When I was looking through this week’s articles, the one on wrestling in the south immediately caught my eye. Growing up in a thoroughly southern family, wrestling is a sport that was constantly brought up in conversations. My grandpa, dad, and uncles would always talk about it, and, fun fact, my godfather is Sgt. Slaughter, one of the wrestlers mentioned in the article. I had never really seen wrestling as a sport. To me, it was some sort of southern spectacle where the men could talk about their favorite characters and rivalries. As the article alludes to, it’s more an entertaining performance rather than a combative sport. I remember watching it with my dad when I was little, and I did not get how this event could be associated with sports. I would see muscly men in tight and revealing outfits talking smack and acting out this good vs bad scenario. Even when they would “fight,” it was all fake stage fighting with a predetermined outcome. I always wondered why this type of entertainment was considered a sport in the American realm. While most of the article talks about the evolution of the performance of wrestling, it does discuss the physical beginnings of it. When I think of fighting, I picture something like MMA. Punching, kicking, blood, and injuries. This is what wrestling used to be. As discussed in the article, wrestlers in the 19th and early twentieth centuries used to fight in public community settings, and they wouldn’t wave the white flag until one man had enough, maybe after a broken nose or the loss of an ear. These fights would draw in crowds, partly because it was entertaining, partly because there was a right side to root for. Throughout the twentieth century, this focus on performance slowly started to evolve. Wrestlers started to play more into the persona aspect of it, developing a charter that the audience could love or hate. This is where the southern appeal started to come in. Many of the characters wrestlers would portray involved typical southern stereotypes. The obese redneck, the hardworking poor farmer, the Colonel Sanders-type plantation owner. Although the article did not mention this, I feel as though wrestling is a part of the lost cause narrative. The lost cause was another story that southerners told to keep this southern way of life alive, and wrestling is a perfect medium for this. It’s a colorful, entertaining way to show the heroic southerner upholding his traditional values while being put up against the evil outsider trying to take this away. Wrestling and fighting are two different things. Fighting is a physical sport between two people. Wrestling is a two-man show meant to entertain the audience with its colorful costumes and witty banter. I dont believe that wrestling will remain a popular sport for long; it has reached its height of popularity in American society, and it won’t be long before it reaches its expiration date.
