Wrestling is Wrestling, Not MMA!
The Kingfish Arnie Katz has become a “must read” daily wrestling columnist. This time, he tackles the controversial subject of the role of MMA in professional wrestling.
Mixed Martial Arts has become the fastest-growing sport in North America and in many other parts of the world, too. It leads boxing in pay per view buy-rate and the live gate is getting up there, too.
Pro wrestling promoters (and bookers) are very observant individuals. When they see something that makes money, they try to think up a way to adapt it to the important job of making money for them.
Pro wrestling has made several attempts to capitalize on the soaring popularity of MMA. The most recent was the championship match between Kurt Angle and Samoa Joe. The booking took a heavy MMA slant for at least half the match.
Other examples of the drive to infuse wrestling with MMA including the WWE’ presenting one MMA guy after another and the use of MMA holds like the gogoplatz.We will certainly see more attempts to bring the dynamism and excitement of MMA to the wrestling ring.
The thing that runs through all these strategies is that none seems to produce a good show. The Angle-Joe match was fine, but it got a lot better at the end when they started working a wrestling match.
The biggest difference between MMA and professional wrestling is that the former is a competitive contest and the latter is a choreographed performance. A lot of the intensity of MMA comes from the fact that it is real. A real fight in a bar is pretty exciting; a bar fight in the movies wouldn’t be nearly as exciting if it simply mimicked the real fight. That’s why movies prepare much more exciting fight scenes to compensate for that.
When a wrestling fan seeing two guys straining in a stalemate on the mat, he thinks, “Rest hold.” Wrestling fans will not stand for static struggling and endless tests of strength, because those tests would not have the reality of MMA or the kinetic excitement of professional wrestling.
Professional wrestling may well benefit from a little cross-fertilization, but MMA and pro wrestling are essentially two different things. We can appreciate them both without making one into a counterfeit of the other.
Those who think they are two separate things, one a sport and the other sports entertainment that should largely stay separate, should start squawking now. Promoters are in love with this idea, exhilarated by the concept
– Arnie Katz
Crossfire4@xoc.net
(4/17/08)
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