though many mock it, i have to add proffesional wrestling to the list. The endurance levels are amazing. They perform every week of the year, often 3 or 4 times a week. To remember the moves you are scripted to make is itself amazing. Every day a new match. I dont know where they get the time to practise them. Matches last about 20 minutes, sometimes up to an hour. And the whole time you need to maintain enough energy as to not risk, any injury to yourself and more importantly your fellow performer.
All wrestlers need to be fast and strong. Its one thing to be able to lift 250 + pounds. Its another to be so strong (yes aided by lots of roids) as to be able to hold a fellow performer, and most likely close friend, well enough so that you can perform the move without injuring him. Any move, even the most basic, can end with death if botched, especially if the wrestler falls on his head, for which there is no protection, or neck. The task is yet more difficult if it comes after 20 minutes of performing. And the whole time the illusion that they are fighting eachother needs to be kept as well.
And those are just the pick up moves. What about the aero ones.
Some of the moves they attempt border on madness. Jumps, 500 degree flips, back flips, double back flips, all onto an opponent, all can and do cause injury if landing isnt 100% perfect. And with things like the backflip or the reverse backflip ( I think this one is even illegal in some places) you cant evem see the opponent, while your performing the move. They occasionally do this stuff from ladders.
Oh and even if you have all that, you need to hope the writers give you the right gimmick, otherwise its all worthless anyway.
And the injuries, and risk, madone. The chances of horrifying injury are odds on. All wrestlers have to accept they will get many of them. Broken arms, broken legs, head injuries, torn biceps, broken necks, often takes a year of rehab. Thats part of the job. Many get paralysed from it. Many are consigned to wheel chairs or get brain damage. Even the steel chair, while the impact is exaggerated on the shows, can cause concussions if used wrong. While wrestling builds itself on huge exaggerations on the seriousness of the events to the viewers, we should not underestimate how serious the events actually are to the wrestlers, once they get behind the scenes. I can only assume they are all masochists of a sort. Not to mention the sick perverted s**t they did on places like ecw where they use real barbed wire, and real fire, which the wrestler gets paid a sum to put himself through, to astonish the viewers, and is then forced to spend months in hospital recovering from.
I guess 1 testament to the injuries is the Chris Benoit story. They found that by the end ( he did a murder suicide on his wife and kid) his brain was so damaged from years of wrestling, that he had the mental capacity of a child. His was the most violent death, but every now and again I see in the papers this and that wrestler has died. Since they are in the papers, I assume these are people who make it in the wwf. Now in our thing and other sports, we do get sudden deaths, but with the exception of pantani and one or 2 others, they are usually from the lower leagues. But in wrestling, all these deaths are coming from the wwf, their equivalent of our tdf peloton. I can only imagine how many deaths there are at the lower developmental levels.
For the record i dont watch it, but i feel the performers need some credit for their very very difficult jobs.
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