Everything is Pro Wrestling

On a cool Saturday afternoon in February 2014, with the picturesque sun setting over the Golden Gate Bridge and cloud cover rolling in, I flipped on the television. Typically, during those childfree, carefree days, my soon-to-be-wife Felicia and I would’ve already gone bouldering, hiked around the city, discovered a new restaurant, and had a coffee and gelato too. Evenings were reserved for movies or sports.

Since we hadn’t yet cut the cord an endless array of cable channels beckoned. What to watch? The NFL season had just wrapped. It was too early to care about the NBA and college basketball was trudging through the dog days of conference play.

While Felicia played Candy Crush I scrolled through the clunky, never-ending guide hoping to find Jaws or Predator. No luck. Eventually the words MONDAY NIGHT RAW grabbed my attention. A replay? Interesting. I hovered over the grid and paused. It’d been almost fifteen years since I’d watched the WWE…

As a kid I loved pro wrestling. Hulk Hogan. Macho Man. “The Million Dollar Man” Ted DiBiase. The Undertaker. “Superfly” Jimmy Snuka¹. Those guys were real-life superheroes and supervillains. The avatars for this little boy’s desire to see good and evil settle their differences through violence. Mano a mano.

I watched religiously until middle school, when my interest waned, and I moved on to “real” sports like football and basketball.

But then, in the late nineties, when I was in high school, pro wrestling entered a renaissance period now lovingly known as the “Attitude Era.” New megastars emerged from the ashes of the staid World Wrestling Federation, including The Rock, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, HHH, Chris Jericho, The New Age Outlaws, Kane, and many, many more.

And that was just within the (then) WWF. World Championship Wrestling, bankrolled by Ted Turner, had poached a number of superstars from its cutthroat competitor — including Scott Hall, Kevin Nash, and Hogan — and went supernova, crushing the (now) WWE in the TV ratings for eighty-four consecutive weeks and seriously threatening to put Vince McMahon²’s hitherto monopoly out of business.

In accordance with Schumpeterian principles, the fierce competition fostered new innovations, ushering in an era of postmodern characters and storylines, exemplary promo (microphone) work, high-paced action, and new match concepts (e.g., Hell in a Cell).

The early years of the “Monday Night War” were fun as hell. Legitimate must-see TV. Alas, by 2000, WCW was faltering, WWE had seized the momentum, and the demands of college and part-time work pulled me away. (Also, I was a total Kane mark. Once it became clear he’d never get a prolonged title run I stopped caring.)

These memories ran through my mind as I debated clicking the button.

“You’re not seriously going to watch wrestling, are you?” Felicia said. Big mistake.

On the screen six men stared each other down from opposite sides of the ring. On one end, a Samoan Adonis stood flanked by two lunatics, all wearing black tactical gear. On the other, a band of gargantuan hillbillies right out of Deliverance held their ground. The crowd was amped. The atmosphere electric.

The Samoan stepped into the ring and invited a brawl. The unemployed coal miner considered it, then backed off. Want to see what happens next?

CATCH ALL THE ACTION LIVE ON PPV!!!

Sonuvabitch.

I quickly learned the two groups were The Shield and The Wyatt Family (both defunct). Pro wrestling had entered a new talent-laden era, emerging from the stale epoch dominated by John Cena, Dave Bautista, and Randy Orton. Even though I hadn’t tuned in for years, I knew those guys existed ephemerally. And while I admired their physiques, nothing about their in-ring performances merited my attention.

This was different.

In the same way Federer, Nadal and Djokovic took tennis to unseen heights, this new crop of wrestlers combined with the ageless wonders of yesteryear to produce the deepest, most gifted, most dynamic roster of athletes in the history of the sport.

Every Saturday night I watched the Monday Night Raw replay (the live show was tape-delayed on the West Coast plus I woke up at 4:30 a.m. for work). I dabbled in a few wrestling podcasts, namely The Masked Man by David Shoemaker. Even considered a subscription to the nascent WWE Network.

But I demurred. I was thirty-four years old. About to get married. Working a highly coveted job on Wall Street. Should I really be watching pro wrestling?

WrestleMania XXX was that April. An epic slate of matches promised an incredible show. The key storyline was Daniel Bryan’s underdog arc. The fan favorite, who’d been unjustly persecuted by the powers that be — in this case HHH and Stephanie McMahon — was seeking redemption, and championship glory. That plotline felt played out. A retread of Stone Cold vs. Vince McMahon from the late nineties. I still wasn’t sold.

My favorite member of the new roster was a preternaturally strong, immensely athletic guy called Cesaro (real name Claudio Castagnoli). He had a shit gimmick, shit music, got limited mic time, and, as part of a shit tag team, was clearly stuck in the mid-card. But his move set was incredible. His feats of raw power and balletic athleticism mesmerized. After a few weeks of watching him perform it was obvious he should be a future champion.

Of course, at WrestleMania XXX he’d been relegated to a Fatal-4-Way tag-team match and had been dumped into a throwaway gimmick called the Andre the Giant Memorial Battle Royale. Not a good sign. I didn’t order the PPV.

By then, however, I’d figured out how to get real-time match updates from Bleacher Report. Throughout the course of another chill Sunday night, my wife played more Candy Crush, and I relentlessly refreshed the B/R app.

Eventually, this happened:

Holy. Shit. The Übermensch was real! And, in alignment with World War II-era ideology, he was a German-speaking Swiss citizen of Italian descent. I told my wife what happened and she screamed, “Cesaro body-slammed the Big Show???!!!”

I ordered WWE Network the following day.

With ample free time outside work, I went apeshit for pro wrestling content (Felicia too). I watched every WWE PPV. Read Raw and Smackdown recaps online. Streamed WWE documentaries. Watched NXT and Lucha Underground³ with cult-like fervor. Listened to five-hour-long episodes of Ring Rust Radio and multi-hour interviews conducted by Jim Ross and Steve Austin, legends of the business who’d reinvented themselves as podcasters.

The apex of this run occurred when Felicia and I attended a live, sold-out NXT house show at San Jose State University in March 2015. We saw Sasha vs. Charlotte and Finn Balor’s “Demon Entrance.” I awkwardly shook the surprisingly tall Jim Ross’s hand as well. It remains the best live sporting event I’ve ever seen, rivaled only by a UNC vs. Duke basketball game.

By early 2017, however, it’d become painfully obvious Cesaro — like Kane, and Bad Ass Billy Gunn, and Snuka, and all my other favorites before him — was dead in the mid-card water. Worse still, we’d cut the cord right as Lucha Underground ran into funding and distribution problems. Plus, we had a newborn.

There was also only so much Brock Lesnar vs. Roman Reigns I could stomach before I remembered “adults” didn’t watch pro wrestling because pro wrestling is profoundly stupid.

Profound stupidity exacerbated by the terminally online “smart marks” — wrestling’s most knowledgeable, strident, die-hard fans — who complained incessantly about the in-ring product. Were they getting worked? Or did they have a point? I could see #bothsides.

Each time WWE management (read: Vince) put John Cena or Roman Reigns over an up-and-coming star it did feel like some meta trolling experiment. The decisions gave credence to CM Punk’s legendary “pipe bomb” promo, where he lambasted the fans and ethered WWE’s leadership, saying, “Vince McMahon is going to make money despite himself. He’s a millionaire who should be a billionaire.”

Why was I watching this shit again? Wasn’t the world descending into fascism? Didn’t I have more important things to do?

I haven’t watched any pro wrestling during the ensuing five years, save a brief one-month re-subscription to the WWE Network in fall 2019 when my son was an infant. Cesaro was part of a new irrelevant tag team. Reigns vs. Lesnar was still a thing. The Undertaker was looking old. The women’s division — led by Bailey, Becky Lynch, Charlotte Flair, Sasha Banks, and a bevy of newcomers — was the true stalwart of the show. Yet despite vast improvements in presentation, casual sexism and idiotic booking limited their airtime and appeal. My return was short-lived.

BUT…I’ve thought about pro wrestling every. single. day since that mid-life binge.

Pro wrestling, like all aspects of human culture, revolves around storytelling.

Comics are storytelling. Movies and television are storytelling. Books — for those few who still read — are storytelling. So’s art, advertising, hip hop, neoliberalism, history, video games, sports, politics, the culture war, and Wall Street too.

Life is storytelling.

Thus, by the associative property of equality, life is pro wrestling.

That sounds ludicrous. A preposterous, hyperbolic, obvious extrapolation.

Let’s explore some examples.

Most obviously, comics are pro wrestling. And since movies and TV shows are exclusively comics now, movies and TV shows are pro wrestling too.

In the simplest comic book story arc, just as in the simplest pro wrestling story arc, a “white meat babyface” (e.g., John Cena, Spider-Man) battles a dastardly “heel” (e.g., HHH, Carnage). The babyface is the clear hero and fan favorite and, on a level playing field, wins a fair contest.

So how do you make this storyline compelling? The heel cheats. Uses underhanded tactics (e.g., punches you in the gonads, kidnaps Mary Jane) to imperil the hero, who — through sheer force of will and goodness of heart — fights back from the brink and saves the day. Everyone goes home happy.

Classic examples: Godzilla vs. Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster. The Beastmaster. Central Banks vs. Inflation. Bounty vs. Brawny.

The inverse story also works, i.e., the heel is dominant and the overmatched babyface prevails through pluck, creativity, and ingenuity. Examples: O.G. Predator and Prey. The Marvel Universe vs. Thanos with the Infinity Gauntlet. David vs. Goliath.

As characters get more complex so too do the storylines.

This is where the importance of “booking” comes into play. Since the results of pro wrestling matches, like the ends of all fictional stories, are (SPOILER ALERT) predetermined, the writers/creators build the competitors’ backstories via the outcomes of prior contests and key storylines.

For example, let’s say I could go back in time and “book” my man Cesaro⁴into the WWE world title. There’s a number of ways I could present him as a credible contender for the championship belt, but I’d prefer a slow and steady approach, like this:

1. Crushes “jobbers” — characters portrayed as intentionally weak (e.g., Mysterio, The New York Jets, Marco Rubio) to make others look strong — for two months straight on Monday Night Raw and/or Smackdown.
2. Begins rivalry with Sheamus (former WWE champion): wins two out of three matches, the last on PPV.
3. Begins rivalry with Randy Orton (all-time great): wins two straight PPV matches, first capturing then defending the Intercontinental Championship.
4. Defends the Intercontinental Championship on three straight PPVs versus Jimmy Uso, Big E, and then Luke Harper (all young and hungry). Eventually loses to a heel version of Daniel Bryan (all-time great), who knocks Cesaro out with brass knuckles while the ref’s not looking.
5. Declares interest in World Championship. Defeats Kane (living legend) in one-on-one match at Hell in a Cell. Last man standing in Survivor Series main event, eliminating Orton, Bryan, and Seth Rollins (modern day Shawn Michaels).
6. Wins the Royal Rumble after entering eighth. Eliminates five, including Kane and Big Show (Rumble legends) and ultimately — gasp! — Roman Reigns (the anointed one). He’s now guaranteed a one-on-one main event match against Brock Lesnar (Viking savage) at WrestleMania.
7. The indomitable Lesnar wins (!!), but only after his manager Paul Heyman distracts the ref, allowing Lesnar to sneak in a low blow. Think Rocky IV, where a shook AF Ivan Drago fretfully says, “He’s not human…he’s like a piece of iron.” Note: Rocky movies are pro wrestling. In fact, let’s go ahead and declare all boxing-related content pro wrestling.
8. Lesnar dodges the rematch, causing triggered fans to back Cesaro even more vociferously. Cesaro and Lesnar go toe-to-toe again at Summer Slam, where the beloved babyface goes over by hitting Lesnar with his own finishing move — the F-5! Cesaro commences a nine-month title run, until he’s displaced by Kofi Kingston at the next WrestleMania.

In this “booking,” I’ve put Cesaro on par with Lesnar, and Kingston on par with Cesaro. Three different champions all end up looking strong.

This is exactly what Marvel did with the first Avengers movie.

Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, and Hulk were all booked as badasses in their respective movies. Then, when they came together as the Avengers, and their egos got in the way, the writers booked a spat between Iron Man and Thor (parity), then had Captain America jump into the fray — despite Black Widow telling him “I’d sit this one out, Cap…they’re basically Gods” — and hold his own!

Meanwhile, in the background, it’s made crystal-effing-clear nobody dares challenge the Hulk. So, booking outcome: Hulk is the strongest though Thor can contend⁵, Thor/Iron Man can scrap with each other, Cap is physically the weakest, but he’s fearless. Now you’ve got a team where the audience believes everyone can hold their own. This formula was repeated in each successive movie, in particular with the introductions of fan favorites like Black Panther and Spider-Man.

Another way to introduce a character with a bang is to have them arrive out of nowhere and take the fight to an established force.

In pro wrestling, they introduced John Cena this way in a 2002 Smackdown match against all-time great Kurt Angle. Angle won, but Cena took him to the limit, announcing himself to the world.

Marvel did the same thing with Wolverine in 1974. One day he popped up in the Canadian wilderness and said, “You know what, Bub, I’m gonna stand toe-to-toe with the Hulk.” Like Cena, Wolverine gets the short end of the stick, but in fans’ minds that weasel is not to be trifled with. Almost fifty years later Wolverine’s still among the top five most popular characters in the Marvel canon. This strategy works for heels too (see: Bane).

In politics, think Obama taking out Hilary in 2008.

In sports, Tom Brady coming off the bench and winning the Super Bowl on his way to becoming the G.O.A.T. — and turning heel in the process.

In business, Mark Zuckerberg dropping out of Harvard, stealing glorified Hot-or-Not tech, and ruining democracy.

The key takeaway: booking creates perception, and perception is reality.

Finally, let’s review pro wrestling’s parallels to the somewhat overplayed anti-hero story arc. What happens when two heels, or two anti-heroes, or a babyface and an anti-hero enter the squared circle?

When done right: magic.

In pro wrestling, one of the most famous “double-turns” in history happened at WrestleMania XIII. White meat babyface Bret “The Hitman” Hart took on budding anti-hero “Stone Cold” Steve Austin in a No Disqualification Submission Match.

Throughout the course of the twenty-two-minute affair, Hart and Austin swapped roles. The Hitman resorted to vicious cheap shots and brutality (heel tactics), but that goddamned Texas Rattlesnake would not give up. Eventually, trapped in the notorious sharpshooter, with blood streaking down his face, Austin passed out. But he refused to tap. He never quit. Heroes are built on tenacity. Grit. Doggedness.

Austin used the rocket fuel from that match to become arguably the most popular pro wrestler of all-time. Hart went heel in the ring, and to some degree in real life too, jumping to WCW.

My absolute favorite analogue in comics is Punisher vs. Daredevil. Ostensibly “heroes,” each dispenses their own brand of vigilante justice, navigates moral gray zones, and makes dubious ethical choices. Sometimes they work together. Sometimes they fight each other. Each believes they’re in the right. Picking sides forces the reader to contemplate deep philosophical questions about right and wrong. Good and evil. It never gets old. Pump it in my veins.

Note: In Ed Brubaker’s epic Daredevil run, Matt Murdock, the Kingpin, Bullseye, and the Punisher all get locked up in the same prison. Its influence is all over the second season of the Daredevil TV show.

Breaking Bad likewise delivers a masterclass in pro wrestling logic. Walter White’s heel turn is subdued and methodical. His actions always seem justified relative to the psychopaths around him. The key booking decision is the introduction of Gus Fring at the end of season two. 

Compared to Gus, Walt looks like an upstanding citizen who’s just trying to support his family. Then he’s just trying to stay alive. After their final fateful encounter viewers celebrate Walt’s victory⁶. The anti-hero bested the heel! Only later is it clear the mild-mannered chemistry teacher has morphed into a monster.

And, as one final example, consider Heat. Michael Mann brilliantly depicts DeNiro as the robber who’s disciplined, conscientious, and loyal, while Pacino portrays the cop who’s arrogant, neglectful, and an obsessive workaholic.

DeNiro robs banks while reminding the victims their money’s FDIC-insured. Pacino ignores his wife and stepdaughter’s psychological distress until one of them attempts suicide. Who am I supposed to root for again?

Heat even ends with a tense one-on-one confrontation (e.g., title match) and, as a final act of solidarity, the antagonists clasp hands to display their mutual respect. Related: Nas and Jay-Z’s epic hip hop feud. Predators vs. Humans vs. Aliens (broadly). The Iliad.

Unfortunately, failure to execute the anti-hero story arc leads to debacles like the 2016 presidential election.

Or a dystopian society where the real-life HHH challenges Elon Musk — who thinks he’s Tony Stark — to an actual pro wrestling match. On Mars.

Bonus take: You know those “real” sports hypotheticals you talk about with your friends? Like, who would win a game between the ’85 Bears and the 2000 Ravens? Or whether Stefi Graf could beat Serena Williams? Or who would win a pick-up game between Jordan and LeBron?

Only pro wrestling makes it happen:

If you’ve made it this far, I commend you. You’re my favorite reader. I hope you’re now equipped to see the world through pro-wrestling-tinted glasses. Perhaps you learned something about the human condition and the nature of the cosmos as well.

Just keep all this stuff in mind when DeSantis hits POTUS 45 with a steel chair on his way to a figure-four submission victory over Biden in the 2024 election.

If the Democrats really want to win, there’s only one babyface sureth to layeth the smacketh down.