Wrestle Mania Overtakes Mainstream America

Insight on the News, Jan 31, 2000 by Andrea Billups

No longer a trailer-park fixation, wrestling has moved far beyond its salad days of finger-shaking, carnivalesque goons to record-setting ad revenues and lucrative merchandising.

America's latest cultural obsession lies in the wrestling ring, where the likes of Sting, Triple H and "Stone Cold" Steve Austin have become testosterone-amped heroes for the young and old alike. With the advent of cable TV, the pseudosport has evolved into a curious amalgam of soap-opera drama and rock-concert spectacle, a guilty pleasure among city-dwellers and suburbanites.

"You guys get ratings that I could not get if I had Monica Lewinsky and the pope on the show," quipped Politically Incorrect host Bill Maher during a recent episode that featured old-school grappler "Rowdy" Roddy Piper and three other guests from wrestling's upper crust.

The name-calling, mat-pounding competitors, experts at staged gymnastics and pantomimed violence, also bring in the big-name sponsors. The World Wrestling Federation, or WWF, recently set TV-advertising records, logging a 230 percent increase in gross sales over the same period in 1998. Even a recent protest over excessive wrestling violence, launched by the Parents Television Council in Los Angeles, did little to squelch the interest of advertisers. While Coca-Cola pulled its ads for the soft drink Surge, those slots were resold to other sponsors at higher rates.

Literature, music and fashion also have seized upon wrestling's enormous cross-cultural popularity, with equally substantial rewards. A book by wrestler Mick Foley -- a garish hulk called "Mankind" who lost an ear during a particularly brutal match in Germany -- debuted at No. 3 on the New York Times best-seller list. A compilation CD of wrestlers' theme songs rose as high as No. 2 on a Billboard magazine music chart. Wrestler-inspired apparel -- remember the shredded Hulk Hogan T-shirts a few years back? -- continues to sell briskly today.

For those who want to better understand wrestling's allure, "don't watch the show, watch the advertising" urges Jim Twitchell, author of Preposterous Violence: Fables of Aggression in Modern Culture. "The reason these shows are all over the TV airways is not because they draw a huge audience, but because they get an absolutely perfect audience of males," says Twitchell. "In other words, it's a sort of Valhalla for advertisers when they can get an all-female audience or all-male audience or a teen audience or anything that is a pure catch. Then your ad dollars are not being wasted."

Twitchell, a University of Florida professor of English for 20 years, compares the story lines created for professional wrestlers to the "penny dreadfuls" or "bloody pulps" of the Dickens era. Those books, filled with violence and sold chapter by chapter on street corners, were written for males, who passed them around until they were in tatters. "The genre is soap operas, and they have these little crescendo stories leading up to a climax of violence," says Twitchell of wrestling today. "The story line is sophisticated, and I think it's getting more than its 15 minutes because it really is well done."

The sheer spectacle of wrestling -- the characters, the lights, the chintzy drama -- appeals not only to blue-collar fans, but to yuppies as well. A growing audience of younger fans incessantly watch cable programs such as WWF Raw, and that has begun to concern educators who fear students may transfer the behavior they see glorified in the ring to the way they treat their friends and classmates. "My take is, wrestling -- whether perceived as imagined or real -- has, in fact, had a dramatic effect on young people across the country," says Ronald Stephens, executive director of the National School Safety Center in West Lake Village, Calif. "The images that are seen on the television screen provide an example for a number of youngsters in terms of the way to solve problems."

Stephens recently visited 19 schools and the topic of wrestling came up with at least half of the administrators. "I've been working in the school-safety area for 16 years and it's been within the last year and a half that the impact of professional wrestling, the WWF in particular, has begun to have a much greater level of concern with school officials around the country," he says.

Some schools, fearing a child could be injured seriously, have created behavior codes that bar sparring or WWF-type wrestling moves. In October, about 60 students at Niskayuna High School in Albany, N.Y., were arrested for their roles as part of a crowd that cheered on two schoolmates at a grudge fight at a neighborhood park. In April, the principal of Pleasant Grove Elementary in Indiana's Johnson County banned all professional-wrestling apparel, accessories and maneuvers at his suburban school after teachers complained of students gesturing in class and during recess.

Michael Cunningham, a professor of social psychology at the University of Louisville and the father of two sons, also is concerned that adolescents indeed may be inappropriately influenced by wrestling. "We're a culture that likes acting out," he says. "Like anything else, any extreme sport can be dangerous when practiced without proper respect. What people don't always recognize is that those moves are scripted."