About a month ago, I went to watch WWE Smackdown in Washington DC. Having watched wrestling as a teenager, this was a little trip down memory lane. Since the live show – which was awesome – I’ve become addicted to ‘sports entertainment’ again. For all the oddities, outlandishness and oddballs, there is something compelling about watching wrestling. It is absolutely a form of escapism.
This last weekend was WrestleMania 39. Another of the advantages of living on this side of the Atlantic is being able to watch ‘pay per views’ (as they were, albeit now the spectacles are part of the Peacock television offer) at a normal time of day. Since my teenage fandom, WrestleMania has grown into a two-night event. A wind warning on Saturday night and the usual Sunday lazy evening meant I had a pretty much unbridled opportunity to watch the event. Watching people have steel ladders bounce off their head and seeing people jump through wooden tables should a reminder enough that while insane, the pain is far from entirely fake.
After each night of the show, Peacock also broadcast the press conference. I found the whole concept of a WWE press conference a little bizarre. In this heavily choreographed and scripted world, would the performers remain in character or would they break kayfabe (wrestling slang for presenting the storylines as true). That question made the press conferences an intriguing watch. Some of the wrestlers seemed to be breaking the fourth wall more than others, acknowledging that their matches were part of the storyline. Sami Zayn in particular acknowledged the storytelling around their tag-team title match, making some comparisons with the evolution of TV driven by the likes of HBO. Whether that comparison is a flattering one or not, there is something to be said for the building of drama which WWE doubtlessly achieves. Other wrestlers, like new women’s champion Rhea Ripley, definitely kept their answers within the storyline. Others again, such as Rey Mysterio, somehow dodged the issue of whether the background to their matches was nonsense or not.
At the end of both nights’ press conferences, former wrestler Triple H took to the podium. Triple H, now better known as WWE’s Chief Content Officer Paul Levesque, ran through the frankly immense statistics about WrestleMania’s viewing figures, social media engagement and gate receipts. Despite a decline over the decade or two since I avidly watched as a kid, WWE is still serious business. It came as little surprise to hear the morning after WrestleMania that the WWE was involved in a tie-up with UFC, creating a new business worth valued at nearly $20 billion.
Amidst the commercial figures, Triple H focused heavily on the WWE’s storytelling capabilities. It is those skills of the performers, as well as the writers behind the scenes, to take what is is essence a bunch of men and women beating the crap out of each other, and rise it into something akin to the British soap opera. Week in, week out, fans are hooked in and pulled along by a web of plots of varying degrees of outrageousness: father-son feuds, social media influencers dressed in energy drink-shaped foam outfits, some creep with a lantern intimidating fellow wrestlers who are built like brick outhouses, etc.
The storytelling is nothing new. When I was a teenage fan, it was The Undertaker and his ‘brother’ Kane alternating between rivals and partners, it was Eddie Guerrero and Rey Mysterio in a ‘who’s the daddy?’ plot and it was a McMahon family fallout on steroids set around the WWE’s purchase of WCW and ECW. If you accept what Triple H and Sami Zayn have to say, the storytelling now is deeper, more complex and longer-running. It is rewarding fans’ attention to detail and staying power. Perhaps this fits with the wider demographic trends amongst WWE fans. Those fans are older on average, not least because people like me, who started as childhood fans, have grown up but continued to follow what is now the ‘WWE Universe’.
One place I didn’t expect to find writing linked to my newly returned interest in wrestling was The Atlantic. So I was surprised to see an article via one of the daily newsletters, looking at the role of wrestling in the rise of Donald Trump. A further article considers the broader notion that wrestling is quite informative about American politics. Having watched Trump’s oratory, the resemblances to wrestlers pushing promos are remarkable.
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