Why I watch Pro wrestling in 2024
During the pandemic I shopped around for new experiences to try, and my attention settled on pro wrestling. Over the years I saw clips and videos that I liked, but nothing about wrestling was emotionally affecting for me. From what I could see from the outside, WWE leaned into redneck anime sensibilities that didn't match my taste. I started listening to the “Wrestlesplania” podcast when Alicia Acampora guested on it, and got a good slice of the fandom’s experience. Eventually I listened to an episode that fully sold me on wrestling, and got me to actively watch playlists and compilations. Trent Bareta, who sometimes wrestled under his legal name Greg Marasciulo, was correcting a story previously told on the podcast, about how he rented a car from hertz, and missed the date to return it. He didn’t have enough money to pay for the late fees, so he just kept the car and drove it whenever he was in that town. This went on for months without him facing any consequences, until one day he was running errands and noticed the car wasn't where he parked it. The car has been stolen, and Greg just felt a wave of relief that it wasn't his problem anymore. He went on this podcast to tell his side of the story, which was identical to the story his friend told, but he just wanted to say it without the tone or judgment.
This story and this moment opened up the possibilities of wrestling for me, the realization that wrestling is an industry made up of fun dysfunctional himbos who started off as broke kids with a dream and weird life experiences that bleed into what they do for a living. It is also a giant interconnected network of performers with histories as granule of one time team ups in an Alabama highschool gymnasium. Every match you see will flavor all future work of the performers. When I first started watching, it felt like every wrestler I watched built their own unique setups and payoffs, creating their own grammar like unique art styles.
Wrestling is an art form with a long history and a unique discursive environment. Perception is everything, stats are justifications, and myth making is built into every broadcast. Everyone is expected to be larger than life, embodying their characters and industry secrets on and off screen. Conversations about wrestling mix on screen narratives, with critiques of physical performances, out of character opinions about the workers, fantasy booking decisions, and meta opinions about what different companies need to do. Wrestling is one of the only performance mediums where fans will determine if a performance was good by looking at ticket sales and TV ratings. This adds up to wrestling having shitty, but Interesting discourse. It's a realm of worldviews and unconsidered ideology that are apparent instantly at a glance, where entertainment can be found by trying to piece together the specific ways any fans perception is incomplete and warped. It's a cesspool that I like to gaze into occasionally.
One thing somewhat unique to wrestling and wrestling discourse is the ethereal “it” quality. That vague sense or aura around a performer where everything just clicks into place. This usually refers to charismatic big personalities with iconic looks, but it's more about a feeling than anything concrete. When someone has a magnetism to them, when they fully capture your attention. Sometimes it's more about aesthetics, Like Will Ospreay’s entrances. Other times it's about how someone carries themself. Jack Perry and Jon Moxley are both normal looking lads, but Moxley’s promo after returning from Rehab captured my soul for a few minutes. In WWE and the attitude era, wrestlers were called superstars and tried to learn into the IT quality, but looking back at that stuff it always felt fleeting and oversaturated. For me, a wrestling company should have a mix of subtle physical workers(Zack Saber Jr.), Shakespearian personal drama(Eddie Kingston), and occasionally main characters who have IT(Swerve Strickland).
There are good videos and posts about getting people into wrestling, but none of those really work for me. Without prior investment the big moments and emotional climaxes look entertaining, but don't hook you. Instead, it took me seeing wrestling as a creative field under constant backstage maneuvering by highly driven creatives to start caring. That there is a long history that informs everything happening currently adds narrative weight that can be used as the foundation for emotional storytelling. I feel like this mindset is best shown in the mountain goats album “Beat the champ”, and it's a personal exploration of wrestling's past. Once you're into wrestling though, the art of maneuvering the human body becomes much more beautiful. For example, the way Zach Saber Jr. wrestles is absolutely gorgeous to me. The man adds so much flavor to everything he does, but relies on old school wrestling holds executed flawlessly. In an age where everything is CGI animation or unchoreographed actors on sound stages, wrestling is so tied to the history of selling physicality and spectacle in ways that underpaid animators can’t accomplish. This also has to do with its improvisational nature, wrestlers adapt to the limitations of their real bodies on the fly. Last year two of the best wrestlers around had a match, Danielson vs Okada, which took a turn halfway through. It wasn't apparent at the time, but in one moment Danielson landed wrong and the weight of a grown man broke his arm. This drastically changed the scope of the match, which was originally designed to show off these two at their extremes for significantly more time. Normally this kind of injury would have the match called off, instead Danielson pretended to have a seizure to get a doctor to look at his arm. The man with a history of head injuries, who was forced to retire due to taking a dangerous number of concussions, chose to conceal an arm injury with something that could have been career ending. He took a minute to compose himself, and then continued to wrestle for 10 more minutes. He couldn't properly move that arm, but in the finishing move he manipulated it with his other arm to put it in the position of a label lock. Wrestlers are truly just pieces of meat, improvising a story together.
Violent old man and also young man yaoi is something that also got me to like wrestling. The guys(and girls and nb folk) are cute, and passionate rivalries can blur emotions.“It was like a flow state. I can’t grapple with anyone else but him”-Bryan Danielson describing his enemy Zack Saber Jr. Sometimes people are just made for each other, and capturing emotional and physical chemistry on screen is great. When Adam page tied swerve Strickland wrists, cut his face open, bent him over, and then drank the blood falling off of swerve’s face! Intoxicating passion. Afterword swerve posted “There will always be a part of me inside you”. It speaks for itself. Actual, direct queerness has been very rare in wrestling, but has ticked up in the past decade. As far as I can tell, LGBTQ wrestlers leave the industry through the leaky pipe phenomenon. In this context, it isn't that there are a handful of people who exclusively are responsible for kicking out queer performers. It's a combination of individual instances of locker room discomfort, prejudiced bookers, and local homophobic fans over the course of a career. There are a few queer folks at the top of the industry though. Former AEW champions Nyla Rose and Anthony Bowens are openly gay. Effy and Kid Bandit are noteworthy queer folks on the Indies, with Effy hosting his beloved “big gay brunches”. Finally there are playful queer storylines, like the Golden Lovers and Maria May’s relationship with Mina Shirakawa. Wrestling queerness is on the uptick, and it's a sight to behold.
Now I'm shifting from talking about the generic to the specific. I’m writing this after watching AEW all In 2024, their biggest pay per view of the year which was set in London's Wembley Stadium this year. Only one match captured my heart and my attention on this night, the Casino Gauntlet match. The gimmick here is that one person will be added to this match, one at a time, until someone secures a pin to achieve victory.
It starts with my favorite lad Orange Cassidy and the living legend Kozuchika Okada facing off. Okada was recently the biggest champ in Japan, the Pinnacle of the trade for some fans and a featured character in the games Yakuza 6 and Yakuza Kiwami 2. They start going at it when the color commentator Nigel Mcguinness unretires from wrestling and shows up with his own entrance music. It's been teased for years that Nigel has wanted to have a retirement match against his old rival and world championship hopeful Brian Danielson, and if he wins tonight that is on the table. Nigel’s appearance kick-starts the story of this match, can this charismatic old guy overcome the odds in his country of origin to face off against an old flame? The crowd’s excitement is infectious, the impossible is becoming reality as Nigel displays a unique style of British wrestling I’ve never quite seen before. And then new music hits, as Zack saber Jr. shows up. One of the most prominent British wrestlers, he just came off winning the G1 climax, an intense round robin tournament that has earned him a shot at the biggest championship in Japan, which formerly belonged to okada. If he wins this match and his title shots, he could be the first simultaneous NJPW and AEW champ.
Next comes Mark Brisco, the Ring of Honor champ getting his moment in front of a 50k+ crowd a year after the death of his brother. He flips and slams someone into the concrete floor, and then in one swift motion starts high fiving people in the front row. Kyle O'reilly comes in, and the friendship trio of O'reilly, Brisco, and Cassidy is together. Their collaborative advantage is short lived, as Hangman Adam Page enters the ring and and my blood suddenly feels different. He fucking destroys the friendly goofballs instantly. Hangman has been crazy for a few months, obsessed with the current champion, his rival who's blood he has previously drank. This match will secure Page a rematch, so when he catches cassidy and does a new kind of flip I haven't seen before, it feels eventful. Out comes the 60 year old Jeff Jarret, who over the past year redeemed his image in the hearts of fans to become a sympathetic old timer who cares about the legacy of long lost comrades. At this point everyone in this match has an empathetic or narrative reasons to win. Ricochet debuts next, with this being the first time I've seen him in action. He immediately does a barrel roll off someone’s back, and is doing something between dancing and flippy wrestling with so much energy. Finally the patriarch Christian Cage comes out hobbling, injured from a match he had earlier in the night. Christian used to be a supportive father figure, until he turned against his mentee, kissed his mom, beat him with a chair, stole his tag team partner, and made fun of his dead dad. Christian has gone on to exclusively compete against people with dead dads, suddenly interrupting another wrestler’s segment with variations of “Nick Wayne, Your Father is dead!”. Christian is an old school scumbag, so when he finishes hobbling to the ring and gets instantly spiked to the floor, the world cheers. The match ends with Christian’s teammate Killswitch(who also has a dead dad) teasing a betrayal, before giving Christian the win. Emotionally the ending was lackluster, but it sets up a fun world championship match against BryanDanielson, a man who also has a dead dad. Overall, this match sparked something in my chest, something that led me to write this post.
If you want a taste of pro wrestling that gets me to enjoy it as an adult, Check out:
Orange Cassidy vs Kylie Rae might have been the first match that really clicked for me. OC at this time was an architect as a day job, and played a character I'd describe as basically a side character in a fast and the furious movie that serves the narrative function of bugs Bunny. Kylie Rae is very charismatic here, making this a fun bit of intergender wrestling.
Effy, OC, Dan the dad, and Danhausen is slapstick character work having gimmicks play off of each other. Historically old school wrestling had a decent amount of stuff like this.
Crush Gals vs Bull Nakano & Condor Saito is a great slice of 80s Japanese wrestling. The presentation, the vibes, and the performances are all a treat for anyone interested in the subject.
Finally, Swerve Strickland vs Will Ospreay is a master class in merging audience work with big displays of physicality. This highlight video gets a lot of that across, but hearing the crowd and seeing something like this happen live better displays how impressive the work is.