Pained expression
That night in Lowell, Chaotic wrestler Jason Blade wildly tumbles over the top rope while defending his half of the tag-team championship. His knee collides with the metal guardrail surrounding the ring with a sickening ping that seems to echo off every surface in the room. He will wrestle the remainder of his bout with a noticeable limp, though it is unclear whether it’s all part of the show. The crowd doesn’t see him lying backstage, after the adrenaline has finally worn off, covering his face and tending to an enormous ice pack while his colleagues shoot each other concerned glances.
“It’s very physically demanding,” Milonas says. “Just look at guys at the ends of their careers — they’re broken down. But the difference is that we’re not trying to hurt each other. Do [injuries] happen sometimes? Absolutely, and it sucks.”
Hearing someone speak so matter-of-factly about major injury is strange, especially given that the payoff for all that pain — if they’re lucky — is the chance to grapple with other large, sweaty men in front of 200 strangers. But according to Milonas, there is much more to this profession than the brute physicality that leaves so many men mere shells of their former selves.
“People don’t realize that it’s not just going in there and doing moves,” he says, defending a sport so often reduced by critics to live-action celebrations of cartoon violence. “It’s telling a story. It’s trying to connect with the fans, whether they’re booing you or cheering you. There’s a lot of emotion involved in wrestling people don’t understand.”
Perhaps this explains why professional wrestling has endured for so long, even in light of a recent shift in the sports-entertainment landscape toward hyper-violent and hyper-realistic combat promotions like the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), whose rising popularity seems a deliberate response to the WWE’s brand of profligate showmanship. Wrestling isn’t primarily a physical medium but a communicative one, whose primary objective is to create tremendous characters that resonate on some level with a devoted fan base and, much more important, its disposable income.
“If somebody could meet someone like you just walking down the street, why are they going to pay for a ticket to see you in the ring?”, Milonas explains. “[Fans] know it’s a show now — they advertise it at the door — but you still want them to get lost in that, and take them away from their daily reality.”
The most successful of these personalities, those who truly elevated this genre of escapism to an art form, are capable of rising above the sport to become veritable icons of popular culture. These superstars are few and far between, but everyone knows their names, whether or not they count themselves among the more than three million people who watch WWE’s Monday Night Raw every week on USA.
“Look at the Rock,” Milonas says, citing one of the WWE’s more recent pop-culture crossover successes. “He transcended wrestling and now he’s a movie star. And what do they still call him? They call him the Rock. They don’t even call him by his real name. It’s amazing.”
