Ok I’m not from usa, so I dont really underestand wrestling. As far as I know its a scripted sketch with real phisical skill necessary to perform the act. But I keep reading about old champions or the first xxx race champion etc. What do you mean champion? If those are actors, so to speak, there are no champion, there is a script to follow. Its like saying Arnold swarzneger was the first terminator to defeat the advanced model in terminator2, what
? Please eli5.
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Professional wrestling was originally legitimate competition. However, in order to get more spectators, it turned into scripted or semi-scripted performance. It started with competitors agreeing to allow each other to do flashy moves that can only done on a cooperating opponent, and over the years turned into a theatrical performance (not quite clear when it became fully theatrical, but it’s been at least a century).
You have to be a talented athlete and a decent actor for professional wrestling (the hammy performance is an intentional stylistic choice, not a result of bad acting, most of the acting skill involved is expressed through body movement rather than speech). However, being a talented athlete does not mean that it is a competitive sport. Ballet dancers also need to be talented athletes, but that doesn’t make ballet a sport.
Many professional wrestlers do have a background in the actual sport of wrestling and related sports such as mixed martial arts (Brock Lesnar is a notable example), but professional wrestling is not itself a sport. It is a theatrical performance which imitates those sports in a highly stylized manner.
The script does not always describe every move that someone makes. It may identify the opening, a few key moves in the middle, and how the performance is supposed to end, leaving some amount of time for the performers to improvise to fill the gaps (maybe with some non-specific guidance in the script).
A champion is just a person whose role in the story is to be the champion. The character John Cena winning things isn’t a competition between the actor John Cena and some other actor. The actor William Shatner didn’t defeat the actor Ricardo Montalban either: they played characters in a story where James T. Kirk defeated Khan Noonien Singh.
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