Recently, my friend, "Lefty," penned an article that had several critical points of note. In case you don't read his blog, you should, because he always has good points. In this instance, he drew a comparison that I'd like to expand on. From his article:
Given the choice of watching professional wrestling or the NFL, I’d choose professional wrestling. At least there’s no pretense about scripting in wrestling. And there’s no politics in wrestling, just flamboyant personalities. It’s a show. It’s entertainment. The NFL has simply turned itself into a political statement. It doesn’t have to be that way.
Wow. A lot of fact and insight bundled into a single paragraph.
It's no secret anymore that the NFL is fixed. Professional football is entertainment, at best. From a different section at the same link, Howard Cosell is quoted as saying, "I have observed the disgusting extent to which television will go in order to get a rating… The world of sports today is endlessly complex, an ever-spinning spiral of deceit, immorality, absence of ethics, and defiance of the public interest."
To be sure, there is a difference between a fixed outcome and a scripted outcome. A fixed outcome is that which the NFL displays - that is, where one team is assured a win. A scripted outcome is what one sees in professional wrestling - where both wrestlers know going into the match which one will win, and they work together to create a story and deliver the predetermined outcome.
The hilarious part is that which comes when you tell the average guy that pro sports are rigged. They will fight back with all the emotion and lack of reason as they did when they were 10 and you told them pro wrestling wasn't real. Of course, pro wrestling is real to an extent, but the outcome is not a function of athletic endeavor, competition, and chance. Similarly, pro football is real, but the outcome is rarely left to athletic endeavor, competition, and chance.
Back to Lefty's point, at least the professional wrestling industry is honest - they don't try to pass their product off as an athletic competition. The NFL has turned itself into a political statement. The WWE, to it's credit, still acknowledges that there is good and evil in this world, and it portrays it's heroes and villains as such. So both are entertainment - the difference is the WWE doesn't pretend to be something else, too.
And, the WWE is more entertaining than the NFL.
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