The Drubbing

The other night I stumbled across the WWE’s 2009 Hall of Fame Induction show on the USA Network, and I wished they’d been showing reruns of Wings or even Becker. As expected, it was being filmed in some stadium in middle-America in front of a packed house. And I wondered, there’s a WWE (formerly WWF, formerly Worldwide Wrestling Federation) hall of fame? For what? What are the criteria. Best undetected whisper to an opponent during a match? Best celebration after the victory of a match with a pre-determined outcome?

So like any passerby of a massive car accident or train wreck, I stuck around longer than necessary and assumed that someone else had already called 9-1-1. And I noticed, that every single “wrestler” used the terms industry, company, business and organization to describe the WWE. But they never once uttered the term sport.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love The Rattlesnake, Stone Cold Steve Austin, just like every red-blooded American should. Because who doesn’t love seeing a badass good guy kick some rudy-poo candy-ass. But if even they refuse to call it a sport, can’t we? It is after all, a glorified combination of a choreographed dance and and an improv theatre. A full-contact Saturday Night Live if you will.

So can we stop calling it “professional wrestling”? These men & women get paid are undoubtably talented athletes in peak physical shape. So they’re undeniably professionals in the most basic sense. But what they do is most certainly not wrestling. The WWE is no more than a long-running soap opera played out as a weekly dance routine in a boxing ring. This “industry” embraces the steroid-enhanced performances and predetermined match outcomes that baseball and other sports have fought to eliminate.

As an aside, it was always curious to me why a company built on the backs of hard-working mid-westerners and southerners chose Greenwich, Connecticut has their corporate headquarters.Why not Milwaukee, Wisconsin. What about St. Louis, Missouri? How about Dallas, Texas? Just seemed to be a very curious decision to me.

Update: The aforementioned event was actually held in Houston, Texas.