Voodoo's Wrestling Reflections: Will Pro Wrestling Ever Be Cool Again?

As I’m sitting here at my desk, writing an article on pro wrestling while my fiancé cuts coupons and gets ready for work, I’m realizing something important: I’m sitting at my desk, away from my fiancé who is cutting coupons and getting ready for work, writing an article on pro wrestling.

It’s almost like it has to be done in secret. There is nothing inherently shameful about being a pro wrestling fan, but on the other hand, it’s not entirely mainstream or totally accepted. My fiancé knows that I have a secret love of wrestling (though it was more that she “found out” from seeing WrestleZone up on my browser once than it was from me telling her). It’s more something she accepts with a giggle, like I do with her love of Fifty Shades of Grey.

It has occurred to me, then, that pro wrestling is not “cool.”

There is nothing inherently wrong with liking pro wrestling, but it always seems to be something people take as a guilty pleasure rather than as a simple, honest-to-goodness pleasure.  No one would ever be “embarrassed” by saying they watch pro football, but saying to “mainstream” America that you religiously follow pro wrestling is like admitting you have a fetish or you watch Real Housewives or such; people do it, there’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s still taken as a little weird.

Even when recent news broke that Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is the fourth highest-paid actor in Hollywood now, it seemed like it was a bigger deal than it really is, simply because Johnson made his name in WWE. No one would look at the list and write a news story about how Adam Sandler is the third highest-paid actor in Hollywood; he’s Adam Sandler, for crying out loud. But The Rock? How amusing! He’s so cute, that former wrasslin’ icon, trying to make it in Hollywood.

The fact that it’s even news that Dwayne Johnson is a highly paid, relatively respected actor is indicative of the fact that he’s not seen as a true actor. He’s seen as an amusing novelty; this is so because he’s a former (and sometimes current) wrestler.

And this is news because, as I said before, wrestling is not cool. Wrestling is niche programming, much like soap operas. Similarly, you don’t see soap opera stars making it big in movies either; when they do, you usually see “former soap opera star” attached prominently to their names.

But it didn’t always used to be this way. Wrestling used to be cool.

Once upon a time, Stone Cold Steve Austin was flipping off and stunning his boss, DX was being hilariously offensive and cutting edge, the nWo was taking over the wrestling world (how interesting that, of all people, the former All-American, corny-catchphrase spouting Hulk Hogan would become the coolest cat on the planet), The Rock was telling people that it didn’t matter what you thought, and Sting was channeling the inner darkness of the anti-hero (still one of the greatest entrances ever). Back then, if you wore a Stone Cold shirt or an nWo shirt to school, it wasn’t a big deal. Wrestling was cool in the mid-to-late 1990s and early 2000s.

But then, WCW went under (taking the nWo, which had become a zombie, with it). Shawn Michaels retired, found Jesus then came back to re-form a DX that was more juvenile than inventive. Stone Cold got mad and walked out. The Rock left for Hollywood. And so on and so forth.

All of a sudden, wrestling was no longer cool or mainstream anymore. It went back to cartoonish storylines, over-the-top characters and the overexposure of a handful of people. Sometimes WWE would strike gold with a character who was fresh and original (and hearkened back to the “cool” days of wrestling,) but when the fans took to this guy, they’d market the heck out of him until he was barely recognizable anymore.

Of course, in case you didn’t figure it out, I’m talking about John Cena's awesome rapper gimmick.

Wrestling briefly flirted with—possibly—becoming cool again with CM Punk’s now legendary worked shoot a year ago, but his character has also been molded and shifted into something less “cool” than it was. Now we’re stuck with a CM Punk who shills ice cream bars and has his own five moves of doom. We’re stuck with a formerly spectacular mic worker and heat-magnet who—with slightly different circumstances—could’ve been a no-doubt top five all-time guy (Chris Jericho) turning into a sparkly leather jacket with a bad haircut.

The list goes on.

So here’s my question to all of you: Do you think that wrestling will ever become “cool” again? If so, how do you think it’s going to happen? Who will be the new face of “cool” that makes pro wrestling a mainstream phenomenon once again?