How professional wrestling is just like an office

I've been watching professional wrestling off and on for ten years now.
When Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW) was an independent
organization that toured small arenas, I was an avid fan, and Matthew
and I only ever missed one event in Chicago. I pouted and whined about
that missed mayhem for months, "I can't believe we missed the
Pay-Per-View taping in Villa Park."

Mathew said, "There, there, next time we'll make it."

It's my husband that brought me to wrestling, unwillingly. He was a
dedicated fan as a child and teenager, and as he matured into an
academic adult, he began to study the media of wrestling as a professor
of communication. I came along for the ride. Sometimes I got
interested in single wrestlers or a tag-team like I would get
interested in a professional athlete or sports team (Love Randy
Johnson, love the Buccaneers, don't follow the rest), and sometimes my
interest flagged and I wouldn't watch with him for a while. I'd sit
with my book on the couch and read while he gave me a play-by-play
account, and I'd roll my eyes and tell him to quit pestering me if he
wanted me to sit with him.

Tonight, as I read my fourth romance novel, he watched WWE. I glanced
up occasionally, and I saw something I'd noticed before but never fully
comprehended: professional wrestling is just like an office. The
people with the most seniority are the least nimble, least willing to
do hard work, least willing to help a new person succeed where they are
waning, and least able to see their irrelevance.

The new people do all the work, "paying their dues." They put in the
extra effort to get every gritty job done, even when it means letting a
sweaty, arthritic old man fall on top of you and get credit for winning
the match although really he couldn't keep up with your stamina. The
new people have all the best tricks, know how to jump off the top rope
in moves the old guys never used to imagine. They threaten their
bodies with the hard cement floor to get noticed in the company and
advance. They're too naive to worry that their strength and health and
fearlessness will sustain them long enough until they become the
top-billing act and pull the most seniority.

When Ben Stein worked for Nixon, he demanded to have a couch and a TV
in his office. He said that to understand what to write in speeches
for the president, he had to understand the hopes and fears of the
general public. He found that mindset televised in soap operas which
he watched laying on the couch at work. The soaps' writers knew their
audience, and through the writers, Ben stein knew them as well.

And so goes professional wrestling. Script-writers who plot out each
story line and angle know what their viewers want to see--media that
dramatizes their real experiences and simultaneously provides the
fantasy outlet for all their frustrations with their lives and the
world. Even when I'm not looking for a reflection of my life in
popular media, I find it seeking me out, now in the guise of professional
wrestlers, huffing and puffing each other to the mat in a submission
hold, sweating through the daily power struggle between new and old.