The Later Years

There have always been plenty of fans of wrestling; even thousands of years ago people enjoyed watching wrestling. It’s just human nature really, us humans love watching two or more people compete, especially when they’re fighting to be a winner!

Fake Wrestling to Pro

The funny thing about wrestling is that nobody knows for sure when the so called “fake wrestling” came in to play. Some people think that this started during the late 1800s, but most people believe that this happened during the start of the 20th century, since it was proven to be fake in the 1920s. Back then, there was a lot of talk about wrestling being over; after all, who wants to waste their time watching a so called sport that was fake? Well, there are obviously a lot of people who enjoy watching wrestling, since it’s remained popular ever since it became a professional sport over 100 years ago.

There were all kinds of worries about wrestling when the word got around about wrestling not being real as some people thought, such as promoters pulling out of the sport which would subsequently cause a lot of harm to the sport as a whole.

However, thankfully the sport didn’t experience too much difficultly, in fact it got even more popular! The NWA was put together in the 1940s and they even decided to put some “real” matches into events to make it seem more realistic. Back then, both wrestlers and fans of the sport were looked down upon since it wasn’t considered a real sport, but things quickly changed.

American Wrestling

After this, the people that were involved with wrestling figured out that Americans (which were their main target audience at the time) loved a few things, including drama and politics. This is when wrestling became extremely popular, since wrestling used the world wars in a way to get more fans by creating dramatic story lines and so on.

Wrestling was also one of the first sports to have black professional sportsmen and women, which at the time was a brave move. As well as this, wrestlers such as Bo Bo Brazil became the first black man to win a title. The people behind wrestling knew that this would attract attention, and as we all know, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

On the telly!

It wasn’t until 10 years later when wrestling was available for just about anybody to watch. The days when you had to pay in to a stadium to watch men and women fight were over once televisions got popular in the 1950s and the 1960s. It was now possible for families to sit at home and enjoy watching wrestling from their own sitting room.

Wrestling became so popular that several different wrestling associations were set up, with the most famous one being WWF (now WWE), not forgetting ECW and WCW. After all of these were set up wrestling suddenly became a very profitable area to be involved in, later becoming a billion dollar business! Some professional wrestlers such as the Rock were so famous that they decided to go down other routes such as acting.