The art of pro wrestling
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Pro wrestling is storytelling. The action is fictional, in the sense that the outcomes are prearranged and many of the moves are choreographed, but it’s also real, Jame Parker writes.

(Illustration by Brandon Celi)

 

Here’s how I know I’m not a real fan of professional wrestling.

Because every now and again, when I’m at a wrestling show in Massachusetts, where I live—whether it’s a World Wrestling Entertainment event at the TD Garden, in Boston (19,000 people), or a Rad Pro Rasslin’ event at the Elks Lodge in Newburyport (78-ish people)—and I’m watching the wrestlers strut and grimace and go flying, and wedge themselves, red-faced, into a wrangle of limbs, and grab the mic and make their speeches, aggrieved or blustering or ramblingly odd, I’ll find myself thinking: Uh, couldn’t this, shouldn’t this, all be just a little bit, you know, better?

This thought would never occur to a real fan of pro wrestling.

But I’m sensing a furrow in the readerly brow: Pro wrestling ? Isn’t that the fake stuff? Rigged battles, hollow contests, the wrestlers cartoonishly lumbering and bellowing, the crowd in a low-rent delirium of suspended disbelief or hypertrophied half-belief or something? The tights, the glitz, the nonsense? Yes, it is; yes, it is. It’s also an extraordinary, and extraordinarily vital, cultural form.

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