Professional Wrestling: Sport and Spectacle

by Sharon Mazer

Professional wrestling is often seen as a suspect sport and marginal entertainment. It is also one of the most popular performance practices in the United States and around the world, drawing millions... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1578060214
• ISBN13: 9781578060214
• Release Date: February 1998
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Length: 206 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

A inside look at pro wrestling.

One thing professional wrestling has going for it is the fans. People either love; rant and cheer or they simply hate it. One thing is for sure, the entertainment that wrestling provides is a multi-million dollar industry with no end in sight.Sharon Mazer has put together a book that shows what wrestler goes through in order to prepare for the "sport" they love. Mazer makes solid arguments about why wrestling is so popular. This easy to read book is a sure fire winner with the pure wrestling fan.Follow the 180 page book as Mazer take you on a journey through the WCW, WWF and talks with wrestlers about how they train, what rigors they face and what it takes to make it in the squared circle. The overall read of this book will give you a new insight into pro-wrestling and the entertainment industry.The price of $18.00 is a little steep, but for the "real" wrestling fan this shouldn't be an obstacle. I have read over 10 books on the sport and this one certainly ranks among the best.

VERY GOOD!

This marks a milestone for wrestling because it features female wrestlers as well. My motto is: if guys can do it, so can girls.

This was a great book to learn the beginnings of wrestling.

Sharon did a great job subjecting herself to the cruelty of the life and times of the professional wrestlers. I would like to see her come out with a newer book, and maybe look back at the wrestler's that she met when she was at Gleason's Gym. I think all the skeptics of professional wrestling should do exactly what Ms. Mazer did and learn the real facts about professional wrestling, or at least read her book. I am glad to see Sharon learned a lot from doing this book and it could teach a lot of skeptics out there about the real truth of professional wrestling.

Actively seeking to be 'marked out'

In wrestling, the lariat or clothesline is a move in which a man is whipped from a standing position via a running straight arm to the throat, propelling him violently to the mat. It was both disappointing and strangely reassuring to find out, from Sharon Mazer's new book, that one of the very first skills a rookie wrestler is taught is the ability to "fall backwards, hitting the mat so it resonates loudly with his fall" precisely to effect this and related wrestling moves.The violent illusion of the lariat is lllustrative of what I think is one of Mazer's major points -namely that wrestling exchanges rely not only on the active co-operation of the wrestling opponent - to forward roll when he is supplexed, to crumple when he is hit, to stay down when he is booked to lose - but on the active complicity of the audience in the illusion of the real. As such. Mazer argues, wrestling is ultimately transgressive and subversive. That is, the wrestling performance reveals, by inference and extension, that society itself and its established protocols are a 'work' ( a social construction) that rely for their power on our complicity. Mazer wonders, but does not completely answer, why a wrestling audience would wish to be reminded of its own complicity in subjection. Perhaps, her book suggests, our willing subscription to the illusion of the wrestling performance is, in a very small way, the tangible proof of our larger individual freedom - to believe in social constructions/'works' or not to believe.I bought Mazer's book as part of my background research for a biography I'm writing of the pro-wrestler Tom Zenk. After some months I am still having considerable difficulty differentiating between Zenk the performer and Zenk the virtuous, masculine figure of his ring persona. I had been running the line of a high quality performer denied justice by the bookers but have now come to the realization, courtesy of Mazer's book, that in promoting this line I am possibly 'marking out' to an well -established wrestling storyline. Here is Mazer -"What fans come to recognize and interact with as they come inside the game is the play outside the play- first the signs of a hero [in my case Tom Zenk] or villain, then the inevitable failure of the representatives of authority in the ring to assure a fair fight and a just end, and finally that the true power lies not in the ring at all - but rather in the hands of the promoters whose purchase of a wrestler includes the right to dictate his success or failure. What is certain is not a Justice which is at last intelligible but an Injustice which is visible both in the dramaturgy of the performance and in the structure of the game itself, in the ongoing failure of authority to assert itself for the hero in the ring and in the success of the authority outside the ring, the promoter, as he dictates an outcome that negates the possibility of any real contest between men. It is not a fair

"Is wrestling fake?" - the point is that-it doesn't matter!

"Is it fake?" is the question we all ask about wrestling but Sharon Mazer, in her book, "Professional Wrestling Sport and Spectacle," saves the big one for last. What she covers first are what I would not have supposed to be your typical wrestling questions. Comparing the sport to the universal mytheme of good versus evil, Mazer looks at wrestling from many different angles and in a style that is stunningly articulate. She plumbs with great clarity the deeper, often hidden , meanings of the sport, and yes, it is amazingly deep and machiavellian with power plays, machismo, homosexuality, homophobia and much much more. The book gives enjoyable insights into one training gym, but arguably could have profited from more (like the WCW school in Atlanta) to round out her research. Nevertheless the time spent with Johnny Rodz and his talent provides inside information on how the guys, and girls, are trained to make their athletics appear r! eal, and the knowledge and execution these wannabes require to make the grade in pro-wrestling is very substantial indeed!At times the book gets wordy but still provided plenty of mat action including plenty of black and white photos to keep the interest up! Yes, the sport of wrestling is a morality play that has been acted out since men have battled each other. And it will continue to be so, even if the players aren't quite as identifiable, and Mazer's work helped me at least understand its universal appeal and why its completely completely beside the point that it's staged!