"Why the hell is the WWE on Sky Sports?? It's not a real sport, it's just guys getting paid too much money to piss about in their underwear! And it's FAKE!" To the eyes of the non-wrestling fan, a wrestling match just looks like "two half naked guys rolling around on top of each other". It's taking the spectacle and reducing it to something silly. If that's the case, can we do that with all sports? Why not say that american football or rugby is a load of fat guys playing catch? Why not say basketball is teams of freakishly giant Slendermen taking it in turns to score? Why not say hockey is a bunch of toothless figure skaters batting an Oreo around with a stick? In all seriousness, we've got to be honest and admit that since the results are predetermined, wrestling isn't a sport in the technical sense. But when they say that, they're disregarding the wrestlers as athletes completely. This is wrong. To be a professional wrestler requires strength, speed, coordination, gymnastic ability, stamina, grace, precision and timing, to name but a few attributes. Take someone like Adrian Neville in NXT. In any given match, he can do handsprings, cartwheels, kipups, lift a man twice his weight over his head in a german suplex, and then climb up to perform the Red Arrow, a corkscrew shooting star press. He jumps up, performs a backflip, rotates 360 degrees horizontally IN MIDAIR and lands on his opponent perfectly and safely, all in the space of roughly 1.9 seconds. There are very few professional sportsmen who could accomplish that. David Beckham couldn't do it. Michael Jordan couldn't do it. Wayne Gretzky, Terry Bradshaw and Jose Canseco couldn't do it either. Although I have heard rumours that Phil "The Power" Taylor CAN do it, he just doesn't want to.
Stephen Maher has been a rock star, a bouncer, a banker and a busker on various streets in various countries. He's hung out with Robert Plant, he was at Nelson Mandela's birthday and he's swapped stories with prostitutes and crack addicts. He once performed at a Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras by accident. These days, he passes the time by writing about music, wrestling, games and other forms of nerdery. And he rarely drinks the blood of the innocent.
