The High Art of Pro Wrestling

The Atlantic

8 hours ago

Here's how I know I'm not a real fan of professional wrestling.
Because every now and again, when I'm at a wrestling show in Massachusetts, where I live—whether it's a World Wrestling Entertainment event at the TD Garden, in Boston (19,000 people), or a Rad Pro Rasslin' event at the Elks Lodge in Newburyport (78-ish people)—and I'm watching the wrestlers strut and grimace and go flying, and wedge themselves, red-faced, into a wrangle of limbs, and grab the mic and make their speeches, aggrieved or blustering or ramblingly odd, I'll find myself thinking: Uh, couldn't this, shouldn't this, all be just a little bit, you know, better?
This thought would never occur to a real fan of pro wrestling.
But I'm sensing a furrow in the readerly brow: Pro wrestling ? Isn't that the fake stuff? Rigged battles, hollow contests, the wrestlers cartoonishly lumbering and bellowing, the crowd in a low-rent delirium of suspended disbelief or hypertrophied half-belief or something? The tights, the glitz, the nonsense? Yes, it is; yes, it is. It's also an extraordinary, and extraordinarily vital, cultural form: essentially American in its clanking, fantastical performance of Self, but also pre-American, reaching back into carnival, burlesque, masks, magic, the dark roots of theater itself. Which is why I love it.
Let me explain.
Pro wrestling is storytelling. It has good guys (babyfaces) and bad guys (heels) and in-between guys (most wrestlers). It has archetypally compelling scenarios: little man fights big man; battered underdog finds wild reserve of pugnacity; old-timer staggers out for one last contest; preening overlord humiliates all, et cetera. The action is fictional, in the sense that the outcomes are prearranged—agreed upon by the promoters, the wrestlers, and their writers or 'bookers' (if they have them)—and many of the moves are choreographed, but it's also real. Those crashings, those sounds of impact cannot be counterfeited; those wrestlers, night after night, are 'taking their bumps,' their real-time, real-pain, real-surgery-will-be-necessary-one-day lumps. The ring itself has a double nature: Made momentarily weightless, twanged skyward by the angelic tension of the ropes, the wrestlers thunder to Earth as they land on the canvas. (Or on the flooring around the ring. Or on the ringside table of the commentary team, scattering the mics.) No repeal of gravity.
Huge, artificial characters, stalking around within touching distance (don't touch the wrestlers!), within smelling distance (inhale the wrestlers!), getting shouted at, shouting back; an audience primed for disorientation, ready to be taken almost anywhere; the entire space activated, energized, hummingly theatricalized. That pro wrestling so often seems—to me—to be underachieving, allowing its almost unlimited artistic-dramatic potential to dissipate in lame bombast and puffery and stomping-about, is part of its endless fascination.
This, as I say, is not how a real wrestling fan thinks. My friend Lexi, with whom I go to all the wrestling shows—she has been my Virgil in this noisy, gaudy underworld— she's a real wrestling fan, from childhood. She is a connoisseur of both the theatrical and the technical elements of pro wrestling. All the characters, all the moves. Her sense of irony is acute. But with Lexi—as with every real wrestling fan—there's a mysterious, enchanted approach to the whole wrestling gestalt going on. A primordial buy-in, before the thinking starts: the Wrestling Mind.
Imagine a place where you don't have to choose between the real and the unreal—a place, in fact, where the nonstop oscillation between real and unreal is ritualized and crudely yet brilliantly dramatized. But to truly get there, to truly dig it, you need to enter the Wrestling Mind. And for a finicky aesthete like me, that's a problem. Drinking certainly helps. (Nothing drastic: A couple of nice Bud Lights will do. I'm a cheap date.) Still, while all around me the real wrestling fans are whooping and roaring and cracking mean, hilarious jokes, throned high and superb in the Wrestling Mind, I'll be levels below, fussing around with my critical misgivings.
Such as: This wrestler's monologue, in which he's vowing loud vengeance upon his current nemesis—why is it so clunky, so verbally stale? He's seized the mic; he has our attention. There might be 10,000 people listening intently. Why isn't it funnier? Why isn't it sharper? Why isn't it more insane? Why isn't it an Elizabethan diatribe, full of strange and bloody imaginings? Why isn't it better written?
Or: How come there's always this air pocket of anticlimax after the wrestler's entrance music stops? Especially at the big shows, in the arenas. Cody Rhodes walks out, peroxide stare, looking like the security detail for an alien emperor, and the whole place rattles in an ecstasy of concrete and heads-thrown-back to his heavy-metal anthem, ' Kingdom ': 'Out the curtain, lights go up, I'm home. Whooa-ooa! ' But then the wrestler reaches the ring, the song ends, and— whoosh —the voltage drops … bathos dilates … desultory crowd-buzz … Here we are now, entertain us … It feels like a failure of dramaturgy. Seriously: Shouldn't somebody fix this?
Considered as spectacle, pro wrestling—especially at the local level—fits almost perfectly the description of 'Rough Theatre' given to us by the English director and radical Shakespearean Peter Brook in his book The Empty Space. (The fact that he doesn't mention wrestling once makes it even better.) 'Salt, sweat, noise, smell,' Brook writes, 'the theatre that's not in a theatre, the theatre on carts, on wagons, on trestles, audiences standing, drinking, sitting round tables, audiences joining in, answering back.'
Pleased by the show, spectators will chant This-is-awe-some! or Ho-ly-shit! and the wrestlers will throb happily and seem to float. But a match that leaves the crowd cold will congeal before your eyes. It's alarming to watch: The wrestlers are huffing and puffing and sweating like fiends to 'get over' (elicit a reaction)—but apparently someone has installed an evil energy-draining, drama-draining magnet under the ring. Nothing works. Nothing can work while this terrible magnet is operative. They heave, they thrash, they pound the canvas with their palms. Nothing. The crowd will not engage, insisting rather on exercising its fatal mandate of indifference. Such loneliness in the ring! This is the despair of wrestlers: unredeemed perspiration, useless bruises.
So for all the scriptedness, the 'fakeness,' there's an unpredictability. An air of reckless improv. Of hazard and mood swing. One take, no do-overs. Brook again: 'The Rough Theatre doesn't pick and choose: If the audience is restive, then it is obviously more important to holler at the trouble makers—or improvise a gag—than to try to preserve the unity of style of the scene.' In my mind's eye now is the wrestler Dj Powers, expert purveyor of oiled-up heel attitude, at an event in a bar called Electric Haze in Worcester: Heckled from all sides, fuming on a pyre of abuse, Powers is screaming, 'Shut up! You love me! ' as he launches himself from the top rope.
Narrative breakout, narrative fire: That's the goal. Your storyline catches on; it keeps the people coming back. For all concerned, this is the ultimate pro-wrestling high. If it happens, then you're on a 'run'—a gorgeous (and very profitable) slalom through the Wrestling Mind, fed into, collaborated with, psychically crowdfunded by the fans. It can last six months, a year, two years even, depending on how skillfully it's handled. Most of the time it doesn't happen. But sometimes it really, really does.
In Say Hello to the Bad Guys: How Professional Wrestling's New World Order Changed America, the ESPN reporter Marc Raimondi chronicles one of those times. His book is sort of a cultural study, sort of a business story, but primarily it expounds upon a very powerful moment in wrestling storytelling: when Hulk Hogan turned heel.
July 7, 1996, Daytona Beach, Florida. The event is the ' Bash at the Beach,' a televised showcase for the Ted Turner–owned World Championship Wrestling, rival to Vince McMahon's World Wrestling Federation. In the ring, two flaming heels, two bullyboys—Scott Hall and Kevin Nash—are brawling with, and somewhat getting the better of, a three-man tag team: Sting, Lex Luger, and 'Macho Man' Randy Savage. Nash has already kicked Savage in the gut—the cheap shot, the low blow!—thus guaranteeing the odium of the arena, and Luger has been knocked out cold (really? fakely? unclear!) and gurneyed away.
So now it's two on two, Hall and Nash versus Savage and Sting, and we're in the wallowing, slo-mo, death-blow phase of the match, the moves heavier and more reverberative, the wrestlers shining with exhaustion. Soon all four wrestlers are prone on the canvas, stunned, rolling feebly. (This is a standard tableau in pro wrestling, its version of the last scene of Hamlet : bodies everywhere.)
But wait! Someone is storming toward the ring. Who, what? ' Hulkamania! Hulk Hogan is here! Hulk Hogan is here!' scream the announcers, their voices blending in frenzy. 'Go get 'em, Hulkster!'
Okay: pause. Rewind. A little context here. At this point, Hulk Hogan—real name Terry Gene Bollea—has been on the WCW roster for roughly two years. Prior to that, he wrestled for Vince McMahon in the WWF, where he and McMahon created the extraordinarily successful Hulk Hogan character: a babyface all the way, an all-American hero, beloved of children (his little Hulkamaniacs), clad in bright reds and yellows like a beautifully muscled crayon or piece of candy. A hunk with platinum hair, platinum mustache; friendly, bald crown; kind, droopy eyes; and a patriotic, virtue-promoting line in big-man patter—'Train. Say your prayers. Eat your vitamins. Be true to yourself, true to your country. Be a real American. Ooof!'
So the expectation, as Hogan makes his way toward the ring, is that he's going to lay the heels—Hall and Nash—low. Hogan climbs into the ring; he tears off his SpongeBob-yellow tank top; he dazzles the terraced fans with the gleaming caramel planes of his torso. And then he bounces once off the ropes and does a leg drop—not on Hall or Nash, but on 'Macho Man' Randy Savage. Treachery! After which he stands up and gloatingly high-fives the two heels.
In the arena, joy's fuse is quenched. Stillness. Sour, scattered sounds of outrage. The commentary team is apoplectic with despair: 'What the hell is going on? Oh my God! Are you kidding me?!' The announcers' horror rises. 'A career of a lifetime right down the drain, kid.' A hail of fast-food wrappers and paper cups starts falling in the ring. 'He has slept with the devil!'
There had been heel turns before, and there have been heel turns since—but this one was a doozy. Who gets the credit here, the writer's credit? That would be Eric Bischoff, WCW senior vice president. Having lured Hogan over from the WWF, Bischoff had noted a gradual ebbing in the current of Hulkamania. 'After the new car smell went away,' he told Raimondi, 'it was kind of like a 'seen that, done that, been there, what's next' kind of thing.' Bischoff was also in the mood for some sensational, reality-busting storytelling. 'When you see things you've never seen before, your brain automatically shifts into 'Oh my God, I've never seen this before—it must be real.' ' He pitched it to Hogan in 1995: What if he became a bad guy? Hogan threw him out of his house.
A year later, he was ready for it—although not without his doubts, as he told Raimondi. 'I went, 'Oh boy, when I turn heel, this is going to either destroy my career or this is going to be the greatest thing that ever happened in wrestling.' ' At Daytona Beach, the Hulkster went on to announce that he, Nash, and Hall were now a team: a heel trinity called the New World Order, which was soon the hottest thing in pro wrestling. Hall, Nash, and Hogan—now wearing black and cultivating vicious dark stubble around his platinum mustache—were stylish meanies. They were stylish meta-meanies: Nash and Hall broke into the control room during WCW's show Monday Nitro and pushed the producers around—wrestling as reality TV.
By now it will be clear that the real world, where most of us spend at least a couple of hours every day, is basically a footnote to pro wrestling. But it does exist, so it is necessary to recall the image of Hogan ranting at the 2024 Republican National Convention. 'Let Trumpamania run wild, brother! Let Trumpamania rule again!' Wrestling as politics, politics as wrestling: Many have pondered the connection. Did the success of the New World Order seed the culture with a virus of heeldom triumphant, which would eventually flare up and flourish in the gleeful malevolence of Trumpism? Did Bischoff's bravura storytelling end up breaking off another chunk of consensus reality, like ice from a melting glacier? Raimondi hauls in some sociology professors at the end of his book, for intellectual heft, but his case is already made: The ones least caught out by the rise of Donald Trump were the real wrestling fans. To them, it was all very familiar.
Pro wrestling happens (mainly) in the ring; it also happens in the imagination. Those booming, rattling arenas, and those riotous little halls, are imaginary spaces. Sometimes the action is rough theater; sometimes it's opera buffa; sometimes it's sheer absurdity; sometimes it's close to tragedy. Could it be better? Better written, better organized, a more efficient vehicle for whatever it is in the moment? No doubt it could. But if it was better, it would be worse.