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| Pictured: A Match and a Fight Photo Credit: ImpactWrestling.com |
Whenever those words are uttered, I let out a big groan. It's the most cliche thing in wrestling to say that any match that has extreme personal stakes in it is no longer a wrestling match but a fight. It'd be bad enough if the hackneyed nature of the phrase were the only thing going against it. It's patently false, and not even in the sense of every wrestling match is a fight anyway. It's that no matter what, every time that phrase is uttered, the match never ceases to be a match.
Every company is guilty of this, from the main offenders like WWE and Impact to even critically superior promotions like Chikara. Every time that phrase is uttered, the end result of it is someone having his or her shoulders pinned to the mat or their hands slapping the mat in submission. I thought that was the very definition of a wrestling match?
People like to point out incongruence in backstage brawls as if someone in a bar fight would ever use an Irish whip. That's something I can forgive in that it's a wrestling show, and the people fighting are wrestlers, so they do wrestling things. But because they're doing wrestling things all the time, the point stands that nothing is ever not a match, and if anything ever became not a match by definition, it really wouldn't have a point except to advance a story. That is a pretty important reason, obviously, but at the same time, the point of wrestling is sanctioned violence within the confines of a wrestling ring. Any old TV show can have a fight that ends when someone gets knocked unconscious or killed or even arbitrarily when someone says that it's over. The reason why wrestling is wrestling is that things end in the ring. (Another thing I hate in this milieu is when shows promise "confrontations" between people. Ooookayyyyyy.)
Some might accuse me of being pedantic or intentionally dense here. The thing is, I know what the intent is. I know that it's being intentionally wrong to prove a point. I might be okay with it if it were used sparingly, for only the bloodiest of blood feuds like, say, Kevin Steen and El Generico in Ring of Honor to use a recent example. However, it gets tossed around so goddamn much that it's lost the meaning it was supposed to convey in the first place. There were two matches on Bound for Glory, for example, that were described not to be matches but fights (the Aces and Eights tag match as well as James Storm/Bobby Roode). Two on the same card is too much.
It's one thing for a wrestling company to drive something so hard into the ground that it comes out the other side of the Earth. When it's something as incongruent as saying something isn't a match when it's clearly a match? That's when I start popping aneurysms.
