Professional wrestling, like anything else, has a fan base. Professional wrestling fans are a very unique breed. The reason for that is wrestling is a very unique art. You either understand how it works or you don’t, there is no in between so to speak. Real wrestling fans are the ones who understand and enjoy professional wrestling for what it is.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvTNyKIGXiI[/youtube]
Above, I have linked an infamous video entitled, “It’s still real to me damnit.” It features a male wrestling fan thanking wrestlers for everything they do. When I watched it, I felt that the guy understood that wrestling is not a sport, its entertainment, but he was still in the mindset that it’s a legitimate competitive sport. That is not the case. Where the criticism comes into play is from the critics. Those are the people who torment wrestling fans by calling wrestling “fake.” I consider myself a smart wrestling fan. The proper term for wrestling is “scripted” not “fake.”
If someone is going to call wrestling fake, then they are saying it’s no different than TV shows or movies. TV shows and movies follow scripts and have actors play characters, similar to the storyline scripts in professional wrestling. Here is the difference; wrestlers are professionally trained athletes, not actors. What fans see during a wrestling match is a scripted story of athletic competition that follows a script. The outcomes are predetermined, but the audience doesn’t know what’s going to happen until the match goes on. The predetermined outcome is the main aspect that draws the criticism. Critics believe that wrestling is fake and that wrestlers aren’t athletes. Any real wrestling fan knows that is not true.
You have to be in incredible shape to do the moves seen during a wrestling match. I would be you anything that if a critic of wrestling even attempted the simplest wrestling move, he or she wouldn’t be able to do it, or could even end up getting hurt badly. If you go far enough to come up to a wrestler and call their job “fake” chances are it wouldn’t end well for you.
Critics can do and say what they want, but at the end of the day, wrestling fans are still going to enjoy wrestling. Those are the ones who know what the art of professional wrestling is and enjoy it for just that. It’s up to the real wrestling fans out there to just watch the shows every week, enjoy what they see, and understand how hard the wrestlers work and put their bodies on the line to entertain all of us. That is their goal, and when we watch and pay money to go to a show, we do our part to help them achieve that goal.
Until, next time wrestling fans, especially the real ones,
-Nick
