Wrestling

About

“We’d roll into a new venue every week, usually a dwindling town hall, where civic duties would be abandoned. We’d put out rows of chairs for the audience, with the lights dimmed just enough the paisley carpet beneath became a distant memory. The stale conditioned air would gradually be usurped by a viscos bodily perfume, one of salt and suffering.

Wrestling is not a sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more degrading to attend a wrestled performance of Suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Shakespeare. True wrestling, is performed in second-rate halls, where the public spontaneously attunes itself to the spectacular nature of the contest, like the audience at a suburban cinema. Then these same people wax indignant because wrestling is a stage-managed sport. The public is completely uninterested in knowing whether the contest is rigged or not, and rightly so; it abandons itself to the primary virtue of the spectacle, which is to abolish all motives and all consequences: what matters is not what it thinks but what it sees”.

Extract taken from Giant Haystacks autobiography Between the Stacks