Secret Shame: The Adult Pro Wrestling Fan

Bill Simmons, Larry David and Me

Photo by David Shankbone

This week Bill Simmons, the transformative sports columnist who has built several empires with his now trademarked¹ combination of homerism and pop culture asides, had the great Larry David on his podcast for a freewheeling conversation.² The two touched on David’s intense sports fandom, his long career in television and even a little on process. It was pretty good as such things go, the kind of pleasant, unchallenging access interview that will get you $100 million from Spotify or whoever if you’re good at it.³

After an hour or so, however, David took over the interview, turning the tables on Simmons and turning the heat up to boiling with a few questions of his own. Most interesting was something I’ve wondered about often—how does Simmons navigate a life (and a relationship with his wife⁴) while maintaining such a tunnel-visioned focus on sports?

This piqued my interest immediately as, for a solid decade, I moonlighted as a full time professional sports writer. I’d go to work at my regular job for Big Government, then immerse myself in the world of combat sports each evening. On the weekends, I’d often fly around the country to interview athletes and cover events.

I thought I was living the dream. And it was occasionally great. I’ll never forget hunting for ghost towns with MMA coach Greg Jackson in New Mexico or an irate Mike Tyson pulling his publicist aside to complain that “this guy⁵ wants to talk to me about boxing. Boxing!”

I sat down and chatted with Dusty Rhodes at the WWE Performance Center, grappled with Daniel Cormier in the UFC Octagon, watched Chael Sonnen break up a fight in an elevator and even covered ice dancing at the Winter Olympics. For a combat sports writer, nothing compares to sitting ringside at a big boxing event, then appearing on CNN International to talk about it on the goddamn television—pretty mind-blowing stuff.

But, over time, the cracks began to appear. It was, in retrospect, an impossible way to live. I became a boring person, one-dimensional and dull. Between MMA, wrestling and boxing, there wasn’t time for any additional hobbies. I didn’t watch television or read as many books as I’d like. My entire life was built around sports I had more and more moral qualms about the longer I was around them.

To steal a cliche, it all became a grind, a never-ending struggle to secure funding for coverage. The same events, the same characters, the same arcs. There’s a monotony to sports coverage that kills most careers long before corporate accountants can get to you.

In 2020 I got laid off by Bleacher Report, along with the entire “prestige” team⁶. At the time it felt like a devastating blow. In truth, they had opened the cell doors and set me free. By the time the dust settled and I’d had time to reevaluate, I realized it was the best thing to ever happen to me. I’ve never applied for another job in the field or pitched a single editor. I don’t miss it.

I digress.⁷

This, however, wasn’t the question that got David in hot water in the online circles I walk. No, that was his unbelieving, almost sneering shock that Simmons, an educated adult professional, watches professional wrestling.

“Oh, so you love the performance?” David said. “But they’re all the same, aren’t they? I mean, every match looks the same.⁸”

Worse, in David’s eyes, were the people Simmons made his peers through shared wrestling fandom, convinced that the bulk of the audience doesn’t know the results are pre-determined.

“The people who are there, they think it’s real,” David said. “No, they do. Are you kidding? They go crazy. They wouldn’t go crazy if they didn’t think it was real.”

As a wrestling historian⁹, I find the idea that fans in the audience think the contests are “real” kind of flabbergasting. There has been widespread skepticism about professional wrestling in this country for more than a hundred years, even when the wrestlers tried desperately to convince the audience they were on the level. For the last 40 years with the national boom that was “Hulkamania” no one even pretends anymore. It’s unclear, at this point, whether many fans even understand they are watching a simulated sport—it’s so completely divorced from the concept of being an athletic contest that modern moves and sequences are built on a level of cooperation between the two wrestlers that would have been unthinkable when I was a kid.

Wrestling isn’t real, at least not anymore real than a fight in a Jason Statham movie. Neither were any of the baseball scenes in the classic movies Simmons and David discussed earlier in the podcast. Seinfeld, David’s magnum opus? Also not real. The fix was in. That shit was scripted!

There are lots of appropriate critiques you can level at pro wrestling—the stories are one-note and repetitive, as are the performances. Even at the highest level, you often see acting in and out of the ring that barely reaches the level of community theater. The profession is exploitative to the extreme¹⁰, with promoters keeping the bulk of the revenue while wrestlers (who are classified as independent contractors) are left to figure out a life post-wrestling without appropriate medical care and no retirement plan to speak of. Many are both broke and broken long before they can collect Social Security.

It’s dire.

But those reasonable criticisms aren’t ones you hear often, especially from non-fans. Instead, they focus on that old canard. “It’s fake.”

I’ve heard versions of this for years.

This all felt very perilous to me as I listened to Simmons being confronted about his fandom by someone he looked up to. Earlier in the week, the podcast I used to do with my wife¹¹ was discovered by people at my actual, shoot job.

This had never happened before and it was, frankly, mortifying.

While I was assured we sounded good and were “cute” together, there’s no way to downplay what those podcasts reveal—a wrestling fandom that far exceeds the bounds of normality and approaches weird at a fast clip. We have plenty of sports fans in our building, guys who know about the upcoming recruiting class at Alabama or who might take over as the Special Teams coach of the Cowboys. We even used to have a Finebaum caller on our team.

But you can get away with being an extreme football fan, especially in the South. You can fly flags and cover your car with stickers and wear a jersey like you are a 50-year-old player—that all exists within acceptable left and right limits.

Japanese pro wrestling? That’s plain weirdo shit and I may never recover from it.

Then again, the mockery I face won’t likely have anything to do with the specifics of the batshit things we say on the podcast, which is very much about our feeeeelings.¹² Instead, the question will be the same one David sprung on Simmons:

“How can you watch that stuff? You know it’s fake right?”

Jonathan Snowden is a long-time combat sports journalist. His books include Total MMA, Shooters and Shamrock: The World’s Most Dangerous Man. His work has appeared in USA Today, Bleacher Report, Fox Sports and The Ringer. Subscribe to this newsletter to keep up with his latest work.

1. This has not actually been trademarked. Feel free to steal it like the rest of us have for the last 20 years.

2. I should mention here that I’ve written some pieces for The Ringer. I never got to meet Simmons, unfortunately, as he was one of the people who inspired me to write about sports in the first place.

3. Simmons, one of the founding fathers of the podcast for profit, is more comfortable than ever on the air. While interviews aren’t his strong suit, he has enough star oomph to command respect from the guest and is at his best when he’s an enthusiastic fan of the person he’s talking to like he was here.

4. Simmons wife Kari (aka the “Sports Gal”) used to feature occasionally in his columns and the relationships with the women in his life have long been interesting topics in his work.

5. This guy was me. Tyson doesn’t like talking about his boxing career, no doubt because it’s all been said a million times. Too bad.

6. I was on the masthead at one point. What a crazy world.

7. Simmons handles all this better than I ever did. The seven-figure yearly salary no doubt helps.

8. This is actually a cogent criticism. Almost every match in promotions around the world indeed has the same beats, moves and general ethos. It’s sickening.

9. https://ecwpress.com/products/shooters

10. In addition to the monetary shenanigans, the business also attracts a disproportionate number of sleazeballs.

11. The great Kristina Snowden. In a better world, someone would hire her for her really cogent takes on the business. Instead, it’s all people saying the same old things to the same audience. Boring!

12. More specifically our feeeeelings about professional wrestling.