A Big Screen Body Slam – The History of Professional Wrestling

Title: A Big Screen Body Slam – The History of Professional Wrestling

Description: Steve is joined again by frequent contributor, Chris, to talk about the history, background and context of professional wrestling. Professional wrestling may not be a competitive sport in the traditional sense, but the punishment professional wrestlers put their bodies through is not fake at all. Let’s take a look at the surprisingly long and rich history of professional wrestling!

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Begin Transcript:

Thank you again for listening to Beyond the Big Screen podcast. We are a member of the Parthenon Podcast network. Of course, a big thanks goes out to our frequent guest, Chris.
A great way to support Beyond the big screen is to leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. These reviews really help me know what you think of the show and help other people learn about Beyond the Big screen. More about the Parthenon Podcast Network can be found at Parthenonpodcast.com. You can learn more about Beyond the Big Screen, great movies and stories so great they should be movies on Facebook and Twitter by searching for A to z history, you can also find us at atozhistorypage.com. You can contact me there or just send an email to steve at a to z history page dot com. Links to all this and more can be found at beyond the big screen dot com. I thank you for joining me again, Beyond the big Screen.
[00:00:00] Today, we’re joined again by Chris to talk about a topic of body slamming proportions. We’re going to dive into the history and background of professional wrestling. Professional wrestling has been a staple of the big screen and small screen for decades. It is a theater, a type of ballet. If you will, you could almost say I’ll be at a version with beer, swelling and trash talking this episode.
Help us understand and more deeply enjoy. Our next step is sewed on the 2008 film. The wrestler, you can enjoy these episodes separately, but they’re an excellent pair as a tag team. And I know you’re really excited to talk about this topic. Yeah. Because. I don’t think people really understand just how deep wrestling history is and like how far back it goes and how, we’re only going to be scratching the surface on this episode, but use this as a template.
If you, all of this sounds interesting, like there’s, as [00:01:00] you know me and you’ve been talking about it for weeks, um, there’s so many different roads to go down in terms of a wrestling history. So yeah, I’m pretty excited. Yeah. Uh, introduce your audience to a bit of a wrestling history.
We’re, we’re gonna be focusing mainly just on north American wrestling. There’s a whole history in Mexico and Japan and different parts of the world. But, uh, in terms of, uh, just as using this as like a primer for the movie, the Russia. Just focusing on north America makes the most sense. Yeah.
That’s a really interesting thing. You bring up the history of wrestling. It goes back much further than I expected it to, and you’re breaking it down into four major areas. And so why don’t we start off with this first, um, most ancient era of professional wrestling. Yeah. So yeah, so basically it PR professional wrestling started off as a.
Like legitimate matches when it first started in, uh, [00:02:00] the United States. So it would happen on like circuses, carnivals, uh, your local shows or what have you, we’re all familiar with a amateur wrestling. This is the stuff that you see at the Olympics where you have to pin your guy and there’s there’s Greco, Roman, and then there’s freestyle.
Greco-Roman wrestling as a, it’s only, only upper body. We’re freestyle. Uh, do AA take-downs or what have you, professional wrestling at the time, because they were talking about is basically no holds barred. So there’s submission holds there’s small joint manipulation. Um, there’s, uh, like locks basically like a lot of the stuff that you kind of see and kind of modern MMA now, there was no striking per se, but everybody. It was a dirty sport, so people did it. Um, and this actually got really, really, really popular for really, for, for awhile. And it kind of started around I w I want to say I mean, you can [00:03:00] go back further, but I would say. Wrestling as a sport, uh, professional wrestling as a sport kind of started around like the civil war, Titan time era.
And it kind of reached its peak, uh, uh, right before the great war, basically, uh, with the match between, uh, George hack and Trent and Frank, gosh now to put in kind of like perspective, just how insane these matches were their most famous duel. They had two of them, uh, Frank gosh, won the match, but it took two hours to, to beat George Hawkins Schmidt.
Uh, and professional wrestling for the longest time was considered, was like the second sport in the United States. There was a. Just right behind baseball. I know that’s I seen that, that seems crazy for modern people to really grasp, uh, and it was all I want, I want to, I don’t want to say it was all legit.
Um, the top [00:04:00] guys, it was legit matches the, um, but they ended up finding, and this is kind of how it slowly becomes uh, what they call a work, uh, or a work shoot. They found basically it’s well, we can put on a better show for the audiences if we kind of just dry things out a little bit more, because the guys at the top were so much better than there was no like middle, it was either you’re really good at it, or you’re just terrible at it. So the guys at the top would beat the guys at the bottom, like super fast and there was just no. It just wasn’t entertaining for the audiences. So, wrestling, promoters, or, carnival or carnies or what have you, would incur Wade bike. Hey, just, we’ll give you a little bit extra. If you just drag this match out just a little bit, give the audience a chance of oh, maybe their local guy has a chance and that’s slowly how it started becoming.
Fake, it’s kind of interesting that this time period. So we’re talking about the early, early 19 [00:05:00] hundreds, it seems like there’s a lot of parallels between professional boxing and professional wrestling. Yeah. Yeah. Because yeah, boxing was slow at that time period was also slowly making the change to like the Queensberry rules.
So. You’re starting to have gloves on the hands and it wasn’t just bare knuckle and they started putting time limits on the rounds. And, um, yeah, because you would hear about boxing matches at that time too, where these guys are going, 30 rounds, 40 rounds, just insane. I don’t understand how they were able to do, especially when you look at modern boxing, it’s the only explanation I can think of is they weren’t going as hard.
I don’t know with wrestling, it’s a hard, it’s harder to finish somebody, uh, in a sense like, cause it. This is like more of a dance, right? Uh, if you want like a modern comparison to Frank Ghosh and George Hakone Schmidt, there was a re there was an MMA match between, uh Sakharova who was a Japanese fighter.
He [00:06:00] actually came from a professional wrestling background. He fought quakes, Gracie who’s fighting. For Brazilian jujitsu, uh, in the UFC, he was like at USC one, two and three, they had an hour and a half long match. I mean, it was 100% legit. It’s just, they just couldn’t figure out a way to finish each other.
And Sakharova kind of won because. Got tired. That was basically why the batch finished, but so as crazy as it might sound like that, it’s not unbankable. I’ve watched it myself. I watched the entire match. Uh, not happened, not that long ago. So it’s interesting at this, at this point. Yeah. In the history right around world war, one, professional boxing and professional wrestling are kind of veering off where professional boxing is becoming more professionalized than more.
Rules-based where the wrestling is kind of going in this theater direction. What is the next phase of professional wrestling [00:07:00] after this? So they start. Yeah. So people start realizing things aren’t on the up and up for eight. Uh, especially when people are betting on these matches, it’s all fine and dandy.
If you’re like, oh, just put a show on for the guys who, for the lesser matches. But if you’re putting harder and money down on these matches, you’re not telling people that it starts becoming a problem. Uh, people start realizing and a lot of these matches are not. A hundred percent of real, right?