Professional wrestling, like most sports, is built on a bed of lies. But unlike most sports it’s fairly forthright about the fact that everyone involved with it is lying to you. I’ve been a slightly embarrassed wrestling fan for all of my childhood and more of my adult life than I’d care to divulge, and there’s a ritual I’ve observed pretty much any time I’m watching wrestling with another person for the first time. Before we really get into it, we have to first turn and roundly reassure each other that we know it’s fixed.
There’s something about professional wrestling as a medium that inspires this sort of shame, even though I’ve watched far sillier things in a group without feeling the slightest instinct to explain myself. But what stands out to me most about this mindset as a mandatory primer to the three or so hours of a wrestling event is that it doesn’t even serve its explicit purpose of inuring us, or anyone else who thinks along the same lines, to trickery in the way we hope it will. If you’re watching professional wrestling, whether you’re a lifelong fan, a casual observer, or a complete neophyte, you’re about to be tricked.
From a young age we’re raised on the “Boy Who Cried Wolf” model of personal integrity. The traditional understanding of honesty is that it is like a pristine white jacket that slowly becomes stained with lies, and once it is spotted and blotched with enough tall tales and fakeries, even the most nearsighted village folk will be able to spot it from miles away. This has the unintended consequence of leading us to believe that the best way to camouflage a lie is to precede it with years if not decades of honesty.
In reality the exact opposite is true. Fact and fiction can’t be automatically separated and the only way to spot a lie is with careful attention and deep thought on the part of the observer, which necessitates time and effort. And any system that relies on time and effort can eventually be overrun with sheer quantity. In fact they can often be overrun with less time and effort than it takes to operate them in the first place, because the lies don’t have to rise to any standard of quality as long as they are creative and plentiful.
We’re currently coming to grips with this flaw in our collective cognition in real time as we confront the many companies and corrupt individuals exploiting it on social media, but professional wrestling promoters and performers have known about it for decades.
In 1989, Vince McMahon, the owner of World Wrestling Entertainment and perhaps the most iconic huckster in the history of the industry, was in the throes of a legal dispute over government regulation of pro wrestling. In light of the potential troubles that athletic commission regulation could present to their business, McMahon had no choice but to employ a then controversial legal maneuver now known as The Ol’ Fox News and let his spokesmen explain in a public hearing that WWE/F matches were predetermined and therefore not subject to the supposition of fairness applied to other competitive sports.
In the aftermath of this somewhat humiliating admission that stood in direct opposition to the standard orthodoxy of supporting the fictional world of wrestling both inside and outside the ring, McMahon could have easily gone right back to business with hope that this one small indignity would be forgotten with time.
Instead, in a taped segment on a 1997 episode of WWE RAW, his flagship wrestling show, McMahon announced the beginning of a rebranding of his organization that he referred to as the Attitude Era. The monologue was full of careful nods to the scripted nature of wrestling and a promise that things were about to become a great deal more outrageous as their content adapted to the times. To summarize, after admitting wrestling was fake under duress, McMahon doubled down and created an empire founded entirely on the pretext that wrestling was fake and therefore anything could happen at any time. And in the long run this made it even more difficult to tell which parts of his shows were actually scripted and which parts were not.
As a quick but very telling example of how weird things got almost immediately, It’s important to note that while the man in the taped segment appears to be the same one who plead his case before New Jersey State Representatives in ’89, it wasn’t. Or at least it wasn’t according to the underlying fiction of wrestling. The segment was actually the onscreen debut of Mr. McMahon, a gregarious megalomaniac prone to vendettas against his own talent who ruled the promotion with an iron fist. This character was of course completely distinct from the real Vince McMahon, sometimes described by former employees as a gregarious megalomaniac prone to vendettas against his own talent who ruled the promotion with an iron fist.
The challenge in discovering where these characters end and the real people playing them begin is probably one of the most potent tricks at the disposal of promoters and performers. Even for fans who watch wrestling religiously it’s often exceedingly difficult to draw the line. The line is blurred further by moments in which performers lose their tempers and go off script, and then again by the many planned segments in which performers pretend to lose their tempers and go off script.
In any conversation about pro wrestling, and lies, my mind leaps almost immediately to my very favorite wrestler, Eddie Guerrero. Deception was Guerrero’s entire brand. His character’s mantra “I Lie, I Cheat, I Steal” blasted over loudspeakers as he swaggered casually to the ring, and the same phrase adorned his ring gear and merchandise in case any of his fans were hard of hearing.
His in ring persona was half dashing rogue, half particularly rules minded soccer player, with just a dash of Charlie Chaplin mixed in. His matches were full of flops and pratfalls, angry diatribes at referees, and most of all, the aforementioned lying, cheating and stealing.
But by far the most most effective armament in his constant pitched battle of deceit was his smile. Whether he was embodying a hero or a villain, the smile never left Eddie’s face. It was almost impossible to believe that Eddie Guerrero wasn’t having the time of his life whenever he climbed up to the top rope and leapt off onto some poor unsuspecting soul down below. As a young fan, I didn’t really believe that he was hitting people, I didn’t believe that he was a cheater or that he actually hated his sometimes rival, Rey Mysterio. But I fell hook, line and sinker for his happiness. His beaming smile completely obscured the biggest and most devastating lie of all.
That illusion faded in the wake of Guerrero’s untimely death of a heart attack at only 38 years old. In the months and weeks that followed it became clear that even as much as Guerrero loved to perform and cherished his moments in the ring, he also spent a lot of that time in a great deal of pain, battling a litany of debilitating physical injuries and a corresponding opioid addiction. Dozens of stories of wrestlers who struggled with in-ring injuries and died too soon like Guerrero are woven into the fabric of professional wrestling history, but there’s an eerie disconnect between the televised product and one of its most obvious and tragic outcomes.
Around the time of the 1989 hearing that publicly revealed the fakery of professional wrestling, Al Komjathy, an aide to one of New Jersey’s state representatives remarked “If this were real, there would be broken bones all over the place.” Which reveals just how badly he had been misled about the nature of one of the most dangerous activities ever to be broadcast on national television. Professional wrestling is fake whenever promoters need it to be, and real only when they allow it.
For the most part though, the ways in which professional wrestling manages to dupe us are far from sinister, and are somewhat helped along by our willing suspension of disbelief. As long as the deception is about enhancing the story being told and not re-enforcing negative stereotypes or dehumanizing the undercompensated private contractors in the ring bringing the story to life, I’m comfortable with it.
But this this week, as the most ugly, turbulent and snakebit presidency in modern history came to an end, I’ve been thinking about how often it feels as if people discussing politics are both metaphorically and literally reassuring each other that that they know it’s fixed. As if that alone will protect them from the torrent of information coming through their phones.
The truth as it relates both to professional wrestling and to the real world outside of it is that if you are observing it you are part of the grift, whether you want to be or not. And passivity is not an adequate defense. The hope central to the endeavors of bad actors in both news and politics, is not that viewers will take everything they are saying as uncompromisingly true, but instead that they will knowingly remark “this is all fake” and then sit back as the cacophony washes over them, content that they’ve done their due diligence.
Splorchtown 