Yea, cuz God knows Rey Misterio, Chris Benoit and Shawn Michaels are all huge, roided up muscleheads. For the record, Misterio is about 5'4, 160 lbs, Benoit is about 5'9, 220 lbs, and Michaels is the largest of the three at a whopping 6'2, 225 lbs.
You think it takes no skill to wrestle? I'll tell you right now, I wrestled in high school, as in "real" wrestling, and it was the hardest thing by far I'd ever done. Once a year the wrestling teams and basketball teams would switch practices and take on the other sport's drills, and let me tell you, it was funny as hell to see all the big, tough basketball players puking their guts out from exhaustion. A 3-minute amateur wrestling match is like torture, like running a mile at full speed with a child on your shoulders. Wrestling is the toughest sport there is, bar none, and anyone who thinks or says differently never competed. If you think otherwise, get on the mat and prove me wrong.
Now, consider this: Many professional wrestling matches go far longer than 3 minutes. Many go as long as a half an hour, and until a few years ago matches that went an hour or more were common. And not just wrestling on a mat... actually being picked up and slammed on the mat, sometimes from ten feet in the air or more. As has been said, "you can't fake gravity". It hurts. The mats in pro rings are the same as amateur mats... they hurt. NOW factor in getting hit in the head with chairs, falling off ladders... where exactly does the "fake" part come in? Because the match results are predetermined? How many boxing matches has Don King promoted that were fixed in advance?
The guys don't try to kill each other. But mistakes happen. People get hurt. People die. People have been dropped on their head and died of a broken neck, right in the middle of a match. People have taken bad falls, suffered serious internal injuries, and died, right in the middle of a match. Broken necks, heart attacks, punctured lungs, brain aneurysms... they happen.
http://www.gerweck.net/sabuneck.gif
That's a match from 1994, Chris Benoit wrestling Sabu. About 30 seconds into the match, Benoit went for a suplex and dropped Sabu directly on his head, fracturing several vertebrae in his neck. Most people would take it easy after that; Sabu wrestled less than two months later wearing a neck brace. Think that was "easy"?
You know how many people in wrestling actually perform, every single night, with injuries that would have normal people collecting disability? Hulk Hogan's left knee is, for all intents and purposes, gone. His knee ligaments have been completely destroyed because he blew his knee out in 1985 and never got it fixed until 1999 because up until recently, if you were hurt, you did not get paid, period, so nobody could afford to take time off with injuries. And that's just one example. There's an immeasurable number of retired wrestlers who are either in wheelchairs, partially paralyzed, or have had hip and knee replacements because of all the damage done during their wrestling careers. I suggest telling one of them that it's "stupid" and "all fake".
Not everybody likes wrestling, and that's fine. But to not respect it means, in all honesty, that you're ignorant. To not respect what these people go through, every night, for the sake of entertainment, is ignorant. I have eternally more respect for men like Hulk Hogan, Bret Hart and Chris Benoit than I do for spoiled, pampered "real" athletes who whine incessantly and strike/get locked out because they want $10 million a year instead of $8 million a year.
