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    Why we watch sports (other than professional wrestling)

    My threadjacking attempt to play the Vonnegutian Martian anthropologist fell flat yesterday,* so I want to atone for the sin by seriously raising the question of why we watch sports.

    There are three kinds of answers to the question I can think of: (1) a Witggensteinian deconstruction of the question, (2) a phenomenological/aesthetic answer, and (3) a moral answer. I'm sure there are more than I can think of, and also that these can be extended in interesting ways. So comments are welcome.

    (1) Wittgensteinian (possibly MacIntyrian) Answer-

    If construed broadly enough, the question is infelicitous. Since part of what it is to be human is to delight in playing and watching games, the question amounts to asking why one should be human. And this makes no sense. First, it's not a choice. Second, "Why?" questions are only felicitous with respect to a normative/teleological background shared by the asker and answerer. If the claim that games are an essential part of human nature strikes you as untrue, go read Bernard Suits The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia, a book Simon Blackburn rightly called a masterpiece (brief review by Mark Silcox here). Note that if Suits is correct that "game" can be defined as “a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles” then the "Why?" question is even more pointless.


    Note that people who don't like sports just prefer other games. If they don't play D&D or video games, they certainly treat aspects of their work life like games (everyone does this). So the person who doesn't like sports needs to be able to give reasons for why her games are superior to games we classify as sports. This is where the next answer comes in.

    (2) Phenomenological/Aesthetic Answer-

    Philip Walsh wrote me a cool e-mail that he gave me permission to exerpt. I don't think I could put it any better than this, and when he ties it to dance at the end I had a kind of aha moment.

    I guess we both find one another's disposition re sports baffling.  You can't imagine someone enjoying something that is so pointless, and I can't imagine someone who doesn't enjoy sport.  Perhaps the difference is our respective experiences playing sports?  I have always loved playing sports.  Soccer, basketball, tennis, and golf are my favorites.  I've reflected on why I love sport through the lens of my training in phenomenology.  I think I get so much pleasure from executing skillful movement, well, skillfully.  Skillful bodily activities are activities comprised of certain movements that can be done more or less well.  Not all skillful bodily activities are sports.  Running, swimming, jumping, and throwing aren't sports until you embed them in a game structure.  "Pure" sports, in my view (and nothing hinges on my use of "pure"–but I think it works), are those in which the very precise kinds of skillful bodily movements that are necessary for excellence in the sport are inextricable from the game structure.  Basketball, for example, certainly involves running and jumping, but there are so many other dimensions to the game.  Lionel Messi is the greatest soccer player in the world right now at all of 5'7" and about 150 pounds, because there are so many other ways for him to be better than his peers than just pure speed or strength.  So, for me, track and swimming are the most boring sports because there is so little that can happen.  They are all pretty equal physical specimens, and the difference between them comes down to so little.  (Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt are great examples.  Phelps has disproportionately short legs, a huge wingspan, huge feet and hands; Bolt is taller than practically all other sprinters, yet can pump his legs faster than the shorter guys, which isn't supposed to be possible.)

    To get back to the part about the value of sport, I suppose its just the pure aesthetic pleasure I get from excellence in skillful movement.  I really like dancing too.  Of course, there are other factors like the thrill of competition and winning and so forth, and I'm sure there are lots of arguments about the social function of sport, and I'd have to think about all of that a lot more!  As for watching sport, I just get a lot of pleasure seeing someone do something that I've practice and tried to do in an amazing way.  I think there's a lot of beauty there.  Perhaps there are some embodied empathic resonance mechanisms at work.

    Q.E.D.

    (3) Ethico-Moral Answer

    I might be getting this wrong, since I'm not a sports fan. But it seems to me that sporting events are ceremonies of fairness in a badly corrupted world.

    I don't have anything particularly wise to say about corruption. Please listen to the song at right.

    Incidentally, I take that this is the deeper meaning of Ted George's claim that rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for big oil. There's this kind of perception that they just have the bankroll to put together a winning team. But then it becomes a work like everything else, undermining the moral point of sports.**

    These seem to me to be the main good responses to the question, but I'm sure that I'm missing something.

    [Notes:

    *I think that my phenomenology while writing those comments was that they would be funny in a self-deprecating way, but they came across as condescending and snobbish. I don' t know what they really are. Kant is right that we don't know if we have a good will, and Dennett is right that these kinds of things are often completely indeterminate. I have a nasty cold and am desperately trying to meet a paper deadline, and so might have just been being a grumpy a-hole. Who's to say? The sickness/deadline thing is not an excuse, just an explanation.

    It's very weird phenomenologically when you first realize you are sick. It rarely lands fully formed like Athena from Zeus' pate. You usually realize that you haven't been feeling well. But then that means you felt badly but didn't realize that you felt badly. That's strange. Does the toothpaste make the orange juice taste differently, or does it just make you not like the taste of orange juice?

    **Howard Cosell once said that professional wrestling was real and everything else was a work. This is because the promotion will lose money if they don't push performers who draw the most heat from the crowds. So the "real" competition among the performers is to get the most heat. It's epistemically weird though, because one can root for the performer playing a heal while rooting for the character s/he's playing to lose the match.]

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    20 responses to “Why we watch sports (other than professional wrestling)”

    1. anon grad Avatar
      anon grad

      Nice post. FWIW, I didn’t take your earlier comments to be snobbish.

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    2. Sara L. Uckelman Avatar
      Sara L. Uckelman

      I find many sport excessively boring to watch (tennis. golf. darts. football (American)); I also find most of them unenjoyable to play. So I was surprised to discover during my years of BBC access that gasp I was actually watching more sports than anything else on TV. How on earth did that come about? There’s three types of sports that I found I watched:
      – Snooker. My husband introduced me to this by accident, and I became an instant convert (we don’t currently own a TV. If I could figure out how to get BBC1 and BBC2 access in Germany, I would buy a TV simply so that I could watch snooker on the beeb again). I find the mathematics of it fascinating, the ability that the players are able to convert balls-on-the-baize into a representation in their mind that allows them to calculate angles, spin, and velocity, etc. This is something that can only be done through many years of hard practice, even if natural aptitude can set you off on a good start. This falls under the general heading of “I enjoy watching people who can do something well do it well.” It’s like enjoying a good painting, or a good meal: There is real skill and talent and effort that is required in order to do this.
      – Athletics. I found that athletics had much the same going for it as snooker in terms of skill and innate mathematical calculations. How do you know when to lift your leg to get over the hurdle? How do you pace yourself when running a race? Just what are the physical mechanics of a good long jump, high jump, pole vault, discus? I find athletics both interesting and aesthetically pleasing in the same way that I find ballet enjoyable to watch.
      – the Olympics. Every two years (when I have a TV; I completely missed the Olympics that just went), I find myself getting swept up in the wake of sports I’ve never even heard of before, sitting on the edge of my bed and shrieking at the TV. But this is not so much about the sports as it is the camaraderie — I’ll never forget watching 2010 speed-skating with a good Dutch friend on the other end of IM, typing back and forth commentary, observations, cheers and despair. I’d never felt so part of the Dutch community as I did when I followed the rises and falls of their speed-skaters. (And the flip side of this is the competitiveness. Pretty much the only time I care that much about “American” things any more is watching the USA’s medal tally :).) I experienced the same phenomenon during a recent football world cup; when the Netherlands reached the final, I actually rescheduled a flight so that I could watch the game in Amsterdam rather than from Leeds where I was supposed to be at a conference (I went the next day), even though I care absolutely nothing about football.
      So for me, it’s not really about the sports themselves. It’s about the skill and artistry that they display, and about the social side of things.

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    3. Kevin Avatar
      Kevin

      Three reasons I watch sports:
      (1) To admire the excellence exhibited by their practitioners;
      (2) To be carried through various dramatic-emotional arcs;
      (3) To have something in common with others who watch sports.

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    4. r Avatar
      r

      I don’t have the same ethico-moral ideas about sports that you do. Although I understand to some degree the aesthetic appeal, I have always thought that sports were problematic from an ethico-moral perspective. Some concerns, in no particular order:
      Sports celebrates tribalism, us-verse-them, and so on. What’s it to you that your city’s team wins? –It’s that they’re ‘your guys.’ But this sort of tribalism is one of our worse characteristics and is neither to be celebrated nor encouraged.
      Sports also celebrates competition. It’s about winning. The teams and the fans may want a beautiful game, but if they have to choose between a beautiful game they lose and an ugly game they win, almost invariably they’d rather an ugly game they win. But this interest in winning qua winning is another of our worse characteristics and is neither to be celebrated nor encouraged.
      This varies by sport, but the athletes in many professional sports are very young. There are two disturbing aspects to this. The first is that we shower them with untold amounts of money, but we also ask them to subject their bodies to serious damage, to foreclose their studies, enter into a celebrity lifestyle and so on. Putting immature people in that position seems wrong. (And all the hopefuls who never make it merit mention here as well). The second is that there’s something unseemly about adults putting that much pressure onto a competition between a group of children. In some way, the entire audience of major sporting events–including the olympics, where they are very young indeed–plays the role of the bad parent at the high school game.

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    5. Jon Cogburn Avatar
      Jon Cogburn

      I agree that these are all pressing problems, and probably part of the reason I find sports distasteful.
      I want to push back on one thing though. I think that sports actually function in part in human societies to help us learn how to lose (should have put this as part of the moral argument in the OP). Clearly though, when various forms of regionalism or desperately scared parents are added to the mix they often don’t work this way.
      One thing I like about the United States is that our fans usually riot only when their teams win. In the rest of the world they tend to riot when their teams lose.
      But the institution only works to the extent that losers behave. If every soccer game ended with fans attacking the players, there would be no more soccer. I don’t think that you can have a society unless the people deeply internalize the norm to not run amok when they lose, and I think sports is one of the primary ways that human societies instill this norm.
      I don’t know if you could have cultural institutions that teach us how to be good losers without simultaneously having the cult of winning we both find to be so morally problematic. If it didn’t hurt to lose the game, then there would be no content to being a good loser.

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    6. Jon Cogburn Avatar
      Jon Cogburn

      Of course there has to be a balance. No one should put up with their own exploitation. When the deck is stacked one should not accept it.
      I think this is partly why it’s so important that sporting events be fair and non-corrupt, as noted in the OP.

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    7. marcus Avatar
      marcus

      Almost every sport with a current mass following today has the origin of its modern form — its rules laid down, codified and organized — in Britain or a former British colony sometime between 1870 and 1920. So even if the human propensity to games is universal (and I believe it is) our current sports world is pretty historically specific. I think we are living in a golden age of organized sports.

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    8. Luke Maring Avatar
      Luke Maring

      Thanks for your post! I love it when sports and philosophy intersect.
      One small quibble with email you posted: Most people who don’t really know sports like swimming or track often assume that contests are determined by sheer physical prowess, as if the technique and skillful movement that are so obviously a part of a soccer or basketball are irrelevant. But that’s just false. There is an enormous amount of technique in, say, sprinting: there are three distinct phases in a race even as short as 100 meters, a different running form is best for each phase, and transitions from phase to phase are incredibly important. Athletes spend years mastering these details. Swimming is, to my mind, one of the paradigmatic examples of technique over brawn: back when I was trying to swim fast, I was routinely dusted by people half as strong as I am. Even weightlifting, where one might expect raw strength to trump technique, athletes again spend years drilling technique. Athletics just is skillful movement.
      Second: aren’t there just, like, a million different reasons we watch sports? E.g., home town allegiances, tradition, aesthetic appreciation, cultural expectation… I’m suspicious of the idea that we can rank these reasons in importance or fundamentality.

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    9. Philip Walsh Avatar
      Philip Walsh

      Hi Luke, thanks for making that point. I didn’t mean to imply that sports like track and swimming don’t involve the mastering of precise technique, I am well aware of what goes into both through both participation and study. I do stand by my distinction, however, because of the comparatively broader variety of skillful movements demanded by what I’m calling the more “pure” sports. Part of why these sports demand such a broader variety is the uniqueness of the game structures in which the skillful movements are embedded. A race event (for swimming or track, say) demands the mastering of very narrow, specific task. A soccer or basketball match can unfold so many different ways, the inherent spontaneity is bound to demand a wider horizon of responsiveness. Golf, to use a different example, lies somewhere in between: hitting a good tee shot is pretty much a matter of mastering a very specific move, but the terrain of the course is bound to force you to make all kinds of shots that you just can’t quite practice.

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    10. Andrew Sepielli Avatar
      Andrew Sepielli

      A few points:
      1) I know and know of visual artists and musicians who, rather than just make art as they feel like making it in the moment, place themselves under rules, restrictions, and limitations, with the idea that possibilities will open up that might have been unwittingly foreclosed by the more “direct” method. (Jon — based on the music you post here, I assume you’re familiar with Eno’s Oblique Strategies.) It seems to me that sports are akin to, and interesting for some of the same reasons as, art produced by the “indirect” method.
      2) Relatedly, we enjoy some fiction in part because the specific things we like about it mightn’t have been. The hero wins, but she might have lost (or so we can sometimes fool ourselves into thinking.) The plot resolves in a certain satisfying way– it “clicks” — but it might not have. Characters cross paths, but might not have, and so on. There is, however, a fundamental kind of necessity at the heart of all fiction — it will be, at least in the mind of the author, interesting or compelling or whatever other “thin” aesthetic term you want to toss out there. Even in work that’s purposefully boring, as I’m told the posthumous DF Wallace book was, is supposed to be interesting for its boringness. It’s very difficult, then, for fiction to satisfy us specifically because it might have been utterly uncompelling. You’ve always got an author who’s trying to “do something”. But sports can be satisfying for just this reason. Drama arises out of what could have simply been undifferentiated “pushing a ball back and forth”. There’s no author with a stake in making it interesting. And so, yes, you get the Spurs in the NBA finals. Snooze. But you also get the ’04 Red Sox, Kerri Strug, etc. If you’re a non-theist who finds interesting the emergence of life out of primordial goop, you should find sports interesting for basically the same reasons.
      3) Sports bring people of different races and social classes together in a way that few other interests do.
      4) For lots of reasons, I think, the arguments put forth by prominent sports writers are just much, much better than arguments of, say, prominent political writers. Compare, say, Joe Posnanski’s stuff on why Bert Blyleven had a better HOF case than Jack Morris with the average piece in the NYT Sunday Review. Not even close. I’ve given the former to my undergrads as a template for their philosophical writing. If I had my druthers, they’d remain blissfully ignorant of Brooks, Dowd, etc. That sports provide the raw materials for good arguments redound to their credit.
      5) r (above) tells us that sports celebrate tribalism. That doesn’t seem right, unless r’s claim is read in a way that’s close to trivial. What I think is that tribalism is deep-seated, difficult to excise, and that if we can find outlets for it that are basically harmless, that’s better than trying to suppress it across the board, only to find it expressing itself in dangerous ways.
      6) Same deal with r’s “competition” point, plus I don’t find entirely implausible Nietzsche’s claim that the competitive instinct is responsible for many of civilization’s marvels. Like, I can imagine non-human creatures for whom that might not have been true, but that’s beside the point.

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    11. Luke Maring Avatar
      Luke Maring

      I think I see now. Thank you. It sounds like the relevant distinction is not b/w sports that require lots of skill and those that don’t, it’s b/w sports where the course of play is closed and sports where course of play is relatively open. There are lots of ways for Messi to attack the defense; there’s more or less one way for Bolt to win the 100 meters.
      (BTW, that helps with your Messi example too–he’s one of the quickest players on the field, and so belongs to the naturally gifted class that includes Phelps and Bolt. But if the point is rather that his sport leaves more room for creativity, I get it.)

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    12. Jon Cogburn Avatar
      Jon Cogburn

      Excellent point about sports writers! Frank Deford is a genius.

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    13. James Rocha Avatar
      James Rocha

      This is a variation of points already made, but I think it is important to note that sports provides some of the best, unscripted intellectual stimulation available for mass viewing. Sports certainly are the most appreciated bit of intellectual stimulation in mass culture at large. And, with almost every sport, the people who enjoy it the most truly understand the intellectual side of it. Football is the easiest example: our culture (and I mean our mass culture, which is usually criticized for its ignorance) not only appreciates what the athletes on the field are doing, but also what the coaches are doing (football coaches were appreciated for intelligence long before TV show runners; and they are in fact geniuses, by and large).
      Sports that appear to have no huge strategy element almost always do. When I first began watching cycling, I didn’t really understand all the various moves and elements that went into a 20 day race that averages something like 4-5 hours of racing per day. But once you understand everything they are doing throughout that race and how intricate it is, you gain this huge appreciation for the intelligence of cycling coaches and the riders (especially, of course, the domestiques–who have to do the bulk of thinking while the leaders merely follow for 90% of the race).
      I think it is important to remember how much of our mass culture pushes aside intellectual competition. Just consider political debate. You cannot watch good political debate on television — either by politicians or on 24 hours news channels. It is effectively forbidden from viewing on the mainstream media. The TV shows that a lot of people find intellectually stimulating are also not reaching mass audiences (Breaking Bad in its best episodes only reached a fraction of the viewers of NCIS). In a very real way, for what most people watch on TV on a regular basis, they best exercise their mental capacities in an enjoyable way — and they are really engaged on intellectual level, which is indicated by how much people understand sports as complex and constantly changing as football — when watching sports.

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    14. Neal Hebert Avatar
      Neal Hebert

      I do think Jon’s attempts to complicate sports fandom in the earlier thread were quite valuable, however. I know several NewAPPs posters are quite enthusiastic American football fans, and this always surprises me to read given the consensus among medical professionals regarding the fact that watching football really is watching people receive traumatic, debilitating head injuries every time the ball is snapped. Same goes for boxing (not MMA, which would likely surprise people, but the gloves used in MMA are quite different than those in boxing with different effects; MMA has different problems, see below).
      I say the above because this has affected my ability to watch professional wrestling, my research area, because what we know about concussions now makes what performers were doing ten and twenty years ago extremely difficult to watch – especially given what we know about how these people’s bodies are now.
      It’s more than just football, too. I’m quite a big UFC fan, but I’ve gotten out of the fandom for the most part as I’ve learned more about how harmful weight cutting is to the human body (and how athletes I know insist that the harm they’re doing to their bodies makes them more competitive, despite, you know, empirical evidence that they are anything but stronger). I’m not sure I can take being a UFC superfan when the first kid dies from weight cutting; I didn’t enjoy being a professional wrestling superfan when Chris Benoit killed his child, his wife, and himself because of the concussions he suffered and couldn’t really watch wrestling again until concussion protections were in place to protect the performers. I can take injuries that arise from competition (broken bones and whatnot), but it’s the life-threatening stuff that keeps me up at night.
      I don’t say the above to deny that people gain joy from watching sports at all; others are experts on their internal, subjective emotional states and it isn’t my place to question them (which would be the height of arrogance). Rather, given what I know of my internal, subjective emotional states that arise from my fandom of things, it surprises me to find that others aren’t sensitive to the same sorts of concerns that I am (such that informed spectatorship is affected by these sorts of concerns).

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    15. Marijo Cook Avatar
      Marijo Cook

      Weighing in here with some points that haven’t been mentioned but that have been on my mind lately (its spring break, so I have time to think!): Sports are an important component of our social construction of masculinity. I believe that it was a crisis of masculinity during Victoria’s realm that led to the positioning of sport in the education of young men and its consequent importance throughout the 20th century. Perhaps it had something to do with the dwindling empire, or with the rise of urbanism. It is also tied to racism, of course, and the rising importance of eugenics and a notion of the ideal genetic specimen. White, British men were to be both celebrated and cultivated in athletics.
      Athletics are well-suited to the task of masculine construction insofar as masculinity is concerned with the production of warriors, because sports also contain elements of warfare: physical ability, competition, the risk of injury, the willingness to inflict harm, teamwork, obedience, enduring the drudgery of training, etc. In the United States, we have carried this to an almost ridiculous extreme, but we are probably also the nation that has been most centrally involved in warfare for the past couple of centuries. War and sports are both sort of integral to American identity, especially since WWII. Television has also turned out to be a great medium for watching (some) sports, which is the wholly accidental source of the profitability of sports today, insofar as one no longer needs to actually attend the games in order to participate and care about them.
      Working in high schools for the past few years has led me to believe that the whole business of sports is having a really destructive effect on our public schools. This ranges from the problem of having students who think that they will be NFL stars and consequently think they don’t need to learn how to read, to problems of discipline that stem from the idolization of football players (e.g.- consider the famous cases of rape over the past year, but also this leads to many small discipline problems during the average school day that would not exist if there were no sports teams), and just the waste of huge amounts of time and resources on practices that are not even justifiable in terms of physical fitness, much less general education (except for those lessons in ‘being a good sport,’ in the value of working hard to achieve a goal, and in teamwork that may be best transmitted through competitive sports, but this is also debatable). We talk on and on and on about how to improve education, but it is practically taboo to suggest that eliminating the schools’ preoccupation with competitive sports might benefit the educational process, because so many people have not only a financial investment but also an emotional attachment to the culture of sports. Instead of teaching kids to get the kind of regular exercise that prevents many of the diseases that are most prevalent today, we encourage them to get involved in competitive games that really don’t lead to general physical fitness and can lead to serious injury or even death.
      Jon’s pretending to not understand the fascination that sports engenders is irritating in just the right way, I think, because really, our interest in these teams is as constructed as our interest in any (other) brand might be. It is one way of interacting socially that is promoted by those people who are able to profit from our social interactions. This is, of course, above and beyond the fact that everyone profits from having young people (traditionally men) who are willing to sacrifice themselves in order to protect the rest of us from our enemies (warriors from other tribes), which is the fact underlying the construction of warrior masculinity in the first place.

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    16. Jon Cogburn Avatar
      Jon Cogburn

      Benoit’s finisher was horrible, head butting someone from a jump off the turnbuckle. Are there other moves where the performers are being more careful now?
      How effective do you think the anti-concussion moves in WWF are going to be?
      My impression is that after Eddie Guerrero died they finally got serious about steroids and human growth hormone (and as a result have been pushing wrestlers who can actually move again). Are they as serious about concussion protection? If so, it would alleviate my guilt about being a fan considerably.

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    17. Neal Hebert Avatar
      Neal Hebert

      Strangely, it was the Benoit muder/suicide a year after Guerrero’s death that really changed the culture – and it’s an indictment on the WWE that it took something like that to get them to start being concerned about their athletes’ holistic wellness.
      As best as I can tell, the new drug testing appears to be working – the WWE (much like the Nevada State Athletic Commission as of last week) does not allow performers to be on testosterone replacement therapy, although older performers or athletes with a non-independent contractor contract are allowed these sorts of RXes. Are the guys 100% clean? Almost certainly not, given that there are certain performance enhancers that simply cannot be tested for (Human Growth Hormone, or HGH, being the big one). So there probably are still guys on HGH, but there are guys on that in every sport since it can’t be tested for.
      But part of the reforms since the Benoit death, particularly in light of former wrestler Chris Nowinski’s research into head trauma, is that the Wellness Policy they’ve instituted is extremely careful when it comes to concussions. Performers are put on hiatus until they can pass impact tests, sometimes resulting in months of inactivity to protect their brains. This has unfortunately resulted in guys coming back from injury with no storyline, but they’re healthier and safer.
      The Wellness Policy seems to be legit. In fact, it’s the reason that Bruno Sammartino finally agreed after 30 years to be inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame and rejoin the company as an entertainment ambassador and historical first champion (they wrote him out of history until last year).
      WWE wrestlers, though, are no longer mostly musclebound freaks. There are still those guys, granted, but they’re seriously promoting leaner men with athletic builds. Daniel Bryan is getting the biggest push of anyone right now (he’ll likely win the title at Wrestlemania) and he’s 5’10” and 190 pounds. Antonio Cesaro, nee Claudio Castagnoli, is another guy they’re pushing – he’s more of a Vince McMahon body builder type, but he’s clearly not on PEDs as well. For years he’s been a proponent of Olympic style strength training and he’s maintained the same physique since the middle of the 2000s as an independent wrestler. He’s also an amazing athletic performer, doing Mark Henry-like feats of strength despite being smaller than John Cena.
      Although CM Punk is out of wrestling (he walked out on his contract because he got angry and exhausted), his status as a top guy who does no drugs is pretty close to unimpeachable.
      So yeah, there are guys in wrestling that are being pushed and at least appear to be drug free. There are policies in place to protect their mental and physical health to a degree that is unprecedented in professional wrestling history. Where it’s worrisome, however, is in Japan: New Japan Professional Wrestling is, in terms of in-ring action for the past 18 months, the best wrestling promotion on earth. They do not take concussion studies seriously, however (I suspect due to these studies’ origins as American research). After the G1 Climax tournament that we watched last Fall, about a third of the guys who were in the tournament were pretty seriously injured given how physical the matches were and how hard they worked themselves. Several were out of action with broken bones; others worked through their injuries and are still working injured right now. So there’s a real sense that the excellence of the company is taking its toll on the performers.

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    18. Jon Cogburn Avatar
      Jon Cogburn

      O.K. I’m feeling the guilt now.
      The G1 Climax tournament was possibly the best professional wrestling I’ve ever seen. I probably liked that better than any WrestleMania, and I came in not knowing the storylines or characters and it was all in Japanese (with many of the entry songs overdubbed because of copyright too, if I remember). The stories the performers were able to tell just with movement were transcendent.
      It’s awful to think that a culture of injury was a necessary part of why it was so amazing.
      I didn’t know about the C.M. Punk thing. Was he angry about jobbing to Kane? (I’m angry about it.) I can’t believe they aren’t selling his merchandise. That’s absolutely crazy. If this is a work, it’s the biggest one of all time. It doesn’t look like it is though.
      Vince McMahon would often rather make a point than make a buck. This may be necessary. . . I think he realized how Eric Bischoff’s letting the wrestlers bully him was part of WCW’s implosion. But in the long run McMahon tends to come around though. If he’s willing to resign Bret Hart, anything is possible.

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    19. Neal Hebert Avatar
      Neal Hebert

      On the New Japan front, the injury thing only became apparent after the tournament so I don’t feel as badly about that as I ordinarily would – the wrestlers were working themselves too hard, and they pushed themselves far beyond what they should have out of pride and competition with each other. At least half of the entrants in that tournament were among the best wrestlers in the world, and with nine PPVs in two weeks (with different combinations of wrestlers getting a shot to headline) they pushed themselves well harder than they should have. The physical toll it took wasn’t obvious until after the tournament, and the wrestlers seem to have learned: there’s another tournament going on right now, and they seem to be taking it much easier on themselves after last year’s G1. Then again, we won’t know for sure until G1 2014 – and the tournament is almost as big a deal to New Japan as Wrestlemania is to the WWE (the Tokyo Dome Show in January is NJPW’s Wrestlemania, and the G1 is kind of like the Royal Rumble in that the winner gets a shot at the title at the Dome four months later), so the mentality might be to push harder for that tour than everything else, no matter what the physical consequences are. We’ll see this year.
      As for Punk, apparently he’s just burned out on wrestling, exhausted both physically and mentally, and unhappy with his position in the company. He got turned face after last year’s Wrestlemania, and went from being the #1 heel to a (distant) number 3 babyface in the company (after Cena and Daniel Bryan for sure, possibly after The Shield now as well) and wasn’t pleased with storylines for him. He says that his dream is to main event Wrestlemania, and he realized that the company had no plans on letting him do that – and this year, he was originally working a program with Triple H at Mania and he felt like that was not what he wanted to do (Triple H has a history of making Punk look bad in matches and trying to kill his pushes dating back to 2011 after Punk resigned with the company). Triple H, obviously, is unhappy that Punk dissed him by not wanting to work a huge match with him at Wrestlemania, and Vince McMahon has told Triple H to take a step back from the situation and allow McMahon to take over negotiations with Punk.
      The reality is they want Punk back, the crowd still chants for Punk like crazy, but Punk is enjoying the opportunity to rest and heal. I think injuries, for Punk, are worse than for some other wrestlers because Punk is straight-edge in real life, and views pain killers and most recuperative medicines as a non-starter given his beliefs – so when he’s working hurt like all wrestlers do, he’s hurting a lot more than most.

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    20. Neal Hebert Avatar
      Neal Hebert

      For people that read New Apps and are wondering “well, how could something fake like professional wrestling be so dangerous” or why Jon and I are discussing a random Japanese tournament, this is a link to the final match pre-intermission of the G1 Climax Dy 4 event (in other words, this was not the main event or the craziest thing on the card): Katsuyori Shibata versus Tomohiro Ishii. The match itself is a little over ten minutes long, but if you just watch the first 3:24 of the video you’ll see why it’s possible to get so concerned. It also instantiates a lot of Marijo’s criticisms about masculinity as athletic praxis.
      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASVEQ6VGkQA

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