Is Professional Wrestling a Sport?

Over the past six months, I have been watching the WWE’s three main wrestling shows, on top of every pay-per-view they have put on. Wrestling in the “no fans” era has been very strange and shows how much more important fans are to that than any other sport. I can’t fully explain why my childhood love of wrestling was suddenly reunited, but it was and I have been as invested in it as one possibly could be. I get hyped up about the good storylines, disappointed in the bad ones, and I dissect matches and the skill required to pull them off like a coroner doing an autopsy. One question that has consistently come up when I try to talk about wrestling with the people who don’t get it is, “Why would you watch that if it’s all fake?” After months of being asked this, I finally decided to see what an article about the topic would look like. My greatest hope is that this article serves to illuminate a few people as to the athletic and physical acumen required to be a professional wrestler. I also have just been dying to write about wrestling in some form and this was the only way I could justify putting it on my website.

The easiest place to start is dispelling the myth that wrestling is fake. Wrestling is scripted, not fake. The outcomes of matches are decided ahead of time, the promos are usually written and rehearsed prior to the show, and certain big moves you see throughout matches are planned out and gone through beforehand to make them as safe as possible. The actual wrestling people are doing is not though. The WWE has become ubiquitous in the world of wrestling and it seems to be that everyone believes the weak pulled punches you see in the WWE are the only kind wrestlers do. Promotions like Impact and All Elite Wrestling (AEW) often employ these same striking tactics. However, in New Japan Pro-Wrestling (NJPW), there was a variant of wrestling devised decades ago called “strong style.” The idea of “strong style” is the thinking that the best way to make fans believe you are hitting each other really hard is to hit each other really hard. This type of wrestling is rarely utilized in WWE, however, that doesn’t make what these guys do any less impressive, or dangerous.

You will rarely see guys full-on punching each other in the face. The athleticism from some of the more high flyers is never exaggerated though. Guys like Rey Mysterio, Jeff Hardy, and Kofi Kingston became fan favorites because their matches were always high pace and they constantly put their bodies on the line to do something cool. Whether it’s Rey’s luchador technique that sees every move performed a little faster and with a little extra oomph, or Kofi’s dives to the outside of the ring whether its seven people there to catch him or only one. Jeff Hardy has developed a reputation for jumping off something (usually a ladder) way too high just to make a crowd pop. These are the types of stunts that guys perform weekly to provide entertainment. This is the main reason wrestling fans take offense at the word fake. The pain that these guys subject their bodies to is not fake. The torn pectorals, broken collar bones, and life-altering nerve damage are not acted.

The biggest issue I have run into with this article is that I want this to be something people can read. I don’t want to embed a smattering of YouTube videos that will drag people away. Part of that is knowing the rabbit hole that can lead people to wander down, but also it just doesn’t flow. If you want to know just how much athleticism it takes to be a professional wrestler, look up highlights of any of the guys I mentioned above. There is no better defense for that than seeing the footage.

So let's just agree wrestling isn’t fake and that these guys are indeed athletic. That doesn’t make professional wrestling a sport. If that were the case, being a stunt man would also be a sport and I have never heard anyone try and argue that. However, the sustained output of athletic feats and the vast expenditure of energy seem to side with pro-wrestling being a sport. The hardest issue to get past is the scripting. How can something be a truly competitive athletic competition with the ending being predetermined? This is the question I struggle with most myself as well.

Professional wrestling has been around as long as some of your favorite sports leagues, if not longer. Before the world’s grumpiest republican, Vince McMahon, took over as the CEO of the company that would soon swallow dozens of smaller promotions, wrestling was real. Even if it wasn’t, it didn’t matter because there was a sanctity surrounding it and the outcomes that viewers got to witness. McMahon threw that all out the window in the early 80’s with the creation of Kayfabe and the term “Sports Entertainment.” This isn’t going to be a history lesson but it is important to know what Kayfabe is and see that later term if you’ve never heard it. Kayfabe is the world the wrestlers and their characters live in. It is a world separate from everyday life where fictional faces and heels (good guys and bad guys) live. The term “sports entertainment” is mostly what I want to focus on here though. When McMahon coined that term, it was a way of telling everyone that this stuff was scripted. Real sports have random outcomes based on players' performances. Whereas wrestling was a known, written commodity. Things get changed on the fly when injuries occur and when fan backlash dictates it, but otherwise, everything has been at least roughly laid out before you ever see it.

That seems to be the nail in the coffin of this debate then. These guys know what they're doing before they do it and the occasional audible can’t make up for it. Except that isn’t the end of it. The fact that it's labeled as “sports entertainment” and not merely sports is important. Everything in the wrestling world isn’t scripted. Whether it’s spoken promos or the matches themselves, oftentimes the things you’re seeing were never fully scripted out at all. Moreso with the matches, the actual “scripting” comes down to an amount of time the wrestlers are allowed to take up, an outcome determined by a creative team, and a rough narrative the writers want to tell based on the storylines going on in that week's episode of the show they are doing. More often than not (at least with the big names) it is up to the wrestlers partaking in the match to plot it out and hopefully get a bit of rehearsal in before the match takes place. The most involved writers get is when they are looking for specific “spots” to take place. A “spot” in wrestling is when a particularly important move that’s bigger than most is performed. It usually involves jumping off of something or a particularly tense moment, or even an act involving a weapon like a steel chair or a kendo stick.

Wrestlers are required to go out in a live setting, with millions of people watching sometimes, and perform feats of athleticism for a crowd that reacts based on allegiances to certain people. To me, that sounds like the very definition of a sporting event. That’s also where the crux of my argument lies. These men and women are doing this live in front of crowds and on TV. They aren’t given these detailed instructions on what moves to be doing for the fifteen minutes they’re out there, it's entirely up to them. If they mess up the whole wrestling world gets to see. There is a level of pressure under which these people perform that every professional athlete knows the burden of. This shared experience to me more than allows for the classification of professional wrestling as a sport. “And that's the bottom line, ‘cause Stone Cold said so.”