2003/06/01 by David G. Schwartz · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #American Sports and Literature #Sports, Gender, and Society #Rousseau and Enlightenment Thought
paper · pdf · doi:10.1002/j.2831-865x.2003.tb00598.x
openalex publication_date 2003/06/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
Nothing seems so far removed from the embellished elegance of a modern casino resort as the sweat-soaked spectacle of a professional wrestling show. In fact, they are not so dissimilar—they share common roots in the American carnival tradition. Both evolved from cruder carnival forms and maintain identifiable carryovers. Each mingles entertainment with emotion. Most significantly, both forms, while ostensibly competitions of athletic prowess or luck, are actually heavily scripted. One wagers at a casino knowing that the odds are already set in the house's favor just as wrestling fans know that the outcome of the match has been predetermined, but still cheers or “boos” the action. Still, because of the enduring lure of these erstwhile carnival attractions, both professional wrestling and casino gambling remain thriving industries and entertaining diversions for many. Though the sport of grappling itself is ancient, professional wrestling emerged as a spectator “sport” in the carnivals and fairgrounds of America in the early 20th century. Originally, one of the many attractions of the carnival was a strongman who offered to wrestle all comers. These early wrestlers were known as “hookers” and “shooters” for their abilities to apply painful submissions (“hooks”) and “shoot fight,” or legitimately defeat opponents. Eventually, promoters began organizing programs, or cards, featuring several matches between professionals, and professional wrestling as a “sport” was born. Invariably, these contests were staged, with a promoter scripting the matches to maximize the box office draw. Still, professional wrestling thrived. In the 1950s, it was a major presence in early television, and by the 1970s regional promotions presented wrestling cards in most parts of the country. In the early 1980s, wrestling became a more national phenomenon. Vince McMahon, Jr.'s World Wrestling Federation (WWF), with popular, marketable champion Hulk Hogan, secured a measure of mainstream popularity and, more importantly, national television exposure. The National Wrestling Association (NWA), of which the WWF was no longer a member, also promoted itself as a national promotion, although it was actually a consortium of several promotions. In 1990, Ted Turner bought World Championship Wrestling (WCW), one of the NWA's constituent members, and pumped a good deal of his personal fortune into it, hoping to displace McMahon's WWF as the nation's top promotion. After a heated decade-long inter-promotional rivalry that featured talent raids and salary wars, Turner's WCW, having been acquired by AOL as part of its merger with Time Warner, was bought by the WWF in early 2001. After a brief “Invasion” storyline, WCW was officially put to rest, its titles merged with the WWF's own and its remaining wrestlers absorbed into the WWF. On the heels of this victory, however, the World Wrestling Federation was forced to change its name because of a trademark lawsuit brought by the World Wildüfe Foundation. The world being only big enough for one WWF, the World Wrestling Federation changed its official name to World Wrestling Entertainment, or WWE. World Wrestling Entertainment, the only remaining “big league” for professional wrestling in North America, currently televises two weekly national television programs, Raw (Monday nights, TNN) and Smackdown (Thursday nights, UPN). Five other shows, some with original in-ring action and others that merely recap the flagship shows, fill out the balance of WWE programming. MTV also airs Tough Enough, a reality-style program that chronicles the training of would-be prospects—the winners of each season get developmental contracts with the WWE. In addition, WWE produces a pay-per-view roughly every month, and merchandises a range of disposables, from t-shirts featuring popular stars and their catchphrases to a replica Rey Mysterio, Jr. luchadore mask. The WWE is big money: in 2002, an off year, the company reported revenues of over 425 million. The source of this money shows the WWE's reach: live events, television advertising, pay-per-views, merchandising, and a Times Square restaurant, the World (WWE Annual Report). This prosperity rests firmly on tricks culled from decades of carnivals. The “insider” parlance of professional wrestling is littered with carnie survivals. Fans, particularly those who “believe” the storylines, are “marks.” Wrestlers booked as fan favorites are “faces” (derived from “baby face”), while antagonists are “heels.” By pairing faces and heels, promoters hope to create compelling storylines that will “put asses in the seats,” i.e., increase attendance at live shows, ratings on free TV shows, and buyrates for pay-per-views. Wrestlers are showcased as anatomical specimens and acclaimed for their strength, muscular development, agility, or physical courage (or, as is often remarked, “testicular fortitude”). In addition, the beauty and physical charms of female wrestlers are used to attract wrestling's base of young male viewers. In this sense, professional wrestling is like a traveling, televised carnival sideshow, which brings an assortment of oddities and exceptional human beings (such as the strong man) to town. Wrestling also retains a similarity to carnivals in its presentation. Nothing is ever presented at face value. Elaborate out-of-ring storylines set up to justify the in-ring matches sometimes eclipse the actual wrestling. Bait-and-switch tactics are common, such as when a promised showdown between two wrestlers on free TV is postponed (conveniently until the next PPV) after an out-of-the-ring beatdown. The hype, in short, consistently exceeds the actual show. Until the late 1990s, wrestling promoters vigilantly protected “kayfabe,” which can best be described as a dogged maintenance of the truth as booked by the promoter. Under the rules of kayfabe, for example, faces and heels could not be seen fraternizing in public, and all wrestlers remained “in character” inside the ring and out. Some survivals remain today; when popular wrestler Duane “The Rock” Johnson needed time off from his WWE schedule to shoot The Mummy Returns, then-onscreen boss Vince McMahon declared The Rock “suspended indefinitely” for a minor infraction of the rules, thus establishing for the mark audience why a popular superstar was no longer appearing. Many fans knew that The Rock was in fact in Hollywood (a fact that the WWE, in one of its many instances of doublespeak, paradoxically publicized). Still, within the storyline, announcers maintained the artistic fiction that The Rock had been suspended by a power-hungry McMahon. This was kayfabe at its most bold and elementary. Kayfabe was one of the most easily identifiable carnival survivals, and it was only brought down by the profusion of wrestling internet sites that follow both in-ring storylines and locker room politics with an almost religious devotion. Kayfabe helped to preserve the illusion that professional wrestling was, in fact, an athletic competition in which the participants legitimately fought to emerge victorious. Mark fans showed a ready belief in kayfabe, sending get well letters to popular faces rehabilitating worked injuries (in actuality, often enjoying a vacation) and reviling cowardly heels with visceral hatred. Classic heels skilled in drawing heat from audiences, like Jerry “The King” Lawler, whipped otherwise rational adults into a blind frenzy, sometimes literally inciting a riot. This kind of audience manipulation was, often, the very essence of carnival shows: get the marks in the seats, and make them eager to come back for more. On the surface, kayfabe was the cornerstone of professional wrestling. If a fan doubted that the faces and heels were really locked in a continuing struggle, promoters believed he would stop watching. But professional wrestling has only become more popular and more accessible to mainstream popular culture since the death of kayfabe. That is because promoters, following Vince McMahon's ingenious device, now assert that professional wrestling is not sports but sports entertainment—an exhibition staged for the audience's enjoyment rather than a competition to determine the superior athlete. Stripped of the make-believe cover of kayfabe, professional wrestling thus stood exposed to the world as little more than a carnival sideshow, in which strongmen and acrobats postured and flopped around the ring. 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 heavyweight 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 physical 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 outside of the hype. The magic act may use tricks that can be bought in any second-rate 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, believing 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” represented in the ring is more than geographical. Non-white, non-Anglo wrestlers often 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 militant black faction called the “Nation of Domination.” Similarly, those who just “don't fit in” also make easy “Others.” Scott Levy, after an initial WWF run as spoiled rich boy “Johnny Polo,” transformed himself into Raven, a nihilistic, apathetic product of early 1990s grunge—his finisher, the “Evenflow DDT,” recalled an early Pearl Jam song. Mick Foley, in his first WWF incarnation, portrayed Mankind, a leather-masked freak who had been confined to a basement since childhood and who reputedly enjoyed pain. Although the heel “Other” may occasionally win, in the long run he is usually beaten by the face, who represents the “normal” side of American life. Wrestling fans, like carnival goers, could therefore encounter a menacing “Other” that was contained and ultimately defeated. 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