Wrestling, the male soap opera

While the gladiators of ancient Rome appealed to most of the populace of that era, the professional wrestlers of our own time don’t exactly enjoy the same audience.

But don’t make the mistake of thinking no one pursuing a college degree would watch hours of sweaty men in tights hit each other. Chances are a wresting fan is sitting in your class right now and more than a few Fresno State students will be in the Save Mart Center for WWE Monday Night Raw on Oct. 24.

Ancient Rome can only wish its gladiators had thought of the gimmicks you can watch today on television. As if body slams, finishing moves, submission holds and chair shots aren’t enough, the past two decades have seen professional wrestling mold itself into a male soap opera.

Soap opera? Even more reason to discredit wrestling, one might say. It’s bad enough watching grown men “pretend” to hit each other in “fake” matches, but now we have to listen to phony and ridiculous dialogue as well?

To all these charges there are answers and there are fine reasons an educated person might watch professional wrestling.

First of all, there’s nothing fake about gifted athletes engaging in extended stage combat that would make any actor, Hollywood or Shakespearean, envious. And there’s nothing phony about weekly concussions, lacerated faces, broken bones and torn tissue. The stunts some of these men, and women, have pulled would be watched with admiration by gymnasts and acrobats.

As World Wrestling Entertainment superstar Chris Jericho put it: if a stunt double were to do his moves for him, then it would be fake. But there is no stunt double and no help. He and his colleagues are out in an unforgiving ring (that ring, mind you, is designed to withstand the impact of 300-plus-pound men throwing each other around) putting their bodies on the line for our entertainment.

And it’s just that: entertainment. It’s an act. It’s for fun. It’s not real.

People wonder how others can enjoy something that’s fake. Well, when last checked, movies are fake, television shows are all acts and the best literature never actually happened, though many characters in all of these are either based on people who actually lived, or are based on ideals that all people share, archetypes. It is here professional wrestling shares its link with other, more accepted, forms of entertainment: the characters.

Wrestling is a case study of how modern American society categorizes its members. The WWE, after its purchase of World Championship Wrestling more than four years ago and its raid of Extreme Championship Wrestling’s roster, is now basically the only game in town. In this monopoly you have a tyrant (Triple H), a bully (JBL), an upstart (Randy Orton), the favorite (Batista), the immortal (Hulk Hogan) and the dead (Undertaker).

Yes, those last two are still wrestling and people’s fascination with death is, of course, not an American condition, but a human one.

And of course there are many more wrestlers back in that locker room, underdogs who will give the best years of their lives but likely never get much of a chance to shine. Dedication like that must not be overlooked.

So, as with the bread and circuses of antiquity, let’s all relax a little and watch the gladiators in the arena. Those who are about to rumble salute you.

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