“He knows how long the matches are going to be before they start?”
“How long and who’s going to win. All except the title matches, then it’s every man for himself.”
So explained Ronny Sammis, a character in a wrestling-themed edition of 1990s drama Quantum Leap. Within that show, the claim proved to be bogus with the promoter explaining to the ‘Russian’ wrestlers that “how the hell is it going to look to the American public to have a couple of communists be the world champion?”
But the belief among fans of a particular mindset that wrestling matches might not be on the level but title bouts had to be real – why on earth would somebody deliberately pass up the opportunity to be champion – is one of the most prominent examples of the “worked shoot”, perhaps better described as the double-bluff.
Where professional wrestling at its most basic once involved trying to make fans believe everything they saw was for real, the industry has for decades tried to profit by taking advantage of those fans who believed or knew that it was a performance. The theory goes that if you can persuade that section of an audience that a specific element of it is in fact for real, they’ll see it as particularly significant and worthy of their attention, time and money.
The ‘legitimacy’ of the title is one example. Championship matches in the United Kingdom would sometimes carry a higher ticket price than regular shows in the same venue, perhaps due in part to fans believing they were more important sporting occasions. In the United States, the façade was inadvertently aided by the government. In April 1930 the New York commission reclassified professional wrestling as theatre and required promoters to describe bouts as “exhibitions.” However, an exception was made for championship bouts, which were the only ones that could be promoted as “matches” and even then only if the challenger was considered a serious contender. By attempting to protect the public from shams, the law was in fact giving false credibility to the biggest bouts.
It wasn’t merely a case of trying to fool the run-of-the mill fan. One of the most famous bouts of the era was specifically targeted at more cynical grappling devotees who believed they had the inside scoop. It featured Jim Londos, who was the biggest wrestling drawing card of the pre-war era, but had only limited legitimate wrestling skills at best. Both newspaper reports and scuttlebutt meant that more dedicated fans ‘knew’ he would be doomed if he took on veteran Ed Lewis, a genuinely skilled grappler who they believed was on the outs with Londos’s promoters.
To take advantage of the intrigue, promoters openly billed the match at Chicago’s Wrigley Field as “the last shooting match in history”. In reality it was a standard worked affair with Lewis doing the job, having already agreed to join forces with promoters. Despite this, enough fans thought they’d be seeing the real deal that the show was attended by more than 35,000 people and drew a then-record gate of $96,302 (equivalent to $1.8 million today.)
Such tactics would eventually die down in the US, partly because the development of the business and media coverage of it mean that fans fell into two main categories: those who didn’t know (or didn’t care) that wrestling was a show, and those who had enough access to insider information to appreciate that no matter the supposed stakes, virtually every match they saw had a planned finish.
However, the story was very different in Japan where the wrestling world overlapped with that of martial arts. In the 1970s Antonio Inoki became the country’s top wrestling star thanks largely to a serious of worked matches with legitimate sportsmen from fields such as judo, kickboxing and karate. The idea was for even cynical wrestling followers to reach the conclusion that the martial artists would never throw a contest with Inoki and that at the very least he had the skills to compete with real combat experts. (Inoki’s contest with Muhammad Ali was an exception in that it was planned to be a worked bout with Inoki winning a controversial victory, but Ali got cold feet and demanded a genuine contest. Disputes over the hastily negotiated ruleset meant the match was a dud with neither man in a real position to take advantage of their particular skills.)
Come the 1980s and the hardcore fans were taken in by a double-bluff based not only on their ‘understanding’ of genuine wrestling combat but also of backstage politics. Akira Maeda had become a superstar in the breakaway UWF promotion which used a more credible in-ring style. Upon his return to New Japan, he sold out Sumo Hall for a match with the veteran Inoki. Fans believed Inoki was holding him down and there was no way either man would agree to lose to the other. In this case their suspicions proved correct and the match was changed to a 10-man tag.
Maeda later left New Japan after legitimately assaulting another veteran star, Riki Choshu, in the middle of a match. He then revived the UWF, appealing to younger fans who believed that wrestling was fake but UWF was for real. Despite not having television, the group was a hit, regularly selling out Korakuen Hall in a matter of moments. While it had something of a cult audience, UWF did break through to the mainstream, running Budokan Hall and even holding a successful event at the Tokyo Dome.
Eventually UWF split into several groups that took a differing approach to the ‘worked shoot.’ UWF-i was the biggest success, even hiring then-WCW champion Vader to lose to top star Nobuhiko Takada to supposedly prove the latter’s superiority in a real contest. Eventually the group fell into financial difficulty and was bought out by New Japan. Meanwhile Maeda’s RINGS promotion gradually evolved into a legitimate martial arts affair, while another group, Pancrase featured genuine sporting contests from the start.
Arguably the most successful double-bluff in the US came from Brian Pillman, who adopted the “Loose Cannon” character in late 1995 and 1996. Deliberately looking to attract the attention of the online fans, he spent almost every waking hour – whether on camera, behind the scenes or even in internet chatrooms – trying to convince the audience and his colleagues alike that he had lost his mind and could no longer be relied upon to follow the script. The reaction of commentators sounded realistic, most likely because it was real, most memorably when Pillman grabbed the shoulders of Bobby Heenan from behind during a live broadcast. Heenan, who had legitimate neck issues, had no idea what was happening and blurted out the quite reasonable question “What the fuck are you doing?”
As well as staging backstage walkouts and phony arguments, and invading the ECW Arena, Pillman began working with wrestling chief Eric Bischoff and booker Kevin Sullivan in a series of incidents that included Pillman and Sullivan allegedly brawling for real in the ring. This led to a strap match on pay-per-view in which Pillman sarcastically announced that “I respect you.. bookerman” before walking out long before the scheduled finish, much to the bemusement of the announcers. Amazingly Pillman had even more outlandish stunts planned that he never carried out, including chaining himself to the goalposts at the Super Bowl and storming the ring at a Madison Square Garden house show.
The punchline was that fooling the fans wasn’t the real goal of Pillman’s antics. Instead he wanted to raise his profile, create a bidding war between WCW and WWE, then get a large guaranteed contract that he felt would force promoters to feature him in a stronger position to justify the expense. The punchline came when he convinced Eric Bischoff to legitimately release him from his contract to make the ‘storyline’ even more credible. Once Bischoff agreed, Pillman was free to negotiate with WWE and signed a deal, hiding the fact that a life-threatening car crash had ended his days as a top-flight in-ring performer.
While Pillman’s antics had most certainly fooled a generation of fans who thought they understood how the wrestling business really worked, there’s no real evidence that it directly drew any money for WCW. The only financial beneficiary was Pillman himself, both through his WWE deal and a short-lived premium rate telephone line where he pretended to be giving the real scoop. There was no logical conclusion to be drawn that “Everything is fake except this bit” was a worthwhile creative direction, but a few years later new WCW booker Vince Russo would carry on regardless.
While the direction of traffic for in-ring talent in the Monday Night Wars was now very much in the WWF’s favour, writer Russo and colleague Ed Ferrara made the leap in the opposite direction in October 1999. While it was highly unusual to acknowledge behind-the-scenes staff movements on air, announcers on WCW Monday Nitro sounded delighted to celebrate the move, while retaining enough ambiguity that viewers could imagine the pair as matchmakers rather than storyline writers.
That went largely out the window on Russo’s first day on the job when Buff Bagwell wrestled with a grumpy face, clearly invited his opponent La Parka to perform his finishing move, and stood up immediately after the pin, with the announcers actively drawing attention to his unusual behaviour. Bagwell then grabbed an announcer’s headset and said on-air “Hey, Russo, did I do a good job for you?” It certainly got people talking, though how it played into any long-term storylines never really became clear.
That incident was a model of understatement compared with the debacle of New Blood Rising the following year, shortly after Russo returned for a second stint as WCW’s head writer. The previous month’s show had involved a somewhat baffling sequence of events that saw Jeff Jarrett openly lay down to be pinned by Hulk Hogan before Russo cut a ‘shoot promo’ on Hogan that led to a six-year court battle over alleged character defamation.
The New Blood Rising bout featured Goldberg, Kevin Nash and Scott Steiner battling for the number one contendership. It got off to an odd start with Tony Schiavone referencing backstage politics and noting that “We have all talked privately about who will ‘go over’ in this match.” This sparked off ten truly bizarre minutes where the commentary went back and forth between calling the match as a legitimate contest, speculating about who had been booked to win, and debating who would prevail if the wrestlers ignored the planned finish.
At first it appeared they were going for the “This bit is real” vibe, openly refencing Nash joining WCW’s booking committee shortly before ending Goldberg’s streak, but calling the in-ring action as if the wrestlers were genuinely struggling to win. Then Nash put Goldberg in position for his powerbomb finisher only for Goldberg to simply walk out of the ring, stopping to argue with Russo on the way.
The announcers then became increasingly explicit about what had supposedly happened, starting with “Maybe Goldberg was supposed to do something that wouldn’t have made him look good, but this doesn’t make him look good, does it?”, moving to “I’m thinking Goldberg was supposed to go up for the jackknife and he swerved Kevin Nash right there”, and then referencing the ongoing Nash-Steiner action by asking “If in fact the jackknife powerbomb was part of the design, what are they going to do now? Improvise?” By the end of the bout the announcers were openly praising Nash and Steiner for their professionalism – something that no doubt raised eyebrows backstage – in particular Steiner for taking Nash’s finisher.
If anyone had any clue how this was supposed to make people more interested in watching subsequent bouts, or indeed to pay to do so, it wasn’t made clear. The follow-up came the next night when Russo announced on air that “Bill Goldberg has it in his mind that if this world were real, he could take everybody” and ordered him to fight former UFC star Tank Abbot. As this unfurled, the announcers explained that this was “not what was on the format, not what was booked, not what was planned.”
WCW Monday Nitro was cancelled in March 2001.
In the post-Monday Night War era when WWE became the dominant promotion, the double-bluff took on a new element. For the most part the idea was no longer to give the misleading impression that a particular match was – unlike the others – being conducted without a scheduled outcome. Instead it was more a case of acknowledging wrestling as predetermined and instead trying to trick fans into believing other elements of the business were how the promotion wanted to (falsely) portray them.
An early example was the late-night WWE Confidential show in which host Gene Okerlund regularly talked about behind-the-scenes events and acknowledged that wrestling bouts were predetermined. In some cases this was for reasonable editorial purposes such as a segment taking issue with the term “fake” and detailing genuine injuries suffered by performers. In other cases WWE was clearly giving its spin on incidents such as the Montreal screwjob or the departure of Steve Austin after he refused a demand (made on short notice) to lose to up-and-comer Brock Lesnar. On closer examination, the idea was clearly that by being ‘honest’ about wrestling’s nature, the show would have enough credibility for viewers to accept the promotion’s version of events as genuine.
More recently, the ‘reality’ TV show Total Divas has featured some of the most mind-bending double-bluffs. The programme somehow manages to occupy its own universe somewhere between pro wrestling and reality: within the confines of the show wrestling matches have predetermined endings, but the performers have real relationships and genuine rivalries.
On the one hand, it’s too simplistic to say the show is complete fiction: the romantic pairings are genuine, as are the seemingly inevitable season-closing weddings. On the other hand, many of the events and scenarios are clearly staged or constructed, hence the production crew list including numerous people in a “story producer” role.
And while it seemed as if the “worked shoot” tactic had become outdated or suitable only for niche elements of the business, WWE brought it back out for the biggest storyline of the year: Roman Reigns vs Brock Lesnar at WrestleMania. In the latest attempt to get fans to cheer Reigns in high-profile matches, WWE attempted to downgrade Lesnar in the eyes of the most dedicated fan by playing on his reputation as a selfish mercenary.
This peaked at a pre-Mania house show in which Lesnar beat Kane in barely 30 seconds. Bizarrely the idea was not to make people think he had “gone off-script” and stolen a quick victory. Instead the goal – which was achieved in some quarters of the Internet including mainstream sites like CBS Sports – was to make fans think he had refused to work a longer match, leaving the fans shortchanged.
The problem is that the plan only half-worked. The New Orleans crowd was neutral at best for Lesnar but still not interested in supporting the “full-timer” Reigns, leading to arguably the worst crowd reaction for a WrestleMania main event. The following night got even deeper into double-bluff territory with Reigns complaining on Raw that Vince McMahon had not “smartened him up” or “looked him in the eye” before the match.
Exactly how this is meant to win the sympathy of the fans is difficult to decipher. The match finish was squeaky clean, so the only rational interpretation is that wrestling matches are predetermined and that Reigns was scheduled to win only for McMahon to change his mind late on – in other words, something very close to the truth but with a slight exaggeration in the telling. The problem is there’s no logical reason why fans who grasp the point being made here should then be rooting for Reigns to win a rematch, particularly having just been reminded the winner is selected by Vince McMahon.
In some ways its shocking that a double-bluff or ‘worked shoot’ still has even the slightest effect in 2018 when wrestling’s inner workings are so open. Then again, the sheer amount of information of varying accuracy that’s available, and the way many fans find the machinations of wrestling’s creative process more compelling than the product itself, means there’s never been so many people who could theoretically be fooled into thinking something happening is – unlike everything else – for real.
The problem is that while those inside the creative process can easily go online and find examples of having successfully double-bluffed some fans, there’s no clear indication that doing so goes beyond earning attention and begins producing revenue. The more that promoters and bookers do this while failing to serve the wider audience that simply wants to enjoy a wrestling product at face value, the more it appears that some of the biggest marks are behind the curtain.
