15 Biggest False Narratives In Wrestling History
12. Wrestling Used To Look Realistic
No it didn’t, not once.
Well, perhaps once. The UWF-i league promoted ultra-realistic shoot-style wrestling, and was for a few incandescent years a hot property.
Beyond that…
The worked punch was once as ubiquitous as the reviled superkick, which is meant to be bad on the basis that, if you can’t kick somebody in the head and put them down, you mustn’t be a very tough dude.
The practitioners of the old punch must have been soft as sh*t, then. You couldn’t hope to keep count of how many of those were thrown in every other match promoted in the 1980s.
The Canadian Destroyer looks too cooperative, many people decry. Welcome to professional wrestling, in which every move is and looks cooperative, even the hallowed body slam. If you can’t see a wrestler post for it, you’re not looking. And that’s precisely the point: you aren’t meant to look. If you look too deeply, everything looks silly or at least illogical.
Even in much fetishised grapple-heavy matches, there’s not much preventing a wrestler using a free arm to elbow somebody in the ribs to break free of a submission hold.