In Defence of Professional Wrestling

• April 25, 2012
• 2 Comments
• Blog, Training, Wrestling
• Posted by Ed

It’s just gone midnight and I’ve just finished my forth, three-hour wrestling training session in the last seven days.

I’m about to set foot on an hour long tube to my car, so I can drive half an hour home. Then I’ll sleep for five hours, haul myself upright, clang my way through a gym session and head out for eight hours of work.

My calves feel like pin-cusions, the insides of my lips are shredded and my lower back is demanding a gimmick of its own…

…and I’m loving it.

With every passing hour of training, I can feel myself loosening up and relaxing. Bad habits are rearing their heads and, slowly, getting stamped out. I’m not what I was 7 years ago; I’m less confident, I’m slower to pick things up and the thought of getting moves wrong scares me more than ever…

But I do them all. I do all the moves I’m shown because I want to wrestle and fear cannot enter into the equation, not if I want to keep myself and everybody else safe. I still have a long way to go but, if I can keep up this pace and hold my body together, I hope I’ll make a decent wrestler.

The talent out there is amazing – and intimidating. Just today I saw a man closing on 7 feet tall perform a tilt-a-whirl headscissors and met a guy capable of pulling off standing starpresses who is yet to do his first show. I listened to gimmick banter that made me laugh out loud and found myself booing and cheering characters who had only been in the ring for a matter of seconds.

Done right, wrestling is as entertaining as TV and films. Much more entertaining, in fact. There’s no special effects and camera angles, no retakes and stunt doubles. There are people – just people – right in front of your face, making you genuinely care about every move they make. They don’t need extended stories and flash-back histories; the way they act and move RIGHT THERE AND THEN dictates the way you feel about them and the situation.

Wrestling is so much more than muscular men in pants, pretending to fight. Wrestling is so much more than screaming, shouting and powerslams. Wrestling is so much more than a sport – it’s an artform. It’s an expression of character and a performance – even a dance!

(Note: people who think wrestling isn’t a sport are simply looking for competition in the wrong place. Wrestlers don’t compete against one another in a mock-fight; they work as a team, competing against other teams to produce a better athletic, aesthetic and theatrical display. That’s how I see it. It’s more like Olympic Gymnastics than Olympic Wrestling.)

In a good wrestling match, nothing is done for the sake of it – everything is there to enhance the audience’s experience. You can’t just go through the motions, not if you want the people watching to care about what you’re doing. With every move you have to consider your positioning, how it will look to the people around the ring, and how this character, in this situation, would perform this move.

On top of thinking about all that – whilst being constantly spun around and dumped on your head – you have to consider the actual wrestling. Which foot should I be leading with? Which arm should I be grabbing? Which leg should I take-off with? Where should I place my hands? What am I meant to do once I duck this and reverse that? Which side of the ring do I need to be on next? Which way do I need to be facing right now? When should we bring in the high-points? Where is everybody else and what are they doing?

And, all the time, how should MY character be handling all of the above?

There is too much to think about. Literally, too much. If you find yourself considering everything you need to consider, you’ll be operating far too slowly for it to look any good. The only way to do it properly is to practise and practise and practise, until you’re doing most of it without even thinking about it. Only then can you get it all right, keep it all safe AND make it look good.

Frankly, it’s incredible. And I want to be a part of it.

Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t all jokes and backflips. Training in London takes 7 hours out of my day and costs me £25 a time, which contributes to around £300 a month I spend on training and fitness. I go to bed in pain and wake up in more pain, early enough to get to the gym, to ensure I’m in good enough shape to improve and stay safe.

Yesterday I was spitting blood out my mouth from a clothesline thst went badly; today I am blowing blood out my nose from a headscissors that went well… I know that, in the near future, I will be somersaulting off of ropes and letting other people land on me after doing the same. And I know that, as often as not, it won’t go as expected…

…but I also know that nowhere else in normal life can you get that feeling.

Nowhere else in daily life do you trust your safety to somebody else with every passing moment and take responsiblity for their safety just as often. Nowhere else do you open yourself up and PERFORM, mentally and physically, to the very best of your ability, like you do in wrestling.

Not that I’ve found, anyway.

• Tags: sport, wrestler, wrestling