of overlap with combat sports fans.
Like…of course he did. It’s the storyline. It’s quite literally “in the script”.
Yesn’t.
An actor breaking the record for most best performer oscars won in a career would also be newsworthy, yet you can absolutely pay your way to an oscar.
John Cena is remarkable in that he’s such a draw that a multi-billion dollar organization decided to set his career as the new ceiling to break for the next big star, by breaking a record untouched for decades, might I add. That’s newsworthy.
That isn’t scripted, that is a performer being skilled at what he does, as much as I personally don’t enjoy his work.
But I thought at some point they steered into the whole “entertainment” aspect when most of us grew the hell up and clued into the absurdity of it all.
This is like, the most “I learned something so the rest of the world learned it with me” I’ve ever seen.
Wrestling has been known to be fake for over a century; newspapers stopped reporting on it as a factual sport in the early 1900s.
Hell, it was known to be fakery before it was ever televised.
Kids don’t know until they do.
It’s live action martial arts anime theater. No more, no less.
tl;dr: Should John Cena’s record-breaking 17th title win be in the papers? absolutely. Sports section? Maybe, depends. It is a “sport” in the same way that figure skating or synchronised swimming is.
Yeah, that’s kinda silly. I can see an argument that WWE wrestlers are athletes, no problems there. But they don’t actually perform in any sort of athletic competition, which makes thinking of it as a “sport” a little weird. If WWE is a sport, then so is ballet.
Roberto Bolle wins unprecedented 17th championship against King Mouse in the Nutcracker cage match!
In a way, it is impressive. They make those decisions based on certain factors and his ability to draw crowds, attention, money has been sustained for a long time.
I don’t think people are deluding themselves.
WWE is less wrestling and more a glorification vehicle for the MacMahon syndicate. All the real pro wrestling is on AEW or the circuits now.
Wrestling and the media surrounding it will always be written/performed as though it is real. There were just as many adults that knew it was fake when we were kids that didn’t. It’s santa clause and easter bunny style culture. Once you are disillusioned, if you want to continue being involved, you join in on the act.
The audience participating in the performance by pretending that it’s real is central to the meaning of kayfabe. That never changed, even if it only recently expanded to some media that’s in your news feed.
The only professional wrestling I pay attention to is the current US administration.
{sneaks up behind Trump with a folding chair}
Who cares? Let people enjoy it if it makes them happy.
