Two wrestlers enter the ring: the popular hero of the squared circle, and his biggest rival. They exchange strikes, holds, and throws for the better part of an hour, battering each other in front of an astonished crowd. Then, finally, the hero definitively defeats his foe, and stands triumphant, vindicated once and for all.
This is the type of story professional wrestling promises. Unlike real sports, it can control the results, making sure that every match is competitive and that fan favourites always get their moments of triumph. But this is also something that happens a lot less than one might think.
Professional wrestling TV is all about, in one way or another, delaying the cathartic satisfaction of one star wrestler definitively beating another. This originated in the territorial model of wrestling, where wrestling TV aired on local networks as a way to promote upcoming live events. These shows were essentially infomercials. Wrestlers would quickly beat nondescript opponents, and then they would give an interview or get involved in some sort of altercation designed to make you want to pay to see them take on someone stronger.
Of course, at the live events, you rarely saw a definitive conclusion either. The bout between two stars would end in disqualification, or count-out, or with the villainous heel stealing the win through cheating. This, of course, would set up a rematch for future shows, with satisfaction often only coming when one wrestler was about to leave the territory.
When wrestling went national in the 80s, this model was mostly still adhered to, but with the gradual addition of pay-per-view matches. Instead of making you want to go down to your local armoury, shows were designed to make you want to call your cable provider to see two star wrestlers get it on. However, wrestling TV also gradually began to become an asset in itself, something that became the target of big TV deals (WWE’s now number in the billions), multiple hours long, and serious ratings juggernaut.
At some point, the handful of short matches you foisted on your local CBS affiliate became no longer adequate. To compete with other shows, wrestling needed to offer longer and more exciting matches on TV, as well as more frequent appearances by stars. But these shows also needed to sell pay-per-views (or, in the case of modern WWE, monthly subscriptions.) Wrestling TV had to walk the line of being exciting, but also convincing you that there was something way more exciting behind a paywall.
Throughout all these business changes, wrestling has had more and more hours of TV to fill up, but not necessarily that many more stars. WWE now airs 7 hours of weekly TV, and its biggest rival AEW airs 5, along with various streaming exclusives and pay-per-view events. So wrestling has devised various ways to offer wrestling without actually offering what you want most out of wrestling, which is a star definitively beating another star. Obviously, you have the various interviews and non-wrestling segments that take up a good amount of time in both companies, but at some point you have to have a wrestling match without it being the wrestling match. Here are the usual tropes used:
1) The squash match
A wrestler you know beats the tar out of a nondescript loser, with the match usually lasting just a few minutes. This was the meat and potatoes of wrestling shows up until the 1990s, meant to get across the overwhelming strength of the star wrestlers, but today you usually only see straight-up squashes for a few weeks after a new monster is introduced, or on internet-only shows like the late, lamented AEW Dark.
2) The glorified squash
In this variation, the loser is not nondescript, but rather a recognizable figure who is generally well-respected but never seems to actually win matches except against other losers. The match will be presented as competitive, with the loser coming close on several occasions, but the result is never really in doubt. This has been a particular favourite of AEW, where 90% of TV matches seem to be someone who almost never wins on TV going life and death with someone who almost never loses. But someone without much prior knowledge of the promotion would think that they’ve seen a great, competitive match between two stars, and in a vacuum they did.
3) The tag match
Two different sets of wrestlers that are feuding with each other combine to come up with a tag team match, or two feuding wrestlers each find a set of less-impressive friends or allies. A tag match presents an opportunity to showcase exchanges between stars without having any of them defeat each other. You can also mix multiple feuds together to make the promotion feel like a whole world and not a series of isolated storylines. And as long as there’s someone who can eat a pin on each side, there’s at least some suspense as to the outcome.
Tag matches are especially popular in Japan and Mexico, where lesser shows can consist entirely of six- or eight-man matches. But because of this, there’s been kind of a stigma on tag matches as unimportant time-filler. One of the longest-running wrestling memes is how often Teddy Long, acting as the General Manager of SmackDown, would make a tag team match (playa). I’ll be honest and admit that, when I see a NJPW or DDT show that’s mostly tag matches, I will usually skip it.
4) The non-finish
Of course, there’s always the option not to have a definitive finish. This can take many forms – a disqualification, a count-out, a no-contest, or even a pinfall win after excessive dirty tricks. The point is presenting a big match without having one wrestler definitively lose, hence kicking the can down the road for a rematch. This was especially popular in the territorial era, where you would frequently see the world champion meet the local favourite without a clear winner. As these finishes took place at untelevised events, and the average fan had little exposure to other territories, such a result could feel unexpected and organic.
However, as more and more big wrestling matches moved onto TV, fans started to notice the pattern of non-finishes. A disqualification or count-out came to be seen as a cheap finish that lowered the quality of the match. So while you will still see your share of inconclusive finishes, especially in WWE, there’s been a shift away from promising matches you can’t deliver a real result to.
5) 50/50 booking
The other way to respond to this booking dilemma is to put together matches with definitive results, but to have these results not matter so much. This is a trend that modern WWE TV has often fallen into. Matches would generally feature two roughly equally-positioned midcard wrestlers, with one of them getting a clean win, or winning by somewhat nefarious means if they were a heel. The next week, they would match up again, and the other wrestler would win. Boom, you have a “storyline” for the middle of the card, and you didn’t need to sully anyone who really mattered.
Want more wrestling goodness? Check out my article on a very strange WWF show in “When Oprah Met Hogan.”
This trend came to be derogatorily called “50/50 booking” by critics. The idea was that if none of these wrestlers were established as really better than each other, no one progressed or got over. There’s a lot of truth to this critique (although many of the ones making it also hated when a wrestler got a strong push.) At the same time, booking matches between middle-of-the-road wrestlers does create a situation where you don’t know who’s going to win, and the matches can be a lot more entertaining than squashes or dirty finishes.
Ultimately, I think a good wrestling show is going to mix all of these strategies together, as well as including the occasional big match with definitive results on the show just to keep people coming back. The issue arises when a company begins to overly rely on a single time-killing tactic. AEW has recently done this with the glorified squashing, creating cards full of clear winners and losers, and I think it’s contributed to the decreased interest in their weekly shows as of late.
At the same time, you could say that modern WWE has abused 50/50 booking, many lucha and puro promotions have made the multi-man tag a synonym for meaninglessness, and traditional “old school” wrestling ran the squash and non-finish into the ground. If wrestling is a kind of magic show, always tricking the audience into thinking they’re seeing more than they are, then the trick is to not do the same trick too many times.