WTF is Up with Fake Professional Wrestling?

Ever watched professional wrestling on TV and asked: how did we get here? How did we get to sword wielding Scottish warriors on one channel, and a jungle boy and his dinosaur friend on the other? Love it or hate it, the scripted nature of professional wrestling is a medium unto itself, with few sports like it. Boxing may get accused of being rigged from time to time and mixed martial arts can give us larger than life characters with legitimate skills, but seemingly no other genre of sport intentionally marries drama and its athletes the way professional wrestling does. While wrestling has been a thing seemingly as long as humans have been humaning, our story today starts in America. Coinciding with the American Civil War, three styles of wrestling became dominant and proved important to the formation of modern pro wrestling. The first was introduced by Irish immigrants and quickly soared in popularity across the country, with a particularly  firm base in New England: Irish Collar and Elbow wrestling. Collar and Elbow wrestling starts in a hold position where opponents grappled the collar and elbow. Unlike a lot of team sports, the barrier of entry to wrestling is easy: all you need are two people and a little space. Irish Collar and Elbow wrestling was popular amongst immigrants for just that reason. Further, matches actually favored smaller wrestlers, so the malnourished small frames of the era found it easy to compete. This style of wrestling was so popular that it was used by the Union during the Civil War to blow off steam and give them a place to settle scores without fighting. Its reign as the most popular style ended in the 1890’s. It has, however, survived in modern pro-wrestling in the lock ups. This is an abridged version of a video on our channel TodayIFoundOut which you can check out and subscribe to here: