Hiya!

I can only imagine what it must have been like to be a pro wrestling fan during the ’80s. It must’ve been a wild time as you had to check a TV schedule to see when your favorite wrestling program was on instead of just booting up YouTube and watching clips online. You had to rely on dirt sheets and gossip to find out the results of the shows they don’t broadcast on TV instead of just googling it or visiting your bookmarked wrestling news site.

The weirdest thing would probably be debating with a non-wrestling fan whether or not if pro wrestling is scripted or not. Yeah, it sounds really weird today as practically every wrestling fan knows it’s all fake. If you’re one of those who believed it was all on the up and up, I’m sorry that this is how you found out it’s all phony. Then again, please don’t abruptly ask if wrestling is fake to a pro wrestler. You don’t want your face to cave in from blunt force trauma or anything like that.

Now, I’m not here to downplay pro wrestling. Being a fan myself, I applaud all of those involved who put their well-being on the line just to entertain us with their athletic endeavors night in and night out. It’s a hard job where you can get injured in front of a packed crowd and then being told to continue on with the spot because you need to do it just to tell a story. Most pro wrestlers also have to be good at speaking most of the time in order to get your character out there. They might only have bullet points so they have to think fast on their feet and just ad lib whatever the situation may take them. It’s a tough job, both physically and mentally.

However, in this day of age, we still all know pro wrestling is staged. For a lot of fans, this doesn’t sit well with them as they believe kayfabe, the act of making the audience believe it’s all authentic, shouldn’t have died. We all know how the sausage is made and it’s all built on lies and deception. Well, in my opinion, kayfabe actually did have to die in order for it to survive in today’s climate.

First off, it was easier to believe pro wrestling was real, believe it or not. Sure, we have improbable things like Hulk Hogan “hulking up” and shrugging off blows from the likes of King Kong Bundy and Andre the Giant during the latter part of his matches. We could still all write that off as Hulk Hogan feeling the adrenaline kicking in. It was far fetched but it wasn’t beyond the reasonable doubt it couldn’t happen… each and every time Hulk Hogan had a match. Far fetched but still possible… kinda.

Those were the early days, though. As the ’80s moved to the ’90s, things did get more and more unbelievable because, at least during the ’80s, pro wrestlers were just that: wrestlers. Hulk Hogan? Wrestler. Andre the Giant? Wrestler. Ultimate Warrior? An insane and jacked wrestler. Rick Rude? A sexy guy who wanted to show all the ladies what a real man is like but still a wrestler. Honky Tonk Man? An Elvis Presley fan who was, you guessed it! A wrestler! The last guy is stretching it a bit but, technically, the Honky Tonk Man never said he was an Elvis impersonator. I checked.

Things changed during the ’90s and pro wrestlers were being more than just wrestlers. Sure, we still had the likes of Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels, the top guys of the WWF/WWE at the time. However, this was the time when we had guys like The Undertaker, an undead wizard who just so happens to be a wrestler, Duke “The Dumpster” Drose, a garbageman who moonlights as a wrestler, Skinner, an alligator hunter who moonlights as a wrestler and Jeff Jarrett, a country music singer who was in the WWE/WWF because he wanted to promote himself as a country music singer.

It was definitely much harder to take pro wrestling seriously with all of these non-professional wrestlers hitting the ring. Even if I was a kid during this period, I would think there was something wrong and maybe, just maybe, all of this pro wrestling stuff isn’t real. If the characters are all fake, wouldn’t the wrestling be as well?

Then there were all of the real life stuff happening in the background, which really made it impossible for fans to ignore how pro wrestling might be real after all. There was the entire steroids trial which put the WWE/WWF’s owner, Vince McMahon, in the hot seat. Vince McMahon was found not guilty but the trial did have a lot of pro wrestlers, including Hulk Hogan, The Ultimate Warrior and Rick Rude. They didn’t enter the courtroom with all the fanfare and, even for a guy as insane as the Ultimate Warrior seems to be in the ring, they were all normal, regular people. It wasn’t all that bad but it did air out the WWF/WWE dirty laundry in the papers.

Then came the weird tax law, which forced Vince McMahon to admit, under oath, that pro wrestling isn’t real. The state of New Jersey wanted to tax the WWF/WWE as a sport. So, Vince McMahon, in order to not get taxed so heavily, admitted in court that pro wrestling was not a real sport but “sports entertainment.” That should’ve been it as the biggest promoter of pro wrestling admitted it was all phony but the remnants of kayfabe still trudged on.

The real death of kayfabe actually came, with most things, the birth of the Internet. All of a sudden, it was much easier to get all the news you wanted all the time. This led to wrestling newsletters becoming more widely distributed and, with that, people trying to get insider information, leading to backstage news at pro wrestling events getting out. Social media started to become a thing and pro wrestlers, being actual people instead of the comic book heroes and villains we all thought they were in the ’80s and ’90s, got into it. All of a sudden, nothing was a secret and this included wrestling’s greatest secret: pro wrestling isn’t real.

I now have to return to the title of this post. Why did kayfabe in pro wrestling have to die? It had to die because the secret has been leaking through slowly even before the Internet. It might have been easier to hide away things like Hacksaw Jim Duggan and The Iron Shiek getting arrested for carrying marijuana and cocaine while driving as there wasn’t the Internet to shoot out this bit of news to the world. It must have been hard for pro wrestlers to have to hide from the public eye and hang with their friends just because they have to pretend they’re an undead wizard, which is what the Undertaker had to do for years.

In a sense, however, kayfabe isn’t totally dead as pro wrestling fans, even though we all know it’s fake, still pretend it’s all real. We’re all in on the act and we still enjoy wrestling, despite this revelation. That’s because it’s still fun to watch! It really didn’t matter if it was real or fake for a lot of us. We still like pro wrestling because we’re still excited when two wrestlers do an awesome spot or when they go on the mic and deliver a heartfelt promo. It’s might not be real but we still pretend it is because it’s more entertaining that way. Some may say we’re fooling ourselves but I don’t think that’s it. I think it’s more of us understanding how much effort these professional wrestlers put into their job and acknowledging it by saying we’re buying into the act. We know how the sausage is made and we don’t care. Why? Well, it’s still a damn good sausage!

Byee!

What are your thoughts on wrestling kayfabe? Should it have lived on today? Let me know in the comments section below!