Re:Dark Side of the Ring: Pro Wrestling and Americana
by forgottenpass on Friday May 17, 2019 @08:26AM
(#19938828)
There's two things that make wrestling different in kind, a party lifestyle and painkillers for dealing with the fast schedule.
Both of those have subsided from their late 20th century heights. The Ric Flair types got replaced by a bunch of athletic theater nerds, and painkiller abuse is understood as a thing in society.
>There's calls for easier schedules, but as they say, the show must go on.
It's not like there's a league setting the schedule. Wrestling promotions decide exactly how much they're going to work. WWE is sort of notorious that they work contracted talent balls-to-the-wall, where smaller promotions don't run as many shows in a week and independent wrestlers choose exactly how many bookings they take.
There's calls for easier schedules, but as they say, the show must go on. You can't cancel a sold out arena if your lead person isn't feeling well, just like you wouldn't cancel a football game if the quarterback is sick.
(I'm not defending some of the treatment of wrestlers by their employers nor am I excusing their issues - I'm just asking do we know where these problems stem from? Seems easy to blame the boss, but is it their fault?)