Social class at heart of pro wrestling illegitimacy

Everyone I know says professional wrestling isn't a sport because it's fake. I disagree - I think it's a class issue.

When my friends tell me wrestling is fake, I simply bring up the Olympic sport ice dancing.

Both pro wrestling and ice dancing have strong performance elements, involve acts of athletic skill and, at some points, require you to pitch your partner - or "opponent" in pro wrestling - across the room.

Sure, the outcomes are scripted, but the biggest criticism launched at pro wrestling - the ignorant fans, the crass subject matter - are all dependent on class and illustrate our cultural inability to openly discuss it.

We all have some generic conception of what class is - but if pushed, we're often hard-pressed to come up with an idea that doesn't rely on economic terms. Class is one of those social concepts everyone knows about but few people can put into words.

Class has a strong cultural meaning that is often an extension of its economic meaning. Pro wrestling is considered a low-class event and non-legitimate sport. But it bears a strong resemblance to the serious Olympic sport of ice dancing.

Ice dancing is kind of like the bastard cousin of figure skating and ribbon dancing - it's done on ice, there aren't any big jumps - the choreography and performance are the most important aspects.

The corollary to professional wrestling is easy to see. Pro wrestling is the bastard cousin of amateur wrestling and performance art wherein jacked-up men and women in tiny, often spangled pants athletically play-fight for the entertainment of millions.

The main theoretical difference between pro wrestling and ice dancing is the presence of a regulatory body and an official judging committee that legitimizes ice dancing.

It's a sport because someone judges it and decides there is a legitimate winner. The same thing happens in pro wrestling, it's just that the judge picks the winner before and rewards the best performer with future success afterward.

Professional wrestling has never had a sanctioned regulatory body. Since its earliest days in the traveling carnivals of Europe, pro wrestling has been largely self-regulated. It was briefly managed by local boxing commissions, but that was more a joke than anything else because many boxing commissions were already aware of the dubious nature of the pro wrestling.

The common roots in performance make the comparison between ice dancing and pro wrestling legitimate. It's impossible to compare pro wrestling to competitive sports like baseball or football. In those sports, two teams compete for an undetermined, unscripted outcome, and a winner is decided by the rules of the game, not by a committee of judges.

Ice dancing is a different story.

In ice dancing, judges grade the skaters on the performance of movements and skills inclusive to their sport. Ice dancing involves a very specific skill set of memorized and repeated movements that are choreographed - quite similar to pro wrestling, where movements are choreographed, but there is no judging body outside of a promoter and the fans.

The lack of a judging body is somewhat irrelevant in this argument, because it's wrestling's low-class image that truly keeps it from achieving legitimate status.

If pro wrestling instituted a judging system and legitimacy was confirmed, I imagine it would be placed somewhere above cock fighting but slightly below NASCAR in the strata of respected sports.

Academic research supports this, and in a 2002 Sage publication, Thomas C. Wilson found a paradoxical relationship between social class and sports involvement. People in higher economic and cultural classes are more frequently involved in sports in general, according to Wilson.

That relationship changes when the type of sport is considered. People in higher cultural classes are less likely to be involved in lower-class sports.

Class is more than how much money one makes. It can reach as far as the type of sports we like and why we like them or in the case of pro wrestling, why we are embarrassed by them.

It's easy to argue against the vulgar and violent content of pro wrestling. But, many of the themes featured in the average wrestling broadcast are no more high class than those featured on an episode of MTV's "The Real World" or VH1's "Rock of Love." Yet people are not embarrassed to discuss those shows in public.

Pro wrestling receives little respect because it carries the heavy social stigma of lower-class status, which comes partially from its fans, who are often portrayed as ignorant and low class by the media and most public intellectuals. Being called a "fake sport" doesn't help either.

In the end, my comparison of ice dancing and pro wrestling is apt but mainly demonstrates how pervasive class assessments are in the way we think.

I imagine few people know of ice dancing, and in many circles, it's mere mention would certainly raise a few eyebrows, but that in itself demonstrates the power of cultural class.

Consciousness of class may be one of the last dirty words in America, and it's sad that it can be seen in something as simple as the division between sports and entertainment.

Originally published in The Daily Reveille...