The High Art of Pro Wrestling

Yes, it's fiction. So is Moby Dick.

- James Parker

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: essentially American in its clanking, fantastical performance of Self, but also pre-American, reaching back into carnival, burlesque, masks, magic, the dark roots of theater itself. Which is why I love it.

Let me explain.