To simplify this argument, professional wrestling and mixed martial arts differ in the fact that wrestling is fake fighting, and mixed martial arts is real fighting.

I could end the article there, but the minimum word requirements mean I must go on.

Which is a good thing, because to a person foreign to both disciplines, such a blunt, simplistic explanation doesn't really do much for them.

Professional wrestling signifies itself as "sports-entertainment", which I feel is a very apt description.

There are sporting elements to it, and someone must be somewhat of an athlete to compete adequately in a professional wrestling match.

But the entertainment description is also a key.

Because a lot of the moves and hits in a professional wrestling match are designed to miss, it means that to pull in viewers, both at a live event and through the mass media, there must be something entertaining about it.

So, to satisfy the bloodlust of the masses in society, professional wrestling has lots of lights, pizazz, music and maneuvers which are so outrageous as to beggar belief.

Using such contraptions as steel chairs, ladders, tables on fire and other instruments, wrestlers attack the living daylights out of each other for yours and my viewing pleasure.

Because each professional wrestling match is scripted, there's no need for a wrestler to go out and do everything possible to win, the result has already been decided, and thus wrestlers just need to conform to what management say they want from them.

It is all about entertaining and thrilling the crowd with supposed death-defying maneuvers and risk-taking of the order that one wouldn't expect of your average base jumper.

Mixed martial arts (MMA), on the other hand, also again attempts to satisfy the bloodlust in the masses of society, but through different means.

MMA is all about technique, brutality and hardcore fighting skills.

All the moves are real. All the hits and kicks connect.

MMA combines elements of greco-Roman wrestling (of which professional wrestling is a direct derivative of), along with boxing and kick-boxing to create a form of brutal yard-fighting of the like which didn't previously exist.

The entertainment factor is based on two people gutsing it out against one another, there's no bells and whistles like professional wrestling, no protective gear, no scripted matches, just pure one-on-one fighting.

There's minimal disco-lighting and music, as proliferates in professional wrestling, there's no death-defying leaps from the top of ladders of crushing blows to the head from a steel chair, again as proliferates in professional wrestling, and the blood spilled in MMA is all real.

MMA is a relatively new phenomenon which is growing in popularity every single day.

This sport will shoot into the stratosphere, I feel, for reasons that wrestling cannot compete with: it's a sport, it's real, it's brutal and it's totally understated.

Wrestling will always have a place, just so long as people remember it's not a pure sport, as that word is defined, but a sports-entertainment hybrid.

Learn more about this author, Aj Brady.
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