Work, Don't Shoot: Affection and Professional Wrestling

By Daniel Scott Tysdal

I’ve known the Dutch pro wrestler for around twenty-four hours when he raises his leg to boot me. This is while we stretch outside the ring before class.

Moments earlier, we’d enjoyed a “get to know you” chat, having trained together for the first time the previous night. He is on a combo vacation/training tour, visiting various North American cities for the sights and pro wrestling schools. We talked about the difference in training methods between his school in the Netherlands and ours in TO, the climate-change-mellowed Dutch winters, where he’s headed next, San Diego, before falling back into the silence of stretching.

When my new classmate makes the decision to kick me, I am leaned forward in a runner’s lunge. He has just finished using the ring apron for support as he stretches his calves. Through pro wrestling training, I’m learning a bit about other combat sports, and the way he lifts his left knee to waist height makes me bet he’s studied the Muay Thai-influenced Dutch kickboxing.

He snaps off the kick at half-speed, inches from my face, punctuating the almost-blow with a muted grunt.

I fire my head hard to the left at half-speed, releasing a pained groan, face contorted, as if I’ve taken the blow at full force.

The kick carries him past me, and he continues without a word to his gym bag for a swig of water. I return to my lunge.

In pro wrestling, this is affection, this playful exchange of striking and selling. It’s the equivalent of an arm thrown intimately around a shoulder or a side five that transitions into one of those arm-wrestle-grip handshakes with a chest bump.

I first encounter this back in the summer, during my initial stint on ring crew. In this environment’s unique mix of labour, socializing, and education, there are ample opportunities for bonding, ranging from the teamwork required to take apart and reassemble the ring to the opportunities to bullshit in the pockets of downtime.

The bonding practice that surprises me the most is this trading of strike and sell, which I share with my fellow green trainees. We swap them throughout the day as we perform the grunt work we can be trusted with. Carrying a box to the merch table, I receive a spinning back elbow from one trainee as he hauls an armload of curtains. Scheming our wrestling characters in a group of four, one trainee leans back and delivers a superkick inches from my chest, slapping his thigh for effect. Later, lugging two flats of water bottles to the locker room, I receive a mock ladder shot.

In all three cases, I do my part, gleefully selling accordingly.

I am an affectionate person, one who values—honestly, who requires and thrives on—intimacy, touch, and expressions of warmth and care. I still sit in my pops’ lap. (I would sit in my mom’s lap still, too, but she would probably need to have her hips replaced after.) I squeeze shoulders and pat forearms. I unironically exclaim, “I’m a hugger,” like the annoying brother-in-law in a family comedy. My wife exists in a flurry of embraces, kisses, and celebrations. I work her name into every song (though I’ve learned to be more conscious in this practice after not-so-romantically roasting her in the opening line of “The Christmas Song”) and I note aloud her every wonder (she questions this practice sometimes, too, like the other day after I swoon, “wow,” she responds, “I’m literally just walking down the stairs”).

When I sign up for pro wrestling training, I do not expect the affectionate part of me to be nurtured and expanded. If anything, I anticipate this nature will be challenged, knocked out of me, or pushed to such a limit that I will be knocked out of the class. Instead, through pro wrestling, I experience affection in new ways, expanding my understanding of its possibilities. The playful, chummy exchanges of strikes and sells is only one of them.

The second example manifests in two interrelated parts, connecting overtly to touch—the grappling, striking, and slamming in the ring—and to the spirit that underpins this touch.

To begin with the former, the very foundation of pro wrestling as a simulated fight offers a unique experience of touch to someone like me who has never been in a fight. My arm bends in a classmate’s grip as they take control at a spot’s start. My stomach flumps on a classmate’s shoulder, their arms locked in my crotch and neck, as they prepare to slam me to the mat. My butt rams against a classmate’s face as I try to pin them in a botched O’Connor roll. These are not ways my body tends to entangle with other bodies, not publicly, at least.

Having played a lot of school and rec sports from my childhood to early twenties, I am used to the variously fluid, rough, and strange touch of competitive sports. One of my favourite examples comes from my favourite sport growing up, basketball. When blocking out an opponent to put oneself in the best position to get a rebound, the adage is “butt in balls” or, if you prefer rhyme to alliteration, “butt in nuts.” In competitive sports, though, even one as violent as American football, the touch is incidental, a by-product, the necessary means to the true end of scoring points. In pro wrestling, the contact is the means and end: each hold, blow, move, and pin is delivered to get the win.

This brings me to the second part of this example: the spirit that underpins contact in pro wrestling. This spirit is highlighted in the definition of pro wrestling as not a fight, but a simulated fight, and is codified in the foundational ideas of a “work” versus a “shoot.” A “worked” hold, blow, or move is simulated, whereas a “shoot” hold, blow, or move is real. A worked punch, for example, features a big windup and hard delivery, but slides off the side of an opponent’s jaw, causing no damage. A shoot punch lands with full force, ringing an opponent’s bell, and maybe breaking their jaw or knocking their teeth out.

At the root of pro wrestling as a work, then, exists a kind of affection, a mix of intimacy, trust, and care. I experience this every day in training. In my first class, while learning the basic holds, I apply a hammerlock to the classmate who’s coaching me. As I grip his left wrist and palm behind his back, I wrench too far up and he winces, “Watch it. That’s a shoot hold.” A few weeks later, when I learn how to take a dropkick, I’m instructed to provide a solid wall for my partner to strike, which will help him make a controlled landing. Weeks after that, while learning the belly-to-back suplex, I hold my partner on my right shoulder, my right arm wrapped around her waist and my left hand gripping the back of her left thigh. Before I complete the move, which will involve dropping my partner back-first onto the mat as I kick my legs in the air and bump with them, the coach reminds me not to tip my partner back with my left hand as we fall because this could cause a serious head and neck injury as she has no way to protect herself.

In each of these instances, and the hundreds more like them, I encounter the boundary between work and shoot, and I live the affection—the intimacy, care, and trust—that maintains this boundary. My classmates trust me with their arms, backs, necks, and brains, and I, in turn, trust them with my body and mind. I trust that as they send me to the mat with shoulder tackles, hip tosses, and top-rope cross-bodies that they will do so with care.

We also trust one another to complete the contract by selling, dramatically showing how much the holds, blows, and moves hurt. We grasp at the shoulders of our hammerlocked arms, moaning in pain and fighting to break free. We fire up and away as the dropkick lands, yelping in pain as we smash on our backs. We clutch our heads with both hands and writhe on the mat after taking the belly-to-back suplex.

When I share with my wife this specific example of pro wrestling expanding my experience and understanding of affection, she discovers a third example, one grounded in language. Based on my new experience, she wonders if there is a connection in pro wrestling between “affection” as fondness, intimacy, and care, and a similar word that is more obviously associated with this singular sport and art: “affected” as in feigned, artificial, and fake.

I look up “affection” and “affected” in the etymological dictionary and find that, sure enough, my wife is right. (I tried my best not to type this, Love, but I just have to say, “Wow.”) What links these two different words at their origins is desire, though not only desire as lust and longing. Instead, they are joined by desire as wish, as aspiration, as hope. Affection originates c. 1200 in “affeccioun,” “desire, inclination, wish, intention,” while, from Old French “affecter,” affect, in early fifteenth-century English, originally carries the now-obsolete sense of “aiming at, aspiring to.”

In other words, what this link between the roots of affection and affected demonstrates is that haters are wrong to sneer, “Wrestling’s fake!” Instead, they should giddily exclaim, “Wrestling’s fake!” Like all arts, pro wrestling reclaims this lost meaning of affected. For in this affected quality, in the worked and the show, thrives these aspirations, these generous aims to achieve athletic feats and artistic highs. In this affected nature resides affection for these aims, these aspirations, and all the elements that make them possible—we ourselves as pro wrestlers, our partners in the ring, our audience, and our art itself.

Pro wrestlers, in other words, love pro wrestling. This love is the final example of how pro wrestling surprisly changed my experience and understanding of affection. You, like me, may be surprised by my surprise at this final case. Of course pros wrestlers love pro wrestling. How else could one commit to a craft that requires the development of an incredible range of athletic, fitness, acting, and collaborative skills and can lead to serious injury or even death?

One part of my surprise has to do with where I’m coming from as a creator. I love writing, and I can say, without question, that my writing practice has saved my life and continues to sustain my life. Through writing, I come to know, imagine, challenge, and embrace, myself, my communities, the world, and language in old, new, and always invigorating ways. And through reading what others have written, I experience the same.

Many writers seem to despise writing, spending big chunks of time online diminishing and tearing down the art, while getting wrapped up in the baubles and drama that have nothing to do with the wonder and miracle of our craft. Perhaps even more frustratingly, these are the same people who privately, or not so privately, seethe, mope, and rage when they are not recognized as geniuses in the very field they seem to hate. I find this behaviour puzzling, not least of all because nobody is forcing anyone to write, and, as someone who must write—who loves and believes in writing—I find this behaviour hurtful and deflating.

This is where the first part of the surprise comes in: I find my love of writing mirrored in the love pro wrestlers feel for their craft, more than I find it shared by other writers. Put more explicitly, after a year of struggling to write, pro wrestling has reignited my passion for writing.

This is the second part of the surprise. Again, of course I know pro wrestlers love pro wrestling, but I did not anticipate just how infectious and inspiring this love would be. This is a love grounded in a knowledge of the history of the sport and expressed as great matches are discussed with enthusiasm and insight. This is a love that arises in the capacity to apply this knowledge, manifesting, for example, in the genius of taking a minor moment in a spot, say, a nose accidently struck, and developing it, on the fly, into a whole new, minute-long thread. This is a love that is driven to share this know-how and experience, to teach others no matter how new they are or how potentially short-lived their training might be.

The infectiousness of this love, in turn, spurs in me a new understanding of what it means to teach, to share knowledge and to learn together. I have this epiphany during a class in which that day’s coach is asked: what is the most important trait of a pro wrestler? His answer: a passion for pro wrestling.

The writer in me can’t help but hear the etymological root of passion: “suffering.” In turn, the service industry veteran in me can’t help but recall how the word “passion” has been decimated by its corporate taming. At Starbucks, where a part of our mission was to share our “passion for coffee,” my co-workers and I would lampoon this tenet by making cracks about how we suffered for and were martyred by the work of serving coffee.

In contrast to these attempts to reclaim the word “passion” through irony and humour, pro wrestling salvages this word through sincerity. What I realize as our coach talks about his passion for pro wrestling, which resonates with the ways pro wrestling leads me to experience affection in new ways, is that to truly experience and demonstrate a passion for a craft is to undertake it with compassion—to feel sympathy for another’s pain and to seek to alleviate it, or, turning to etymology again, to “suffer with another,” to “together” (com) “suffer” (pati).
​
Here, I don’t simply mean suffering together as we undertake ten drop-down leapfrogs or a gauntlet of shoulder tackles, though this is true. I mean the way our daily suffering in surviving can bring us together in a practice to relieve our suffering together. This is the case with any undertaking—whether pro wrestling or writing, whether cooking, ceramics, or cricket—through which we teach and learn, through which we support, challenge, and share. In pro wrestling, then, our feigned strikes and embellished sells are the marks of uniting in our hope to live more than the dreary, isolating grind. Together, we aspire to transcend our daily pains by raising each other in the air to deliver a body slam with ferocity and care.

---

​Daniel Scott Tysdal is a writer, filmmaker, and teacher. His works include The End Is in the Middle: Mad Fold-In Poems (icehouse), the short story collection Wave Forms and Doom Scrolls (Wolsak & Wynn), and the TEDx talk, “Everything You Need to Write a Poem (and How It Can Save a Life).” He is a Professor, Teaching Stream, at the University of Toronto Scarborough, and a pro wrestling trainee at Superkick’d Studios.