When you think of professional sports, what comes to mind? Football? Tennis? Basketball? Maybe even rugby? When one watches professional sports, one intends to see trained and practiced men and women work themselves to the extreme to engage in an activity with the intent to win the game in which they are playing. While the enjoyment of the audience is an important and crucial factor, the players’ focus is to win the game in which they are currently playing. It is not a silly performance, but instead a display of skills showcased to win the game.
What is a performance, however, is WWE. It’s even in the name! World Wrestling Entertainment. If you have ever seen a match of WWE, then I am sure you understand what I am talking about. If you have not, then allow me to paint a picture of what this “sport” entails. Picture it, big muscled men and women are decorated in enough sparkles and glitter to blind a person, as they scream obscenities on how they want to cripple the person who steps in the ring with them. All the while wearing a mask that should hinder their ability to see in some way.
And that’s all before they step into the ring itself! Once they enter the ring with their opponent, they do the most insane things that come to their minds to beat their opponent. Well, rather “cripple” them. And how do they win the sport, you may ask? Oh, just what one does in regular wrestling. Hitting one another with chairs, flipping onto one another, and flinging one another around by their hair. Like I said, just the regular. And despite all of the hits the players receive, they just keep getting up just to launch an even more outlandish and dangerous attack on their opponent. All jokes aside, if this were ANY other sport, they would not have been able to get up from such attacks. Notice how the words win and sport are in quotation marks because I strongly believe that no one truly wins because this is not a sport. It’s a performance.
