Wrestling is fake. Now there’s a contentious phrase.
For most of its existence the noble ‘sport’ of professional wrestling has been locked
away behind the wall of kayfabe, an illusion of realness upheld by everyone in the business
so much so that to walk right up to a wrestler and ask them if what they do for a living
is a fake was gonna get you one of these:
After Vince McMahon blew the lid off the whole thing in 1989 to get out from under the various
state Athletic Commissions - which is a tale for another video - we now live in a post-kayfabe
era where the audience has been enlightened to the fact that the people on screen are
performers and these are characters taking part in the weird, athletic morality play
that is sports entertainment.
But even now calling the whole thing fake is still gonna get you in trouble with Randy
Orton on Twitter.
In case you’ve been living under a Dwayne Johnson wrestling is predetermined, the winner
is decided by the booker and the competitors work together to tell a story about good guys
and bad guys and deliver moves that look painful and awe-inspiring. Or just cover each other
in dog food. Not all art is high art.
But prior to the revelations about kayfabe the media was obsessed with the notion that
wrestling was a fixed sport with endless articles and exposés trying to uncover the truth about
it, which the wrestlers and promoters rightly viewed as someone trying to put them out of
business.
And they went to absurd lengths to protect the business. Dr David D. Schultz essentially
ended his own career with that slap to 20/20 reporter John Stossel, Lou Albano took a televised
lie detector test, and failed, and in years prior performers would invite punters into
the ring to get a right good stretching and double check just how fake this whole thing
is.
But as something that evolved out of legitimate amateur wrestling, let’s look at how professional
wrestling became one big work.
I’m Laurie hailing from partsFUNknown and this is How Wrestling Is Fake Explained.
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The origins of kayfabe and pro wrestling share a knotted history as the sport evolved out
of freestyle wrestling in Europe during the 1800s and other native forms of competition
in North America and Japan, kayfabe, the appearance of realness, became more integral to the performance
because of how the business was run.
Professor Dan Glenday from the department of Sociology at Brock University calls wrestling
a culturally embedded spectacle and said:
“Commonly known as ‘catch-as-catch-can’, the early wrestling contests in the 19th and
early 20th century normally included side bets or gambling. Most historians of professional
wrestling look to Great Britain as the cradle of catch wrestling while Germany and France
receive honourable mention.”
Wrestling was a carnival act, starting sometime in the 1860s and 70s amatuer wrestlers would
compete to entertain the crowd whilst carnival workers would act as their promoters and bookers.
To give it some of that carnival razzmatazz a lot of guys wore colourful costumes and
created fictional backstories to their character to add drama to proceedings.
The competitions though were mostly legit athletic competitions, though we are going
on the word of the performers and carnival workers of the time, that’s what you would
say. But they used to last hours, so you would think you’d make it snappy if it was all
a work, give ‘em a tight 8 minutes with three restarts just like Raw.
Professor Glenday explains that the purity of the competition got corrupted when money
became involved:
“The link between the evolution of free style wrestling with gambling, side bets,
carnivals and entertainment in Europe and North America probably explains the branching
to professional wrestling from its free style roots. Money became the name of the contest.
Deception became the means to make more money.”
Just like how pay-to-play carnival games are rigged in favour of the house, so too were
the wrestling contests. To a degree. “Wrestlers like George Hackenschmidt distinguished
himself from other wrestling competitors with his version of the bear hug. However, by 1904
in Great Britain, Hackenschmidt had learned ‘showmanship’ from Tom Cannon and Charles
Cochran in order to make money wrestling as a variety act during popular bodybuilding
strongman contests. These ‘talents’ he brought with him to the USA the following
year when he lost his first match against Frank Gotch.”
Prior to Hackenschmidt and Gotch the sport of wrestling evolved because of the competing
interests of three factions: the impresarios, the carnies and the barnstormers. All united
in the search of one thing. Honesty. Money. It was money.
Impresarios were managers who would help craft the personas for the wrestlers to make them
more appealing and book matches to make them interesting, carnies developed dangerous wrestling
moves known as “hooks” that were illegal on the amateur wrestling scene but not in
carnival competition, giving themselves a high win-rate, but also working in tandem
with barnstormers, guys who competed like travelling wrestlers but often would work
with the carnies in order to stage matches and hoover up profit made through betting.
It was this focus on squeezing as much cash as possible out of each performance that fundamentally
changed the way people approached wrestling - the DNA is there: booked matches, outlandish
personalities, moves that you wouldn’t see on the amateur circuit.
This era is also where the term mark originates.
Back in the day with these rigged games: ring toss, balloon dart and the duck pond, which
sound like dropped Retribution names, the goal was to attract people susceptible to
spending their money on pay-to-play.
It’s a similar model to how free-to-play mobile games and the like work - some people
are the whales and likely to spend more whether through frustration, bravado or gullibleness
than others.
When the game operators found someone who was easily enticed into playing the game back
to back and had a fair amount of dough they would literally mark them with chalk.
Here’s Al Snow explaining to some trainees:
“How do we make sure we get the right person? We mark ‘em. Ticket booth is set up in such
a way that the person has to lift up their wallet in such a way that the person in the
ticket booth can see how much money you have.” “I come up with some dust or a piece of
chalk and I mark them. Hence the term mark.” Then all the folks manning the games have
to do is look for the marked mark and entice them over to throw their money at a rigged
game. In wrestling, during this early evolutionary
period before the last vestiges of true sport were drummed out of it, marks are there to
lose their money on the bets for a rigged competition.
Let’s hop back to Hackenschmidt and Gotch as the pair had two of the most significant
matches in early wrestling history in 1908 and 1911 over the World Championship which
Gotch came out on top of. Hackenschmidt’s ‘showmanship’ that was
mentioned earlier was to essentially play with his opponents to give the illusion that
they might be able to beat this dominant wrestler, because then there are stakes, then people
will come back to see the matches. Though those tables were turned when he met Frank
Gotch. At his peak good old Gotch was described as
‘peerless’ and was a talented technical wrestler, but this championship match, this
defining moment in his career is overcast with the shadows of trickery - during the
1908 match with Hackenschmidt for the World’s Championship, George complained to the referee
about Gotch’s foul tactics, including thumbing and headbutting which left Hackenschmidt bleeding,
and Gotch was reportedly also covered in oil to which Hackenschmidt asked for him to have
a shower before they continued. The referee ruled that he should have pointed that out
before the match starts. ‘Hey, he’s cheating’ ‘Should’ve
said before the match began’ ‘Exactly what is your job again?’
The whole thing got so bad that after a two hour battle to the first fall, Hackenschmidt
refused to return to the ring for the second fall and relinquished his World title to Gotch.
They met again in 1911, but even greater controversy hung over this meeting as Hackschmidt had
injured his knee training against Dr Ben Roller though years later wrestler Ad Santel told
Lou Thesz he was paid $5,000 by Gotch’s backers to cripple Hackenschmidt - Hackenschmidt
himself denied any involvement from Santel and maintained it was Roller who caused the
injury. Either way Gotch discovered the injury mid-match and took advantage.
With the World Championship Gotch became a national sensation in the US and reigned until
his retirement in 1913. But the sport was gaining a different sort
of notoriety as the critical eye of the media sought to expose wrestling’s secrets.
“One of those brazen fakes which have soured the people of this city on traveling professional
wrestlers was given in this city at the Winter Circus tonight by Duncan Ross and Ernest Roeber.
“It is said that the match was not on the square; that it was a fake pure and simple
and pulled off for no other purpose than to relieve the victims who were foolish enough
to stake their fortunes on a wrestling match.” “It is safe to say that 99 per cent of all
wrestling matches where an admission fee is charged and where professionals take part
have been prearranged before the men shake hands. “
As the media drew back the curtain on kayfabe and exposed the business interest in wrestling
began to wane throughout the 1910s, and the death knell was almost heard after old oily
himself Frank Gotch retired in 1913. By 1920 in the US things were looking bleaker
than staring down the barrel of a three hour Raw. But in the great white north an evolution
was under way. As Dan Glenday explained:
“The northeastern US, Ontario and Québec became a centre for professional wrestling
when promoters ’Toots’ Mondt, Ed ‘Strangler’ Lewis and his manager Billy Sandow (also known
as the ‘Gold Dust Trio’) t-= “
This was a
move away from the plodding pacing of matches of yore, which could drag on for hours, Mondt
called this blend of boxing, Greco-Roman wrestling, freestyle, lumber-camp fighting and theatre
“Slam Bang Western-Style Wrestling’ - which you’re right sounds like a grill house.
With Slam Bang the Trio took wrestling out of the carnivals and into burlesque theatres
and eventually legit sporting arenas creating the first real promotion in the process.
It no doubt helped that Ed “Strangler” Lewis was legitimately an elite shoot wrestler
and the World’s Champion so he alone drew a large crowd, but with the greater take on
the gate at the sports venues they made the smart move of signing performers to exclusive
contracts and becoming the only game in town.
With this ultimate control of how wrestling was presented, they were able to mould it
like clay into a new form: they gave matches a shorter, snappier structure, invented the
concept of ‘finishing moves’ and tag team wrestling.
They also began to pair teams and rivals up for extended periods creating storylines that
evolved throughout the matches and chemistry between combatants.
We are now seeing this taken to its ultimate conclusion as WWE moves into its groundhog
day phase and just gives us the same match week in and week out.
News of this new style of wrestling travelled on the breeze or through some shared connection
to the Queen to the UK where a one-upping of the format was created called “All-In
Wrestling”, which added foreign weapons like steel chairs and apparently women wrestling
in mud - mud? sounds bad, but that’s just what we called the North back then. I can
say that because I live here.
So wrestling was on the rise again, and now had the added hook of these flashy moves - flashy
moves, a dropkick, who am I Jim Cornette - and storylines which kept the fans returning.
But it was a fragile business still and one that lived in fear of being exposed for the
pseudo-competition it was.
Which happened in New York in 1933 after a coalition of promoters decided to share their
profits, burning one Jack Pfefer in the process.
A promoter himself, now on the outside of the business looking in, he took revenge by
organising an interview with Dan Parker, the sports editor of the New York Daily Mirror
and telling all.
And the thing is fans had long suspected that wrestling wasn’t a true competition, and
had likely made up their minds that they kind of liked it anyway, but this revelation fundamentally
changed wrestling’s relationship with the press.
It engendered a feeling of bitterness amongst sports writers who felt as if they were being
taken for fools and used as mere promotional tools when reporting the results of fixed
matches - many just stopped reporting the results because it wasn’t ‘legitimate
competition’. And without that promotion the business in
New York struggled for 15 years. It feels like legitimacy has been a bone of
contention with wrestling for the longest time from 1895 when the sport was still mostly
shoot all the way up to the most famous Expose, John Stossel’s 20/20 report on the business
in 1984, the overarching media narrative has been about whether or not wrestling is fake.
And you can see how that would lead an already clandestine industry to retreat even further
behind the barricade of kayfabe, the few times the curtain had been peeled back the house
had all but burned down. Confirmation bias at its finest.
But from the media perspective I reckon it’s the brazenness of the lie: the doubling down
on the idea that it’s all real, the slaps to reporters, the choking out talk show hosts
that just perpetuated this I guess feud in slow motion.
As Paul MacArthur wrote for Wrestling Perspective in 1998:
“They are so blinded by the "real vs. fake" issue that they keep their heads in the sand
when it comes to understanding pro wrestling. The record ratings, the revenue, the drugs,
the sex scandals, the premature deaths and all the other important issues that surround
this business are overlooked. They're probably fake too.”
Kayfabe was so all encompassing, the lines between fiction and reality so blurred that
perhaps for the media it was better to just ignore the big stories rather than be bitten
on the arse if it turned out to just be another work.
And unfortunately kayfabe certainly covered for its share of dodgy business practices
and shady dealings across the years.
But in 1989 the kayfabe wall was torn down - that’s the Berlin wall, which also went
in ‘89 - when Vince McMahon asked the New Jersey State Senate to consider wrestling:
“an activity… providing entertainment to spectators rather than conducting a bona
fide athletic contest.”
All to get out of paying the Athletic Commission fees and adhering to their legislation - which
is a bit complex to get into and likely the subject for a follow up video. Let me know
if you want that in the comments.
But it’s worth noting here that 30 years later, wrestling’s still on telly. Their
biggest secret didn’t exactly cause the business to implode.
I think Terry Funk put it well when he was on the Steve Austin Show and said:
“What is professional wrestling? It was a pure shoot in 1905 and it was total entertainment,
and Vince announced it total entertainment in 2010, well if you stretch a line along
that we all evolved somewhere along the line. And what we evolved too is what the people
wanted us to be, what turned the turnstile. That’s what this business is, what do people
want it to be and that’s what it always is.”
And that’s the thing about kayfabe, it was the cover under which all of this evolution
could happen, without the tricky question of why in the hell are you pretending to fight?
Because once you actually see it for what it is, it just makes a sort of sense and all
of the little lies become justified and your disbelief can be easily suspended as you’re
dragged into this wonderful, silly, pantomime, football match atmosphere and swept along
by story. In his book “Hooker, An Authentic Wrestler’s
Adventures Inside The World of Pro Wrestling” the legendary Lou Thesz wrote:
“The reality, or substance, of professional wrestling is the ability to perpetuate a fantasy…
it didn’t matter to me that professional wrestling was a performance.”
I hope that was published by Lou Thesz Press.
And I think that’s it, because once the gambling rackets died out did it ever matter
that it was a performance? Because the biz was dying out when it was two guys stretching
each other for three hours at a time, and a little bit of showmanship, a little bit
of fantasy, a little bit of work is what has kept the business going strong all these years.
Thanks for watching I hope you enjoyed this look at wrestling’s evolution from fight
to fraud, please do like, subscribe, comment and share this video around if you really
liked it as that would really help us out. And if you’re in the mood for more Explainers
why not watch this one about how Championship Belts get made and why they even exist in
the first place.Thanks also to our lovely Patreons who are scrolling on the screen,
details for that in the description. See you next time, Jam that Jam.