9 Ways WWE Owes A Debt To UFC

With the massive popularity of the UFC, the death of kayfabe and the audience for WWE’s version of professional wrestling beginning to dwindle, there’s an ever-greater need for WWE to assist the casual audience in suspending their disbelief, to be able to enjoy a pro wrestling match without automatically thinking that it looks ridiculous.

The additional realism that pro wrestling needs to maintain has always been a part of the sport. It's only in the last couple of decades that the flashier, more cartoonish moves have removed part of that realism from wrestling.

But wrestling has always been adaptable: and just as the advent of cable television required wrestling to add still more flash and panache to sell it to an increasingly jaded audience, so now the ubiquity of MMA and the UFC may be necessitating a move away from some of the more nonsensical traditions of sports entertainment, narrowing the perceived gap between legit competition and worked competition.

Back in the days of kayfabe, pro wrestling was treated as a genuine fighting challenge - Bruno Sammartino famously didn’t want to take on his protégé Larry Zybysko in 1980 because the man was family, and to fight him, Sammartino would have to want to hurt him.

Sports entertainment will always be a part of the WWE: but professional wrestling is also making a sneaky comeback within the organisation, as performers with a grounding in other disciplines and from non-WWE backgrounds are coming up in the organisation without having to stick to the generic punch-kick WWE house style that used to be the focus of all WWE developmental training.

And that’s down to the influence of MMA, of the astonishing popularity of the UFC. WWE is nothing if not versatile. The evolution of professional wrestling isn’t over yet.