At its core, professional wrestling is an athletic theatrical art form that most casual fans have heard of. They may be familiar with a wrestling match, but don’t know the ins and outs of a pro wrestling match. Some may have heard of the WWE but have never heard of WCW or ECW. You’ve heard of Hulk Hogan, but have you heard of Lou Thesz?
Did you know that there were not only wrestling promotions (companies), but that wrestling was so big at one point, it even had a governing body (the National Wrestling Alliance)?
For all of these questions and more, this cheat sheet is for you.
Understanding why professional wrestling is popular
Pro wrestling is popular for many reasons and means different things to different people in different places and at different times:
Providing escape: Pro wrestling, like any other form of sports or entertainment, is an escape, a way to relax and unwind. After a hard day of work, it’s fun to sit back and watch a movie, catch a football game, or see what’s happening on World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) Monday Night Raw.
Getting what you want: What makes pro wrestling unique from any other form of sports or entertainment is both the predetermined nature of it and the fact that it runs before a live audience weekly without any sort of off-season.
What this means is that, unlike a legitimate sporting event, the people in charge can control wins and losses and storylines to better satisfy their audience.
Sure, your favorite wrestler isn’t always going to win every match, but when the time is right, unlike with any other sporting event, the promotion can have the fan favorite win the championship at a time when it means the most to the fans.
When it comes to the modern era of professional wrestling, the 1990s were the peak of the sport’s popularity. Here are the three major promotions that reigned supreme in the United States at that time:
World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE): Originally a Northeastern territory of the governing body known as the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA), which Vincent McMahon, Sr., ran (father of the more famous Vince McMahon, Jr.) with Toots Mondt. Because the territory encompassed the Northeastern part of the United States, including the most powerful media market in the country, New York City, it was often considered the most dominant NWA territory in the country.
It was originally founded in 1953 as the Capitol Wrestling Corporation (CWC). It went through a variety of names, including World Wide Wrestling Federation (WWWF) and World Wrestling Federation (WWF).
World Championship Wrestling (WCW): The only promotion in history which for a period beat then-WWF at its own game and became the biggest wrestling organization on the planet.
Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW): The story of ECW could take up a full book (and has). Its history is a story about a company whose reputation is to its benefit and also its detriment depending on who you ask.
On the one hand, ECW was a national wrestling promotion that during the Monday Night Wars (during the late 1990s) was a distant number three behind WWF and WCW. No matter what, it was never moving into even the number two position. It was, as has famously been said, too big to be small and too small to be big. As a third-place organization, it never had the means to compete with its much larger and much better-funded rivals.
