8
Popular Culture Review
And the public loved it—professional wrestling soared to heights previously
unimagined. Though only a small percentage of fans actually “believe” the kayfabe
storylines that announcers still push perfunctorily, wrestling is popular because,
being worked, it can consistently deliver entertainment in a way that professional
team or individual sports cannot. In fact, one of the early selling points of WWF
pay-per-views was that they were guaranteed three hours of action, whereas a heavy
weight boxing match might last less than a round—fans were assured of quantity
and quality for their PPV buy. As it is staged today, professional wrestling can
deliver a highlight reel’s worth of action every night. One goes to a baseball game
with little more than the hope that a bases-loaded, bottom-of-the-ninth grand slam
will win it for the home team, but one watches a wrestling event with a fair degree
of certainty that the face, even if he doesn’t “go over” (win) in the main event, will
at least hit all of his signature spots.
“Sports entertainment,” then, is decidedly more spectacle than competition.
While part of that spectacle is, as other commentators have pointed out, the physi
cal confrontation that goes on in the ring, the larger part of the spectacle is the
storyline that propels the wrestlers into the ring anyway and the storytelling that
takes place in the ring. Without this story, in the words of former WWF champion
Mick Foley (AKA Mankind, Cactus Jack, and Dude Love), the in-ring spectacle is
reduced to “fat guys in their underwear, pretending to fight (Mankind, 428). These
storylines range from the believable to the unimaginably stupid, but they serve, at
least in the mind of the promoter, the function of getting marks to buy into a feud.
Were the promoter to simply push two men into the ring and bid them to pretend to
fight each other, fans might not buy in.
This is much like the carnival, where, in reality, there is not much to see out
side of the hype. The magic act may use tricks that can be bought in any secondrate store, but if the barker promotes the magician as one of the wonders of the
magical world, marks may plunk down the admission and sit through a show, be
lieving that they are seeing something truly exceptional.
Professional wrestling also has a great deal in common with the ideological
underpinnings of the American carnival tradition, which according to Phillip
McGowan “placed the subversive on display” and allowed Americans to define
what was normal and what was “Other” (McGowan, 2). Sometimes, this is easy to
see. One of the most enduring heel characters in professional wrestling has been
the anti-American “foreigner,” usually tied to on-going geopolitical crises. In an
early-1980s contest pitting the Iron Sheik against uberpatriot Sergeant Slaughter,
what is “Other” and what is “normal” is quite obvious. But the “Other” repre
sented in the ring is more than geographical. Non-white, non-Anglo wrestlers of
ten find their identities reconstructed as gimmicks: Ron Simmons, WCW’s first
black world champion, later competed in the WWF as Farooq, the leader of a