Seven thoughts at the heart of wrestling that are applicable in everyday life.
Wrestling is theater, and by no means a sport. That is why wrestling is not positioned as a real competition for athletes. Here, the winner is not the one who is faster, taller or stronger, but the one who does it beautifully and according to the script, so that the story that the wrestlers tell us has a reasonable continuation or a logical conclusion. That is why wrestling is so much more like Game of Thrones than the UFC.
Wrestling is not a scene from a movie, it is a movie in itself. It’s not about how muscular sweaty men pretend to hit each other; wrestling is about how a whole story is told through the confrontation between two athletes (and wrestlers are certainly outstanding athletes), the characters’ characters are revealed, the whole range of emotions is conveyed.
And most importantly, wrestling never ends. It’s not like a favorite series that has a limited number of seasons – wrestling goes on all year round and the characters are always evolving. In this, wrestling is very similar to life itself. Which means there are a lot of things to learn from wrestling.
Need to help a partner
This is one of the basic postulates of wrestling. Wrestlers are opponents only in the plot, but in reality they are partners who trust each other with their lives and health, and partners, as you know, need help. It’s very simple: you won’t make a move if your opponent doesn’t help you. And first of all, you need to try not to make yourself look better, but to make your opponent seem stronger, more technical and more impressive. Then you yourself will look the same.
“I need an enemy to find peace”
Wrestling is unthinkable without confrontation. Every hero needs a villain. Superman would be nothing without Dr. Luthor, Rocky wouldn’t be so beloved if it weren’t for Ivan Drago, and Holmes would lose a lot of his appeal without Moriarty. A modern person is more directed inward than at the world around him, therefore a person needs an external irritant, an external enemy in order to move away from all-consuming reflection. Everything is like in the Dolphin song. An enemy is needed to make everything meaningless understandable.
To be a man, you have to defeat a man
This legendary catchphrase by the equally legendary Ric Flair has become the main rationale for how wrestlers move up the career ladder and receive world titles. For a wrestler to become a top fighter, he must first defeat a top fighter; and then it will be considered as something serious. So it is in life: to be the man you gotta beat the man.
Sometimes defeat only makes you stronger
Yes, it sounds like a terribly hackneyed cliché, but in wrestling (and in life) it still works sometimes. A worthy defeat strengthens the wrestler in the eyes of the fans; so, it was after losing to Bret Hart at Wrestlemania XIV that the legendary Steve Austin became a truly superstar. Exhausted, Austin lay in a pool of his own blood, richly flavored with sweat and foam from the mouth, refusing to give up on a painful opponent.
Austin lost because he lost consciousness, but at the same time he gained tremendous respect from the fans and a year later became the world champion. More recent examples include Daniel Bryan, who lost his Wrestlemania XXVIII title in a fight that lasted just 18 seconds. Fans after that became even more supportive of Brian, believing that the writers treated him unfairly, and soon Daniel became the most popular WWE wrestler. Having won the wild love of the fans, Brian managed to convince the management and still got him a chance to become a world champion again.
Fall is a must
Wrestling is impossible to imagine without falls on the back – the so-called bumps; Without them, none of the events would have been possible. A properly executed bump, a bump performed at the right time, only adds suspense and allows you to prepare the viewer for a counterattack. In life, it is also necessary to fall: falls harden and add experience; without failure there is no success.
It’s not the result that matters, it’s the process
The founder of American sports journalism, Grantland Rice, wrote that when the Great Equalizer comes, he will not display the result of your match with a marker, but will write how you played in it and showed yourself. The idea is very idealistic, but after all, happiness is really a process, and not the final result, so you should not evaluate your life only by achievements and victories. How a person tried to achieve his dream is no less important. Wrestling heritage (like human heritage) is not measured by matches and titles won alone – more importantly, what impact the wrestler left on future generations. Matt Osborne, a wrestler who has been performing since 1978 and who gained the greatest fame in the second half of the 80s, playing the role of a nutty clown in the WWF, tried a bunch of gimmicks in his career, but did not win a single significant title. Too direct and honest, Osborne did not enjoy the trust of management and over and over again forced him to perform in mostly stupid gimmicks, but Matt, thanks to natural talent,