If you smell what The Rock is cookin’, you already know this column is designed for all the millions and millions of wrestling fans that pack dorms, living rooms and bars every Monday night.Now if you’re not down with that, I’ve got two words for ya. Suck it!To put it mildly, pro wrestling is the mecca of male entertainment. There are no seasons, signing bonuses, salary caps or lock-outs, just a bunch of retired jocks who couldn’t make it in the show and chose a new profession.The best way to describe wrestling would be to call it a male soap opera. There’s sex, drama and conflict all rolled into a few hours of prime time cable television.On any given night, wrestling shows more T&A than a Victoria’s Secret catalog you got in the mail because women inhabited your apartment before you signed your life away on a lease in a roach-infested campus complex.Talk about drama, there’s the whole Sexual Chocolate saga, or what about the Wolfpack trying to overtake WCW.As for brutality, only one name comes to mind: Mankind Or what about all the beat downs the NWO lays out on its victims.If you think you are just too sweeeeet to watch wrestling because it’s too white trash then you should be drug to the Smackdown Hotel on the corner of Know Your Role Boulevard and Jabroni Drive so I can whoop your candy ass.Just because a few trailer park tenants pirate cable to view wrestling and drink Steveweisers doesn’t mean everyone should be given the same bad rap. And just in case you didn’t know, your ass better call the cable man, because the last time I checked it was illegal to use a descrambler.Wrestling should be considered an art form for the finely chiseled bodies, 24-inch pythons and articulate spokespeople. Men know these individuals are actually just entertainers, but women haven’t seemed to figure out what has been known by men since the beginning of time.It’s actually surprising the ladies don’t tune into wrestling more often to watch a bunch of men run around in nothing but a pair of bikini briefs or flesh hugging nylon tights. In fact, the only thing women ever say about wrestling is that it’s stupid and fake.True; a majority of the moves do not have pressure applied to them, but it still takes athletic ability to fly and zip around the ring when you are 6-feet, 7-inches tall and weigh 300-plus pounds. If wrestling was totally real, the actors involved would be crippled for life or dead. Sorry ladies, but wrestling is here to stay.The conceptual formula of why wrestling is such a mammoth success is really not that hard to comprehend: Wrestlers + sex + beer = drunks = ratings.Marketers have tapped into this idea for years. Wrestling is not some new phenomenon that just arrived with a Monday night time slot. Wrestling has been around since the beginning of time when cavemen used to knock their wives over the head with a club. Now just substitute a chair, pit the men against each other and add the ingenuity of a Jumbotron and color commentators.Wrestling is something passed down from generation to generation. My dad took me to see wrestling, and I am going to introduce my children to the same senseless violence I learned when I was young.Now if you have a problem with wrestling, there may always be politics in your future, but I wouldn’t bet on it just because Stone Cold said so.
Justin Hegedus is a senior journalism major from Toledo who wears wrestling tights around campus just for the fun of it.
