10 Wrestling Clichés That Need To Die

Seth "Jack Wilshere" Rollins.

Seth Rollins crutches
WWE.com

Clichés often thrive in the world of professional wrestling, largely as a consequence of the fact that the people behind the curtain are fusty old dinosaurs who are completely out of touch with modern fans (who themselves are mostly basement-dwelling man-children).

Many of the traditional ones, however, have long since died. No-one really believes that female wrestlers are any less capable of putting on great matches, for example, or that small wrestlers should be confined to the mid-card whilst their burly counterparts monopolise the main event.

But that doesn't mean they are totally dead. You can still find one or two fans (as well as industry insiders themselves) clinging to hackneyed ideas that don't really have a huge amount of truth to them - usually because they haven't actually watched enough of the thing in question.

The main cliché that refuses to go away, of course, is that the action that takes place inside the squared circle is somehow not real - but this one doesn't deserve any serious refutation. It's just completely ridiculous, as anyone familiar with the sport will immediately realise.

10. Wrestling Is For Kids

Seth Rollins crutches
WWE.com

Do you have non-wrestling fan friends who keep asking you why you watch something explicitly aimed at children? It's kind of annoying, isn't it?

The stats have largely shown that most of Monday Night Raw's regular viewers are in the 20-40 age demographic - many of them presumably having stuck around from the Attitude Era in the vague hope that WWE will one day recapture its latter-year magic.

The kid-friendly side of the company is that which gets the most attention, which is probably deliberate on their part. They want to promote themselves as a wish-making enterprise that helps children escape - particularly in the wake of several public scandals over the last quarter-century.

Plus: younger viewers buy more merchandise and are perhaps a little less nit-picky about the quality of the product (many of them still believing it's real). That means WWE has every incentive to market its shows towards them, even if they don't make up a huge fraction of the audience.

Contributor