The news that WWE and UFC are to merge is of zero significance to me but clearly of at least marginal interest given that I have decided to blog about it. I watch neither WWE nor UFC, although I’ve always assumed that WWE is purely sports entertainment and UFC a sport. From a brief trip into Cyberspace, my conclusion is that my original assumption was true but how they sit together in one organisation is very strange.
I watched wrestling on television as a young child and later as a fan. As a young child, I thought it was real, not least because my grandfather always told me it was. As I grew older, the doubts began to creep in and eventually I reached that position where I was pretty certain that pro wrestling was faked but somehow managed to suspend reality to ensure I could still enjoy it. That was a necessary step for me to take. And until relatively recently that pretence was maintained by both wrestlers and wrestling companies. No more.
WWE owner Vince McMahon was a key player in revealing what we already knew: that wrestling was a fix, that nothing about it was real and that everything about it was prearranged. No one was surprised but for me it all but ruined everything. I was that young child who was told that Santa Claus didn’t exist and this bloke I was seeing every Christmas wasn’t just a fake but there were thousands, maybe millions, of fake Santas all over the world.
I grew up watching British wrestling on ITV. ITV took it relatively seriously, employing as commentator Kent Walton who described numerous technical aspects of the ‘sport’ which it later turned out were made up by him. He’d refer to a wrestler as the European Middleweight Champion when no governing body existed. The referees were always terrible, taking their eye of the action by way of distraction, although it was later revealed that they were deliberately looking the wrong way. I suspected all of this, but my enjoyment would have been ruined had I thought too much. My grandfather went to his grave believing wrestling to be real. I will go to mine knowing it wasn’t and isn’t.
It will be interesting – or will it? – if WWE and UFC have joint shows. One will be a synchronised entertainment event with pints of fake blood everywhere, the other a genuine violent brawl with real blood everywhere. When a wrestler lies on the canvas pretending to be unconscious, how will we know that the UFC fighter is actually unconscious? They’re certainly a very odd couple.
My own love – and love it was – affair with wrestling ended when WCW went through the hoop. Granted that by the end they had given up any attempt to maintain any pretence that theirs was more of a sport than WWE, I still enjoyed their events more than those of WWE which had become more of a soap opera. But then, given both organisations employed actual writing teams it seems I was a little naive in hanging on to the slim belief there might be at least something real happening in the ring.
None of this bothers today’s wrestling fans and nor should it. They start from a position of knowing from the start what they are watching isn’t real and enjoy it on that basis, rather as someone would enjoy the pantomime which it is actually is. Sports Entertainment gives the clue in its name. UFC is still sport, but for how long? Never the twain shall meet? We will see about that.
