Professional Wrestling is Not a Sport, It’s Entertainment Essay

Professional Wrestling is Not a Sport, It’s Entertainment In what All-American sport can skin-tight spandex be worn and women flaunt giant biceps, while brandishing names such as Disco Inferno or Manna the Headhunter and still are adored by a mass audience? Why, in wrestling, of course. The dramatically choreographed sport entertains an audience of violence-starved fans who covet moves, such as the coined "People's Elbow". In fact, wrestling rises emotion from almost every viewer the industry draws in. Whether the emotion is intrigue, or pure disgust, this form of entertainment relies on the audiences' reactions, nonetheless. In this day and age, an industry has been built based on wrestling as a revolutionary form of mass culture entertainment. Polan explains how mass culture is essentially the regime of content, theme, the formulaic regularity of simple explanatory myths, an art tied to the gives of an everyday world (169). Even though some individuals may have reserve to whether wrestling is art or not, the sport certainly "finds an emot ion resonance in the genre's audience" (Polan 167). Wrestling's main motive is to reach a large-scale audience, and the sport relies on a predictable audience and appealing, symbolic entertainment. Truly, without the hundreds of fans that swear allegiance to wrestling, there simply would be no sport. The wrestlers go about entertaining the masses with outrageous matches and just a tough of cheesy drama. As proof of this, Putterman states: Most sports begin as games that the press and public then overlay with their own wish-fulfillment fantasies in order to turn the game into melodrama. Wrestling begins with the situation and characters of melodrama and then, t... ... Clearly, wrestling is in existence for the show business, but relies on a mass audience to create the sport of wrestling. The money and fame come merely as seconds in wrestling, for the audience must be entertained. Thus, the wrestling industry's ability to bend the audiences' sediments with every move is a raw example of mass culture entertainment. There is no doubt that wrestling is effective in controlling its audience, for it consists of all the elements that embody mass entertainment. Do not let the acronyms fool you, for wrestling is an up-front form of mass entertainment that has no shame and does not try to hide what the sport is all about. So, keep watching, continue to be entertained, even attend a match, and remember that the sweaty, emotion soaked crowd is much more unpredictable than the actual match. That's the effects of entertainment, baby.