Posted: Wed September 2, 1998

It alternately amazes and amuses me how such otherwise bright people can get so bothered by professional wrestling. Screaming that it is not to be taken seriously, they take it sooooo seriously. Basketball fans waxed hysterical when Karl Malone had a harmless gig with Dennis Rodman one night this summer. Television critics went berserk when Jay Leno made a charity appearance in the ring. Johnny Carson's successor thereby showed that he was not dignified. Jay Leno not dignified! Can it be? And, most incredible of all, lovers of boxing actually had the nerve to claim that, by wrestling, Mike Tyson had disgraced boxing—when, of course, Mike Tyson had long since disgraced boxing by boxing ... assuming, that is, that boxing could be disgraced in the first place.

Malone (left) and Rodman were just having some old-fashioned fun. (AP Photo/Joan C. Fahrenthold)

What so upsets these defenders of decorum is the contention that wrestling is fixed, and therefore, anyone who is associated with it is a cheat himself. People, I don't know how to tell you this, but wrestling is not fixed. You can only fix something that everybody else assumes is on the square. Rather, wrestling is scripted. People in wrestling use the analogy of the magician. We know he's not really sawing the lady in half, but we're still entertained. We know that Stone Cold Steve Austin is going to pin The Undertaker again, but we're still entertained. The outcome doesn't matter; rather, as they say, a lot of the fun is in getting there. Besides, didn't they always tell you in Little League, winning isn't everything?

Now, what may really be driving rasslin' critics berserk is that the sport ... uh, the show ... uh, the game show is in the midst of another of its periodic revivals. You can't kill professional wrestling with cheap insults, because too many people simply adore it. Hey, it's a heterogeneous country, and there's no accounting for tastelessness. Or for fun. Some people even buy into soccer.

In fact, wrestling is so hot right now that two rival groups—the WWF and WCW—are both going gangbusters. Almost every week, the highest-rated shows on cable are wrestling. Basically, only the new Monica Lewinsky revelations top wrestling on cable.

Monday night is a veritable hog heaven for ring aficionados, when WWF Raw is War on the USA Network goes head-to-head against WCW Monday Nitro on TNT. Last week, for example, the two wrestling shows pulled in a 7.3 combined rating, while a ballyhooed Monday Night Football exhibition that featured a Super Bowl rematch between the Broncos and Packers pulled a 9.3. When you factor in that the potential cable universe is much smaller than the network draw, then wrestling just about tied football. Dave Meltzer, editor of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter—a publication that is as authoritative about wrestling as The New England Journal of Medicine is about disease—will bet you, first, that Monday Night Football ratings will be down this fall, and second, that none of the experts will understand that the real reason is wrestling. Raw and Nitro.

The WCW was revived by a promoter named Eric Bischoff, using more sophisticated—hey, everything's relative—characters and plots. The WCW's unlikely hero—that's the "babyface" in the trade—is a former NFL journeyman named Bill Goldberg. Moreover, Hulk Hogan is still around, reconstituted as a villain—or "heel." The WCW became a cult sensation on the best college campuses. Soon, in the halls of ivy, there were Monday night Nitro parties!

But the WWF roared back by taking—yes—the low road, reintroducing fake blood in the ring and featuring a new charmer, Austin, of which it may be simply said: He appeals to all our worst instincts. Meltzer reports that Stone Cold Steve is as popular with the Neanderthal types today as Hulk Hogan ever was. He's a crossover figure. Stone Cold moves those T-shirts, and he's made Raw a Monday night match for Nitro.

The irony is that although, of course, the outcome of a wrestling match may be plotted, the most genuine competitive rivalry in sports today is the cable showdown every Monday night between Raw and Nitro.

These commentaries, which appear each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition, are posted weekly by CNN/SI.

 

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