The Storytelling Of Pro Wrestling

The following chapter is from Tough Love: 101 Short Stories, Essays, and Insights to Improve Communication Skills

A big part of my childhood was watching wrestling.

I watched it when it was called WWF.

I watched it when it was called WWE.

There were so many great characters.

The Rock, Stone Cold Steve Austin, Triple H, etc.

Wrestling was a big craze.

Until one day, I came to find out that the wrestlers acted.

There were scripts that said who was going to win.

Not sure if you know this, but this was incredibly sad news for me & a lot of kids in our school.

It felt as though someone told little kids that Santa Claus didn’t exist.

It was that bad.

Wrestling started to build a bad reputation.

If you openly admitted you watched it, someone would want to gladly break the news:

‘Don’t you know it is all fake??’

As I started growing up, I came to realize wrestlers hated that word:

• Fake.

Calling a professional wrestler fake is like calling a journalist fake news.

They view it as derogatory.

I thought this was some joke.

Well, isn’t it fake?

It depends on which context you view it from.

When looking closer, you’ll see the dark sides of wrestling.

Imagine you did that for a living.

You have to be on the road for a staggering 200 days out of the year.

Going from one new location to the next.

Added to this, you need to work with your body.

Jumping on ropes, getting slammed & suplexed.

There are a lot of dark stories about wrestling injuries.

Concussions, damaged spines & even death.

Despite these sacrifices, you got some snotty journalist or little kid telling you that what you do for a living is fake.

That may piss off the professional wrestler.

As I got older, I came to realize how unfair it was to call wrestling fake. Especially considering the transition of the name from:

• World Wrestling Federation.

to

• World Wrestling ENTERTAINMENT.

Wrestling was never meant to be a full-out contact sport.

It was never meant to be a boxing-type scenario.

It was more so meant to be a soap opera.

Pure entertainment.

When viewing it from a soap opera lens, there is a genius to the guy who made the WWE a colossal sensation:

• Vince McMahon.

If I were to call Vince McMahon the Walt Disney of his industry, you may laugh at me.

Walt Disney???

No!

But yes.

He is the Walt Disney of the wrestling niche.

Just like Walt created Mickey Mouse, Goofy & Minnie Mouse.

Vince helped create characters like The Rock, Stone Cold & Triple H.

Mind you, these wrestlers had to act.

On LIVE television.

When viewed from the lens of an entertainment company that employs artists, who happen to wrestle, the whole narrative changes!

WWE is one of the best versions of modern storytelling.

It’s a lane of its own.

I don’t watch wrestling anymore by the way.

However, I began to respect what I couldn’t see before.

Little me was shocked to find out that wrestling was fake.

But older me was more captivated by how they convinced me it was real.

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– ArmaniTalks