Wrestling as culture, Wrestling is the middle child of entertainment. Neither sport nor theater, it exists in the gray area between the two. Despite its odd place in the entertainment hierarchy, wrestling has always had a place in the cultural zeitgeist. Hulk Hogan propelled wrestling to unprecedented heights in the the 1980s during the Rock N Wrestling era. The nWo and Stone Cold Steve Austin turned the Attitude Era of the mid-late 1990s into another boom period with television ratings skyrocketing again and wrestling seeping everywhere into the culture.
Wrestling still has it's place in the culture; look no further than Green Bay Packers' quarterback Aaron Rodgers raising the Big Gold Belt after winning the Super Bowl a few years ago to see that wrestling's reach is still quite strong. However, the TV numbers just aren't there anymore, but that isn't specific to wrestling.
Even in the little places, wrestling finds a way to appear. When the visiting team get's a penalty when they play my favorite hockey team this song plays. Before the second half of Saturday's Alabama-Mississippi State football game this blared over the sound system. Look at the music video for Dej Loaf's Try Me. Recognize that shirt she's wearing midway through?
Since the turn of the millennium though wrestling has fallen off in terms of popularity. Monday Night Raw, which regularly got 4s and 5s in television ratings in the early 2000s (even popping an 8.1 in May of 1999), now sees its ratings stagnant in the high 2s and low 3s.
"I think the numbers are down for the same reasons that a show like the Big Bang Theory doesn’t draw the same amount of viewers as a Seinfeld or The Cosby Show once did," Bruce Lerch, a sportswriter at the Boston Herald said. "Cosby would never get the 20 million-plus viewers it used to because there are too many options for people to choose from nowadays. As far as celebrity/pro athlete interest, I think wrestling is similar to boxing, another sport whose overall viewing numbers are way down from where they once were, in that the biggest matches or events will always draw attention in a pop culture aspect."
There certainly is truth to that. Cable in the 80s was still a fledgling business, moderately substantial in the 90s, and now it is all-encompassing. More to watch means a greater division of viewers and weaker TV numbers across the dial.
What goes against those numbers is the rapidly growing breadth of journalism and commentary devoted to wrestling. From David Shoemaker's work on Grantland.com to Brandon Stroud at With Spandex and blogs like our own cSs and The Wrestling Blog there are seemingly endless places to go to read quality writing about wrestling.
"I think the web has dropped the barriers to entry on all content and thus it allows people with a great interest in pro wrestling to both produce and consume content more than ever before," Sports Illustrated media critic Richard Deitsch said. "We've also seen mainstream places like Grantland and SI and SB Nation write about wrestling in an interesting and thoughtful way. There's also a nostalgic element to it, I think. You have a lot of people in their 30s and 40s who grew up with wrestling and they are the ones either editing or writing the content. It's a confluence of all of those factors, in my opinion."
Nostalgia is an odd, yet powerful, effect that wrestling has on those who have watched it. Fans who came of age during the Attitude Era yearn for the return of Austin, Rock just like their parents reminisce fondly of the days of Hogan, Savage, and Warrior. It's also a medium that allows lapsed fans to fall right back in easily.
Steve Bennett, the host of the Sports Casters podcast, is one of those lapsed fans. Bennett was at SkyDome for Wrestlemania 6 and grew up a Ricky Steamboat mark. He's returned to wrestling over the last few years and echoed Deitsch's sentiments in saying that a key factor in the rise of wrestling in 21st-century culture is the fact that the people in charge grew up marks themselves.
"The gatekeepers [of media] are now people who grew up during the Hogan era," Bennett said. "They grew up loving wrestling. They know the usual gripes about it are bullshit and they know that there is a demand for the content. Bill Simmons [the editor-in-chief of Grantland.com] is a mark. He grew up loving the business and is raising kids who love the business. People who ran media 20/30 years ago didn’t get it. If they grew up loving wrestling the product that Vince was producing during the Hogan era didn’t look anything like what they grew up watching."
Wrestling is constantly in a state of flux. Whether it be it's TV ratings, or WWE's financials, the medium is in a constant arc of change, but wrestling isn't going anywhere. In fact, it's hunkering down and spreading it's legs as wordsmiths across the globe keep the form of theater known as the sport of wrestling alive and engaging fans across generations.
