We had a houseguest over the weekend who was hanging out while I had TLC on. She had many questions that generally boiled down to “if the point of the match is to win, why do they not try to win when they can?”
It’s a hard question to answer without trying to explain all of wrestling, at least to me! Especially with all the gimmick matches, which are even more about the middle of the match than normal.
The best I could come up with (afterwards, of course) was “the same reason that people in musicals have to sing about everything instead of just say what they mean.”
How do you answer this question?
Accurate
Or for the same reason people in horror movies do dumb things and never just try to escape: otherwise we wouldn’t see much of anything!
Winning isn’t the only objective. You might want to show off a bit or get revenge for something.
In line with the “musical” answer, what you’re thinking of is a “stylistic constraint.” A purely technical win outside of one’s established paradigm would not be respected or truly accepted unless specific other conditions were present.
Or, riffing on Chad Stevens’s sentiment, a “win” in wrestling involves more than simply pinning the other guy to the mat, and the unwritten rules call for a certain measure of showmanship on the way to doing so.
What Chad said. There are times when getting the official win is a secondary or tertiary goal, even in a championship match. “I want him to acknowledge me as a serious contender.” “I want to make him feel as much pain as possible before I end him.” “I want to humiliate him.” “I want to show off to the crowd or to my love interest.” And so on.
I agree with all of this! The interesting issue to me is how this all still requires explaining it to someone, right? Wrestling is still (and may always be) in this liminal state where because it uses the trappings of legit competition, you have to learn the unwritten rules as an observer. All of us have internalized the storytelling aspects, to the point where we can read them into a match by cues (“here’s the comeback, here’s the finish”) – but it’s a story in a foreign language, basically (Theoretically the commentary should help with this, of course)
A dumb one-liner version, also: “it’s called wrestling not winning, after all”
Why might it require explaining? Because the story and technique mechanisms aren’t visible at first glance. All the first-time viewer can see is the trappings of a purely physical competition, with no hint that there’s actually a larger and yet subtler game (so to speak) being played out.
In a way, the base physicality of the wrestling match obscures the story, because the novice might not think to look for the paradigms and archetypes that the experienced viewer actively checks for.
Now I’m trying to think of a sport where there’s an obvious goal or target, but whose players do not always go directly for that target. Football, basketball, tennis, and any race have no such nuance about them. Baseball might qualify, but it’s a bit of a stretch because the “goal” is also kind of obscured by the setup of the field. Otherwise, I’m drawing a blank.
I would argue Football and Basketball do have such a nuance. Many times plays are run at the beginning of the game not to make big gains, but to determine how the opponent will react when presented with a similar scheme later in the game.
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I’d say that your friend is right. But knowing about wrestling makes you more tolerant to the “not trying to win” part. If you are horsing around instead of going for a win then you aren’t even pretending that it is a competition any more. If you don’t pretend that it is a competition then you better draw in the audiences attention some other way, i.e you better have a good story to explain why you are in a match, when winning isn’t important to you.
Grappling soap opera. The idea is to build tension, character, and excitement much like a normal episodic TV show does… being as basic and brief as possible with the explanation.