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How Fake is Pro Wrestling?

"The object of pro wrestling is to make the fans suspend their disbelief so they have a good time," Dan 'Austin Aries' Solwod recently told UK-based wrestling magazine Power Slam when asked whether the object of pro wrestling is to '...to make it look real without hurting your opponent?'.

The reason Solwod and said magazine where even having such a conversation stems from a match pitting Austin Aries and Ring of Honor champion Nigel McGuinness in New York just days before the turn of 2008.

Far from being a dazzling display of athleticism with both men doing their all to amaze the crowd whilst remaining relatively unharmed, champion McGuinness walked away from the Manhattan center with a broken nose, a concussion and a nasty cut above his right eye which reportedly needed 14 stitches to close shut,

Hardly what you'd call 'fake', is it?

And whilst your average World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) bout isn't likely to result in such brutality, that such injuries and accidents do occur at all go to show that professional wrestling might not be as fake as it seems.

For all intents and purposes, pro wrestling *is* what insiders refer to as 'a work'. In other words, it's scripted. Storylines are planned just as in any soap or drama, giving wrestling fans a reason to care about the matches taking place, and even the matches themselves are plotted out to great extent, with the days of guys going out to the ring and improvising throughout their performance all but dead and buried.

Yet whilst the results of pro wrestling matches, how their won, by whom and when are all planned in advance and essentially 'faked', there is quite simply no way on earth to 'fake' the physicality that pro wrestlers put themselves through on a nightly basis.

Perhaps now more than ever, we hear of scores of pro wrestlers being sidelined with all manner of injuries, from broken bones to torn muscles and everything in between. Occasionally, such injuries are 'faked' in order to advance storylines, but mostly they're as real as it gets.

Indeed, one way to tell if a pro wrestler has been legitimately injured in a match is to watch the referee. If a guy goes down and the man in the zebra shirt raises his arms above his head in a X position, that's his way of letting the team backstage know that 'hey, we've got a guy who's genuinely hurt down here'. That way, the backstage team can get instructions to the wrestlers, via the referee, to wrap their match up promptly and get the fallen worker some help.

Still not convinced? Just look at the number of deaths in pro wrestling over the last five or six years. The Chris Benoit tragedy aside (that had almost entirely nothing to do with wrestling other than the fact that Benoit was a wrestler by trade), most deaths in professional wrestling, from Davey Boy Smith the British Bulldog to Eddie Guerrero and more, were drug related.

Now, this isn't to say that all pro wrestlers are junkies, far from it. No, the drugs in question in these situations are more often than not steroids, painkillers and anything else that might just take the edge off a hard night between the ropes.

Night after night, pro wrestlers are slamming their bodies around with abandon and eventually, it's only natural that the pain suffered from constant bumping and bashing, whether fake or not, will take it's toll, leading wrestlers to search out anything that can take the pain away, if only for a while.

So yes, the object of pro wrestling may be to make fans suspend their disbelief, but it's certainly not hard to believe the price wrestlers bodies pay for doing so.

Learn more about this author, Chris Skoyles.
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