That’s entertainment

Erik’s grave post about football player Willie Wood, in which he mocks commenters who use the term “sportsball” to signal their disdain for people who pay attention to competitive sports, led to a subthread about why sports in general and sports fandom in particular aren’t things to be taken seriously, as they are merely “entertainment.”

This strikes me as a really perverse point of view, as it assumes that “entertainment” — meaning at the broadest level the human propensity for play — isn’t something to take seriously. To the contrary, as Johan Huizinga argues in his classic study Homo Ludens, “play” in the most general sense is a fundamental aspect of all human culture, and indeed the latter concept is basically unimaginable apart from the former.

I confess to a strong personal interest in this subject, as tomorrow I’m officially publishing an entire book on it. Here’s a passage about the intersection of sports, pseudo-sports, the entertainment industry, and The One Fully Approved Serious Thing, politiics:

One way to appreciate the extent to which the often unhinged passions of sports fandom are seeping into other parts of our lives is to consider the various pseudo-sports that inhabit the psychological twilight world between fiction and real life, so-called.

For example, the Internet offers us a video of “The Battle of the Billionaires,” a wrestling match that took place in April 2007 at WrestleMania, the annual Super Bowl of professional wrestling. This event took place at Ford Field, the home of the NFL’s Detroit Lions. The Battle of the Billionaires itself was a clash between wrestlers Umaga and Bobby Lashley, who had been chosen by Vince McMahon and Donald Trump to represent each of them in a proxy battle between the two plutocrats.

The back story of this particular WrestleMania plot line was elaborate, even by the baroque standards of the campy and melodramatic pseudo-sport that is contemporary professional wrestling in America. That story begins three months earlier. McMahon, the undisputed tycoon of the “sport,” arranges to have Rosie O’Donnell wrestle Donald Trump on McMahon’s wild popular weekly USA Network telecast, Monday Night Raw. That match features wrestlers playing O’Donnell and Trump, rather than the real individuals, who at the time supposedly were engaged in a running feud in the media, no doubt concocted by their respective publicists. In the middle of the match, “O’Donnell” jumps out of the ring and gorges herself on a cake at ringside. Subtlety is generally not a feature of this particular art form.

Three weeks later, during an episode of Monday Night Raw in Dallas, McMahon appears in the ring as the impresario of what he is billing as Fan Appreciation night. McMahon begins by making fun of Texas accents, and claiming that anyone in a cowboy hat looks stupid. Vociferous boos rain down from the crowd. McMahon, in wrestling argot, is playing the part of the heel, that is, the villain of the melodrama. He thanks the fans effusively for making him a billionaire. (This is not hyperbole. In 2020 McMahon’s net worth was estimated to be $2.6 billion). He then tells the crowd he wants to give each fan a special gift, but can only honor one of them in this way. He “randomly” chooses an attractive and half-dressed young woman, who is brought into the ring, and presented with enormous facsimile of the cover of McMahon’s magazine Muscle Fitness, featuring McMahon himself flexing his biceps. The boos become deafening.

At this point Donald Trump appears on the arena’s giant scoreboard screen, and upbraids McMahon for failing to give the audience “value” for their entertainment dollar, which Trump describes as his specialty. Trump says he is going to give the fans what they really want – money. (Wild cheers erupt.) Several thousand dollars in actual currency then rain down from the arena’s upper reaches, triggering a frenzied scramble. Lucky fans display real $100 bills to the cameras for the millions watching at home. A supposedly humiliated McMahon starts ranting about how this is actually his money, and demanding that the fans hand it over to him.

All this is what is known in the trade as “kayfabe.” Kayfabe is the code word used traditionally by people in the wrestling business to describe those elements of the business that are presented to the audience as if they are spontaneous rather than scripted. Such elements include the conceit that the matches themselves are real athletic competitions, that the stage personas of the performers – their “gimmicks” – are something other than elaborate fictions, that the feuds, alliances, and romances between various performers in the ring and off stage are genuine, and so forth.

In our increasingly post-truth world, kayfabe can serve as a convenient shorthand for the whole genre of what in the broader entertainment business has become known as “scripted reality” – that is, scripted dramas that present themselves not as mimetic representations of life, like a play or a film, but as real-life events.

Professional wrestling is fake, but represents itself to its audience as if it were real. This creates a complex mental state in much of the audience, hovering somewhere between, on the one hand, the willing suspension of disbelief in a dramatic fiction, and, on the other, the perception of what we take to be unscripted real-life events. People in the wrestling business refer to those taken in by any aspect of kayfabe as “marks.” Fans who fully acknowledge that wrestling is nothing but kayfabe, yet who still revel in the drama as if it were real, call themselves “smart marks” or “smarks.”

The McMahon-Trump kayfabe reached its climax after the two men signed a contract requiring them to each choose a champion to represent them in Detroit, with the stipulation that the plutocrat whose champion lost in the ring would then be shaved bald by the other. This was what was billed as the Battle of the Billionaires.

The highlight of the Battle itself came when, in the midst of the contest, Trump himself attacked McMahon at ringside. The video of Trump – wearing, naturally, an expensive suit – running toward the similarly besuited McMahon, knocking him down, and then raining obviously fake punches down on his plutocratic rival’s head, is must-viewing for anyone who retains even a shred of optimism about the future of our society (Spoiler alert: Nine years later, Donald Trump would be elected the 45th president of the United States. In 2017, as part of his ongoing proto-fascistic campaign against “fake news,” aka being subjected to criticism by journalists, Trump tweeted out a doctored video of his attack on McMahon, with a CNN logo superimposed on McMahon’s head. A few months earlier Trump had appointed McMahon’s wife Linda to his Cabinet, as head of the Small Business Administration).

I suggest that future cultural historians will be taking something like professional wrestling very seriously, when they try to understand how it is that an absurdly clownish figure like Donald Trump became president of the United States, thus leading to the [tk] of fascism in the world’s most powerful nation in the first decades of the 21st century.

More generally, it’s an extremely pernicious form of anti-intellectualism to treat cultural studies as “not serious.” That kind of attitude is absolutely central to right wing attacks on academia.

So if you don’t want to support that attitude, don’t use the term sportsball, or at least buy my book.