History of professional wrestling

Professional wrestling, a simulated sport and performing art, is a popular form of entertainment in North America, Latin America, Europe, and Japan. Beginning in small, unorganized groups in the 1880s, wrestling's popularity boomed when independent enthusiasts unified and their media outlets grew in number. Professional wrestling became an international phenomenon in the 1980s with the expansion of the World Wrestling Federation. Throughout the 1990s, professional wrestling achieved highs in both viewership and financial success during a time of fierce competition among competing promotions, such as World Wrestling Federation, World Championship Wrestling and Extreme Championship Wrestling.

Up until the 1920s, professional wrestling in North America was viewed as a legitimate sport. This respectability did not endure as professional wrestling became identified with modern theatrics or "admitted fakery" ("kayfabe"), moving away from being a showcase for true competition. The scripted nature of the art have made critics consider it an illegitimate sport, particularly in comparison to boxing and amateur wrestling. No major promoter or wrestler denies that modern professional wrestling has predetermined match outcomes, making such criticism a straw man.

Through the advent of television in the 1950s, and cable in the 1980s professional wrestling gained powerful media outlets, reaching peaks of viewership. The nature of professional wrestling was changed dramatically to better fit television, enhancing character traits and storylines. Television has also helped many wrestlers break into mainstream media, becoming influential celebrities and icons of popular culture. In the United States, in the First Golden Age of professional wrestling of the 1940s-1950s, Gorgeous George gained mainstream popularity, followed in the Second Golden Age of the 1980s-1990s by Hulk Hogan, Stone Cold Steve Austin and Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson. In Mexico and Japan, the 1940s-1950s was also a Golden Age for professional wrestling, with Santo becoming a Mexican folk hero through film roles and comic book characterization, and Rikidōzan achieving similar fame in Japan.

* Professional wrestling in Australia
* Professional wrestling in Japan
* Lucha libre
* Professional wrestling in the United Kingdom
* Professional wrestling in the United States
** History of professional wrestling in the United States

Origin

Professional wrestling, defined as wrestling between two professionals for payment, is a form of both entertainment and fighting. There is perhaps no sport more widely dispersed or older than wrestling; it has documented history in ancient Babylonian and Egyptian art from 3,000 BC, literary presence in the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, and has been known and practiced in ancient Chinese and Japanese civilizations. The Greeks are credited for popularizing it as a competitive, widely-practiced public spectacle of competitive athleticism in the Ancient Olympic Games. It has therefore been believed that the form of wrestling practiced through the ages, from the ancients onto the nineteenth century, has been what is now called the Greco-Roman style.cite news |first=Matthew |last=Lindaman |title=Wrestling's Hold on the Western World Before the Great War |publisher=Historian, The |date=June 2000]

The modern style of professional wrestling, popularized by the United States and Great Britain during the late nineteenth century, is called the catch-as-catch can style. Originally thought of as unorthodox and more lax in style, catch wrestling differs from Greco-Roman in its allowed grapples; Greco-Roman strictly prohibits grabbing below the waist, while catch wrestling allows holds above and below the waist, including leg grips. Both catch wrestling and Greco-Roman were popular, and legitimate amateur and professional sports until the late 1800s, when catch wrestling changed slowly into the sport known worldwide as pro-wrestling, recognized more for its theatrical antics and entertainment than wrestling ability. Greco-Roman, however, did not change in the sense of competitiveness or legitimacy and remains a practiced Olympic sport to this day.

References

External links

* [http://www.prowrestlinghistory.com/index.html ProWrestlingHistory.com]