Old VS New: Is wrestling a sport or performance arts

Which side to you choose

  • "Real" sports

    Votes: 1 33.3%
  • Performance art

    Votes: 2 66.7%

  • Total voters
    3

Psykohurricane55

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Last monday, jordynne grace said in a interview that she completly being the notion that wrestling is a performance art not a sport which was then twitted out to jim cornette and the whole debate started all over again.

The question is, should we considered it as a sport or performance arts?

Personally, i see it this way, it's a sport with a little of perfomance art in it. But at the same time, it need to be treated seriously by the performers and that's where the grey area is. Because while some of the new generation of wrestlers still want this to be treated as a real sports, theor a lot of them that don't and it's hurting to profession as a result especially when some of the biggest name in the indies treat it as performance art.

The fact is, when i was growing up, wrestling was treated as a joke, yeah i live through the first wrestling boom but outside the wrestling fans, nobody was taking wrestling seriously because they though it was fake and back then, if you told a wrestler that what he was doing was fake, he would prove to you how fake it is by putting you in a hold and beating you up in the process. Over the years the industry as a whole worked really hard to change the perception that mainstream media had of pro wrestling and for a while it worked. But then came the attitude era and we open the pandora box by telling everybody that wrestling is pre determine which we already knew it was. But by openly saying it, it made it o.k for newer fans to believe that it was o.k to threat it as such and now, we have a generation of wrestlers, that believr that what they are doing isn't sports but art which takes away from the whole reason wrestling excited in the first place.

Another problem is that a lot of the new generation really don't know the history of pro wrestling as most of them started to be fan of it during the monday night wars. The perfect exemple was during the whole twitter wars between grace, cornette and others when cornette wrote a classic andy kaufman promo as a respond to a twit and everybpdy got upset at him thinking he was thinking that when in fact he was just paying hommage to kaufman.

I feel like wrestling should be treated seriously. Like so many legends said in the past, it's the best of both world, it's sports and its acting but what they do should be threated as seriously as any other sports because in the end, they get hurt like any other athletes. So when a wrestler call pro wrestling, performance arts, it shows how little respect he has for his profession. You want to be thread seriously and be called a pro wrestler, then thread it like if you were in a real sport. If not don't call yourself a pro wrestler, call yourself a entertainer or anything else in that category.

The fact that today's wrestlers want the product to be threated seriously is kinda of a joke. If you want the product to be threated more seriously, it start with the performers in the ring, if you threat the profession with respect and do your job correctly by not telling people that your playing a part and in reality your just al friend, then wrestling will be threated more seriously but for now, whatever they are doing will be threated as a joke because that's how the performers threat it.
 
Pro-wrestling isn't a sport. Wrestling companies can try and portray their wrestling product as being a serious, athletic competition, but at the end of the day it's a tv show with scripted results. Even in the 60's-80's, when wrestling was treated much more seriously among promoters and wrestlers, it was still just a choreographed tv show presenting itself as a sport.

Not to say that wrestlers aren't athletes, they're probably up there with the best in the world, but circus performers could also be considered athletes. That doesn't make the circus a sporting event.
 
Wrestling is and has always been a performance art. People watch wrestling for the stories and the characters. In my opinion, you can't have a good wrestling match if it doesn't tell a story.
 
I can only find wrestling DVDs in the sport section of a store. The definition of a sport requires a winner and loser who hasn't been predetermined, I would still call it a sport but it's difficult to say. I went to see the Harlem Globetrotters which is fun to watch but clearly fixed would that also be classed as a sport?
 

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