not a step

Pro wrestling goes down for the count

At some point - perhaps while America became temporarily distracted by its fascination with the Taco Bell dog - professional wrestling became a pop culture phenomenon. No longer a marginal form of entertainment only one step up from Roller Derby and Australian Rules Football on the television food chain, the pseudo-sport now commands a considerable prime-time audience.

Wrestlers appear on late-night talk shows, wrestlers present at award shows and wrestlers even write books that top the New York Times bestseller list. This isn't Cyndi Lauper inducing a wrestling mini-boom by taking on Captain Lou Albano on MTV; it's a full-scale assault on America being led by muscle-bound men wearing tights.

The pseudo-sport has achieved these new heights partially through abandoning any pretense of reality. Though every sane person always knew wrestling was fake, its athletes and announcers used to protect the charade. Since fans watched because of the scripted battles for gaudy championship belts, the integrity of those titles was protected as those involved in the "sport" never directly answered the "is it fake" question.

It was never about fooling the public - any moron who could scrounge up 80 IQ points would have to wonder how a man could get hit in the head with a steel chair and keep charging ahead undeterred. Instead, the public's relationship to wrestling was similar to the brief love affair we had with Anna Nicole Smith and her comically improbable breasts.

We knew they were fake, she knew they were fake, but she was nice enough to concoct that story about how "they just sprouted up during pregnancy."

Everyone was lying to each other and himself, but the lie made us all feel a whole lot better.

Now, wrestlers, announcers and the businessmen controlling the whole show eagerly call it "sports entertainment," admitting that it's a phony, pre-determined competition. Instead of boxing's super-violent cousin, wrestling has become the Ice Capades' gruesome brother.

Today's wrestling stars openly talk about the writers and the business people who decide the winners. In one of the two leading federations, the owner, Vince McMahon, has even wrestled against his biggest stars. Despite McMahon's impressive physique, that still seems a lot like Robert Kraft coming down from the owner's box to replace Drew Bledsoe, or George Steinbrenner starting himself in Game 3 of the World Series.

Even with these unbelievable match-ups and storylines that would embarrass a "Beverly Hills 90210" writer, wrestling gets more popular every week. No longer a guilty pleasure where fans root for the heroic "good guy" from the United States to beat up the "evil" Russian/Nazi/Iraqi, wrestling has grown because of a new type of hero.

Fans reject the standards of good that were widely accepted in the late '80s, and today's fan favorites stand in stark contrast to the "say your prayers, eat your vitamins" stance that made Hulk Hogan a demi-celebrity during wrestling's first wave of popularity. Now, to be truly loved by the fans, a wrestler must create vulgar catch phrases while expressing as much contempt as possible for anyone on the side of law and order.

This isn't nearly as harmful as the current "what is wrestling teaching our children" people would have you believe, but it's not a good thing, either. More importantly, for a casual fan like me, it's just not that interesting.

I miss the days when wrestling meant a Saturday morning spent watching cartoonish characters in goofy tights battle for a 10-pound hunk of gold.

Fake as it was, the action held some mystery, and my favorite wrestlers from those days still have a warm place in my heart. You can have your "Stone Cold," "The Rock" and "Mankind" and their amazing Nielsen ratings. I prefer the days when no one above the age of 15 was watching and the name "Superfly" wasn't outdated hip-hop slang.

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