*Andre Bazin Voice* What Is Sports?
some notes on the enduring discourse of professional wrestling: sport or not sport?
After a hundred years of discussion and a million comments, the forum thread “Is pro wrestling a sport?” has been officially closed. I hate that I’m about to type out these words, but there’s been some “discourse” on “Wrestling Twitter” as of late, inspired by a tweet from a wrestler I happen to like a lot as an in-ring technician, even if I might disagree with this specific take. It’s nothing that hasn’t been said a million times by various people online, or in real life when trying and failing to get their more respectable friends interested in the dumb carny bullshit that is professional wrestling: “Pro wrestling isn’t a sport, it’s a performance art more like opera and ballet than boxing or MMA” was the gist of it.
If you’d asked me a few years ago, I probably would have given you a very different answer: what originally drew me to wrestling was the pomp and circumstance, the “cinematic” elements that I could latch onto as a cinephile, and yes, even the “storytelling.” But as I’ve gone deeper into the medium and learned more of its history, my feelings have become quite complicated on the subject, and my taste has also radically evolved. Much like I used to be a backpacker who then said fuck that conscious noise and started listening to Chief Keef and Three 6 Mafia, I am, much to my current chagrin, a reformed “Wrestling isn’t a sport” bitch. Over time, the more wrestling I consumed, I began to realize the true draw for me wasn’t pageantry or melodrama or any of that, but the inherent beauty and thrill of pure athleticism, of seeing a human being push their body beyond the limit of what you thought possible.
People constantly ask, “What is art?” but here it feels maybe more important to ask, “What is sport?”. To misquote Frank Zappa’s line about music criticism, writing about sports is like wrestling about ballet, because how do words capture pure motion and physical mastery? It’s usually defined through the binary of sport versus play — I think the obvious difference between “sport” and “play” is the existence of rules that frame and guide the action, as well as an outcome that is not necessarily predetermined, but desired and worked toward, where “play” is seemingly open-ended. Professional wrestling is shaped by rules, on the surface level of kayfabe and on a deeper meta-level, defined by clear tropes as all genres are: the ring, the ropes, the workers, etc. We may know, as smartened-up marks, that the outcome of a wrestling match has been fixed, which is neither “play” nor “sport,” but script, but I think we’re forgetting something pretty fundamental about a dangerous performance involving human bodies, which are themselves never as fixed or certain as we would like them to be. There may be an agreed-upon outcome that is being worked toward, but that outcome may not be reached or executed perfectly—there’s always the risk of injury, of “real” emotions getting in the way, of crowd interference or divine disaster, much like sports, which thread an extremely fine line between routine practice and living instinct. Though professional wrestling may have become significantly more choreographed over the last few decades, predetermined beyond just the results and in the shape of spots themselves as opposed to called in the ring, it can never be completely fixed or controlled because of the fundamental nature of the human body. There is not really an option to “fix it in post” in professional wrestling as there is with so many other mediums. Statues don’t bleed or get sick, motion pictures are a closed loop, but wrestling is alive in the way that only sports can be.
There’s a way of looking at sports as something totally intentional, the result of intense practice and premeditated strategy, while art is expressive and instinctive. But the opposite is also true: the way a work of art is presented to the public is usually heavily mediated and controlled by the artist, while sports evolve and mutate in a second of play. Wrestling, likewise, is a synthesis of both, and varies vastly between workers and companies and promotions — part of what makes professional wrestling so unique is its distinct ability to absorb other mediums like a toxic sponge, whether that’s the incorporation of other fighting styles and the influence of athletic experience in other sports, or popular culture itself. As an example, the roughhousing style of brawling associated with the Amarillo territory and Dory Funk’s Texas Death Match was shaped by the athletic background of star performers like Stan Hansen, Bruiser Brody, and Ted DiBiase, who cut their teeth as defensive linemen at West Texas A&M — in his biography, Hansen talks about how the lariat was originally a defensive tackle move in football, which has since been banned in its sport of origin.
Over the past few decades, there’s been an influx of theater kids into the form, drawn to the notion of wrestling as “narrative,” all storyline and soap opera, which isn’t entirely untrue. But I think it’s important for us to remember that, much like the monopoly of WWE, the “wrestling as art and/or storytelling” mentality, as sold by people who love to quote that fucking Barthes essay, is still something of a historical anomaly that’s only emerged since the demise of the territory system. You can choose to take it or leave it, but for more of its history than not, professional wrestling has been presented as a sport. The insistence that wrestling is not a sport in any way shape or form starts to feel like some dumb coded nerds vs. jocks debate, where sports is the domain of simpletons and bullies, and art is for the rarified intellectual. But sports are art too, and the draw for spectators often has as much to do with the awe-inspiring physical abilities of our fellow man, as it does with rivalries and victories. Some of these nerds who want to keep wrestling for the nerds should maybe do a little introspection, and realize that their interest in professional wrestling might be because it can be a gateway sport, and satisfy an itch for something they’d like if it wasn’t for their high school bullies. Needless to say, in a different time, many of the wrestlers who fall into this category and who sell this line would probably have been bullied out of the sport and stretched within an inch of their life by ex-football players, much like a high school locker room.
Society perceives and treats sports as a populist form for the masses, whereas art is a rarefied niche for the elite, a partitioned-off VIP section in popular culture, where media goes to effectively die. When a medium forsakes its ability to truly shape and influence the public and slinks into the corner of the museum, its demise becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. To put professional wrestling up there with opera and ballet is to say that it’s no longer for the people, but for collectors and investors and donors, for an ever-shrinking community of weirdos whose precious hobby will die off with them. The false distinction between sports and art/entertainment falls apart the more you poke at it, because sports themselves are if not totally worked, then at the very least, lightly massaged. Why do big football schools book their first few games of the season against podunk teams they know they’ll beat? So they can give the fans the satisfaction of victory and draw them back for more. Why are there “media time-outs”? Because much like a taping of Smackdown Live, an arena is a glorified television studio. Why do we have marching bands and cheerleaders and “Turn Down For What” and “For Whom The Bell Tolls” and T-shirt cannons and flashy JumboTron graphics? To hype the crowd up, with the hope that their investment will influence the game, whether to inspire the home team to a W or to intimidate their opponents into flubbing. Not to mention, the greatest moments in sports, the feats that endure, do so not just because of pure skill or because of who won, but because they fulfill some narrative, much like in professional wrestling: the underdog triumphing over the Goliath, the second wind comeback from behind, the last ride of a beloved veteran, or the anointing of a hungry new star. We want narrative and storylines and emotional stakes from sports as much as “art,” and sports promoters do their best to stoke our investment and manipulate our feelings without totally blowing their cover.
This whole thing becomes a kind of circular “Is a hot dog a sandwich?” debate, where ultimately, it doesn’t really matter, a hot dog is sold as a hot dog, just like professional wrestling is sold as professional wrestling. That’s why the word “angle” is used historically instead of storyline or narrative or plot, because that’s all it is: an angle, a sales pitch, a marketing tool. It’s called a “promo” for a reason — not because it’s the main course, but because it’s a gimmick to get you in the door and at the table for the main course. What is essentially advertising and marketing, the tricks of con artists and snowmen, has been deified to the point of art. That’s the greatest work of all, when a carny convinces not just the audience that they’re the Wizard of Oz, but themselves. I see so much kinship between cinema and professional wrestling not just because of my own cinephile bias, but because their cradle was the same: not sports, not art, but the circus, the freak show, the vaudeville circuit, what film theorists politely call “The Cinema Of Attractions.” Wrestling was, above all else, an attraction, a spectacle, a magic trick. The magic trick in question was to convince the audience that the attraction wasn’t an attraction, but something real and genuine and meaningful, namely a sport.
When you look at it that way, nothing’s changed, even if we might classify wrestling differently now — in both eras, professional wrestling has worked to sell itself to a skeptical public by claiming ardently that it’s something it’s not. In the past, the line was that it was a brutal sport that hurt like hell, and that’s why you should take it seriously; now, it’s that it’s a deliberate and legitimate form of absurdist expression, and that’s why you should take it seriously. As someone who has written about wrestling for money, it’s true of my own work too — wrestling is art when an arts editor commissions me to write about it, and it’s sports when a sports editor commissions me to write about (despite the overlooked centrality of professional wrestling to the development of both broadcast television and cable, television editors are usually resoundingly uninterested). Both are true and false in their own way, but both narratives attempt to obscure the reality of what wrestling is: it’s the blade tucked away in the wrist tape, a cold needle in the ass, an injury that doesn’t actually hurt or that maybe hurts more than we’ll ever know. On every level, in the ring and on the mic, behind the curtain and in front of it, shoot or work, art or sport, professional wrestling is about convincing people to buy into a reality that isn’t real.