Even when they’re not in the ring, pro-wrestlers are often still working, whether they’re engaging with fans or pushing an angle on social media or talking with a reporter. They call this “making towns” and they do it week after week because WWE has no off-season. They fly to one city, pick up the rental car (that they’ve rented themselves), have a match, sleep in the hotel (that they’ve reserved), drive to the next city, do it again. They often engage in over 200 fights a year and can be on the road for 300 days. But the life of most of its wrestlers is unglamorous. WWE had about $1 billion in revenue in 2019 and before COVID, its flagship program, Raw, had roughly 2.3 million viewers. She’d bought the place almost a year earlier and estimated that because of her travel schedule, she’d slept there all of 10 nights. “Hell no,” she said, and laughed, picking up a metal triangle her interior designer had hung on the wall and seeming to discover, in that moment, it was a dinner bell. Did you decorate the place yourself? I asked. On the morning I met her there in February of 2020, Lynch wore workout clothes and had blue polish on her nails she occasionally chipped away at. Lynch’s condo in Los Angeles looks like an RH showroom, all thick wood and metal and muted tones. But of all the unlikely occurrences of the past months, at least one, for me, has been that as my sense of the world disassembled, it was Lynch’s story, and pro-wrestling in general, that helped me reassemble it.īecky Lynch (right) and Alexa Bliss compete during the WWE Live Tokyo event in June of 2019. Since then, through a pandemic, a presidential election that contained the brutality of a grudge match, and an attempted coup that meme-makers immediately overdubbed with WWE audio, I’ve come to understand that many of the assumptions I brought with me that night were misguided. If the same people who found Hillary Clinton repellant could embrace Lynch, what did this mean about where women stood in America? Or was this just a ploy by the WWE to gain female viewers? Lynch’s moniker? “The Man.” She was the “top dog, gender be damned,” she said. In Lynch’s case, it transformed her into one of the WWE’s biggest stars (and its biggest merchandise seller). In the moral universe of pro-wrestling, this would normally mark the moment a wrestler went from a hero, known as a babyface, to a villain, or heel. So I’d been confused when I heard about Lynch, who was widely expected to win.Ībout eight months earlier, as a floundering mid-level player, she’d begun to demand, angrily, the recognition she claimed to deserve. I’d also assumed it appealed mostly to working class white men, and since this was a group that tended to support Donald Trump, I figured the same was true of WWE fans. I’d thought of pro-wrestling as a low-brow soap opera for men that could be dismissed as silly if it wasn’t for the violence, misogyny, and racism. The director Werner Herzog once declared in an interview, “Sometimes, just to see the world I live in, I watch WrestleMania.” Sitting up in the stands that night, though, I didn’t know what I was looking at. WWE pro-wrestler Becky Lynch appears at an event ahead of Wrestlemania 35 in April 2019. What was different was that for the first time, the headlining event was a triple-threat match between women-Charlotte Flair, known as the Queen, Ronda Rousey, the former Ultimate Fighting Championship star, and Becky Lynch, an Irishwoman with hair the color of a tangerine. There were enough pyrotechnics for a mid-size city’s Fourth of July celebration. #Becky lynch lingr tv#Over the next five-plus hours, sledgehammers, TV monitors, and tables were deputized as weapons two men plunged 15 feet from a scaffold and the pro-wrestler turned actor Dave Bautista, whose body type is more mountain than man, had his nose ring ripped out with a pair of pliers. When the show kicked off at 7 p.m., roughly 70,000 fans, about the same number of attendees as that year’s Super Bowl, roared in unison. It was a blustery day, cold but not frigid, and so many people tailgated for so long that parts of the parking lot ended up paved with crushed cans of American beer. They wore championship belt replicas slung over their shoulders and exuded the kind of gleeful anticipation that only makes sense if you understand the event, organized by World Wrestling Entertainment (or WWE) as a mix of the Oscars, the World Cup, and the premiere of the final Star Wars film. They came in costume, having traveled to East Rutherford, New Jersey, from all 50 states and 68 countries. Hours before WrestleMania 35, on April 7, 2019, thousands of pro-wrestling fans began streaming toward MetLife Stadium.
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