There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not a sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of Suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque. Of course, there exists a false wrestling, in which the participants unnecessarily go to great lengths to make a show of a fair fight; this is of no interest.

-Roland Barthes

Here’s a fistful of irony for you; a friend of mine went off to see a Cirque du Soleil show in Niagara falls. She was excited to see this stuff because she’s only ever seen clips on Youtube and has always been a big fan of the old Shriners circus acts, and wanted to see what is essentially the 21st century version. When she came back, she told me how impressed she was at the acrobatics and the storytelling they could do with just their bodies. She was absolutely spellbound by the entire experience for the sole reason that it was a physical manifestation of art. This is the same girl that turns her nose at me whenever I utter a single word about professional wrestling.

The irony here, in case it’s lost on anyone, is that Cirque and Wrestling are kind of the same thing. Both art forms rely on physical prowess far beyond that of, to quote Bobby Heenan, “the ham n’ eggers out there.” Both rely on interpretative dance skills as well as a major helping of suspending disbelief on the part of the audience. Both underpay and work their performers into an under-appreciated early grave. Both require a lot of fireworks and a lot of money and a lot of secrets.

One other thing they both share—both Cirque du Soleil and pro wrestling are not “real.” The difference is that one is still pretending to be. The history of these two art forms have common ground in the circus: while the acrobats and jesters enticed peanut-chomping crowds in the big tent, the big strong villain challenged the towns’ local hero in fictitious combat. While wrestling would grow into boxing-sized events all on its own, the circus would flounder and, in most respects, perish. (I’m pretty sure the Shriners circus is still going in some capacity, but nobody can argue that franchise theme parks pretty much killed the traveling circus.)

Television, the other product that we can fairly safely say gave circuses the deathblow, gifted wrestling a target demographic. Forty some odd years later, a group of extremely talented Quebecois acrobats presented hot tourist crowds in Montreal, Las Vegas, and other hubs a new twist on the classic circus in Cirque du Soliel. At present, there’s over a dozen Cirque companies performing hundreds of shows per year. There’s a good number of wrestling companies doing the same. So why does the general public dig Cirque for it’s high calibre of physical art, but think wrestling is for hicks?

In my estimation, it is largely about authorial intent. Cirque performances are difficult to appreciate on a narrative and language level, but crystal clear on what they want you to remember. They want you to leave the show awed by feats of strength, flexibility, and choreography. They would also like you to be confused by the narrative and flow of the show. It is an art thing, in a broad sense. If you feel like something is beyond your casual reason (but not beyond some study) you will generally let it wash over you as arty.

It’s the artiness of it that separates the acrobats of cirque with the acrobats of any other circus. It’s less PT Barnum and more Damien Hirst.

Wrestling has precisely the opposite problem. We immediately understand the narrative surrounding the wrestling. We also generally despise the narrative and wish it would go away (with, of course, the exceptions being cherished scenes that touch the heartstrings but are few and far between). Conversely, the meaning behind the movements of the wrestler is often lost on the audience. They believe that his intention is to hit his moves to defeat his opponent, but only happening on the level of the naive. There is almost no one in the audience who believes what is happening is happening without a predetermined script.

Wrestling has been officially “fake” in the eyes of the people since 1935, when Lou Marsh, a Toronto Star reporter, called it “Sportive Entertainment.”

And since Vince McMahon’s re-christening of the term “Sports Entertainment,” wrestling has been allowed to be fake openly and honestly. But wrestling isn’t respected by anyone other than those invested in wrestling, either financially or through habit. It never really has been. The stigma of being a “fake sport” still lingers, and if the success of Cirque Du Soleil is something to go by and there are multitudes of reasons as to why, then wrestling can and should finally drop the “sport” from every inch of its moniker.

It is in fact the term “sport” that inhibits pro wrestling from becoming something respectful. Pro wrestling is found primarily on sport networks, or, in the case of TNA, on a network with a sport mentality. Wrestling magazines are found in the sports section of book stores. Pro wrestling shows largely occur in sporting arenas. The merchandise—be it foam fingers, t-shirts, or collectible signatures—are all directly comparable to sports paraphernalia. And this is not even including the broadcasts themselves, which border on sports parody. This practice is all in the name of “sports entertainment,” as in, ‘we are a sport, so we have to look like one, or else people will think we’re fake, even though we’re technically fake, but being fake is what makes us entertaining, so it’s okay.’ They have this half-right. Being fake is what makes professional wrestling entertaining. It’s the other half that frustrates people who want to enjoy it as an art form.

The sport aspect of pro wrestling is wrapped up in every angle. It’s not just the companies that toe the line. Newspapers and journals that talk about wrestling will post the column in “sports,” not in “entertainment.” If wrestling is ever spoken about on television seriously as in, not a punch line or a cross promotion piece it is on the sports or sports-affiliated networks. Internet writers will often write about sports and wrestling without so much a page break, as if there aren’t hundreds of things that split the two apart. The worst offenders, and even some wrestlers are guilty of this, are those that find no border between pro wrestling and the mixed martial art world of UFC (Kurt Angle has generally been the worst offender in this regard, at one time challenging anyone from any company, whether the ring be four, six, or eight-sided, a reference to the different stages wrestling and UFC utilize).

One of my favorite tag lines was from the “attitude” era of wrestling, when you would often see the term “Get it?” underneath the scratched WWF logo. The genius of this was that they never elaborated. “It” ended up being whatever people saw in wrestling, which in turn opened the door to subjective logic and personalized reasoning. Most people, as I understand, saw the campaign as a front against WCW fans and people who didn’t like WWE’s style of wrestling, because these people didn’t “get it.” Perhaps that was the intention, but much like how people will go to a Bjork concert and enjoy it because “not getting it” is kind of the point, I thought it was a dig against the WWF’s own audience, who watched it not “getting” the full picture. They didn’t realize that what they were watching was a representation of themselves and many other things. They didn’t realize that “getting it” meant studying wrestling beyond kayfabe and well-known “secrets.” They watched, not fully understanding what it was they were being shown—but that was kind of the point.

In some ways you can compare a well-told contest to a well-performed magic trick. Christopher Nolan’s film The Prestige explains the lure of magic in a way that works well when explaining wrestling, too. The fans don’t always want to know the secrets and are in fact disappointed when they find them.

This whole “get it” thing is really only one reason that pro wrestling belongs somewhere other than the sports world. There is no “getting it” in sports, because sports are fairly simple to explain. Teams play one another to the best of their ability. Scores are tallied, and the winners of the game and the fans of such winners are generally happier and better paid than the losers. That’s pretty much it. Wrestling is much, much more complicated, and it doesn’t help that on top of all the smoke and mirrors they also have to keep up the façade of being a fake sport.

There are two types of wrestling fans that would be disparaged to see the “sport” moniker leave pro wrestling, and their defences are fairly just. The first type, the casual fan, probably wouldn’t appreciate wrestling if it weren’t aesthetically sporty. To place wrestling firmly into the throes of theatre would inevitably lower its appreciation amongst the 18-34 male demographic of homophobic theatre-haters who just want a little character development to go along with their violence. These people have been WWE’s core audience for the majority of their run up until lately. The good news is, most of these people have left WWE for mixed martial arts. In my personal opinion, they aren’t missed.

The other type of wrestling fan this would disappoint is the pure wrestling fan, or, the type of wrestling fan that enjoys the athletic and charismatic ability of wrestlers and appreciates it above all things. These fans subject themselves to months and months of sub par programming in between breaths of “great matches” involving the likes of “real wrestlers” like AJ Styles, Samoa Joe, Daniel Bryan, CM Punk, William Regal, etc. These fans believe what I believe; wrestling can be as transcendent as any art form, and it would be if we didn’t have to deal with whatever issue is making wrestling look stupid to the general populace. Ring of Honor fans explain this wonderfully. They defend their promotion because they only produce “logical” story lines, as opposed to the “silly” shit TNA and WWE does. As if any scenario where two men pretend to fight one another is terribly “logical.”

This type of fan can be persuaded that wrestling is art because they already generally believe this. They see great wrestling contests as artistic, and put up with the rest out of habit. But what if the rest of the show reflected this artistic nature? Yes, this is idealistic, but this is a much better ideal than preferring one wrestler to be champion to another. It is better than wishing that Hulk Hogan would just go away. It is better than complaining about minutiae.

So consider the mould that Cirque du Soliel has created. Imagine a professional wrestling program built on the idea of creating an artistic statement as opposed to emulating sport. Imagine that the wins and losses column mattered less than how well every scene played to the crowd. Imagine if metaphor and body language were used to tell stories as opposed to screaming lunatics wishing death on their opponent all the time? The mind boggles.

The term “sport” was once what held professional wrestling in high regard. Because of its relation to sport, wrestling avoided the same fall as the circus. But perhaps it was not to its greatest advantage. Through Cirque Du Soleil, the circus is enjoying a renaissance and is being lauded worldwide as a spectacle worth respecting. But “sport” has become an albatross for professional wrestling, and it will sink it.

K Sawyer Paul is an author and publisher living in Toronto. He tweets and tumbls. In the wrestling world he is known for This is Sports Entertainment and Aggressive Art.

Edited by TH.