I know I’ve told this story before, but back when I was in college and we all had to come back early from winter break for indoor track, a bunch of us would get bored with nothing to do but practice and meets. So we’d sometimes plan an evening of wrestling matches in someone’s apartment. Individual bouts, tag team matches. It would inevitably end when someone would cross the hazy line between wrestling and, well, wrestling, perhaps confusing fake and real.
Regardless, there was always someone limping a bit at practice the next day, although no one would dare tell coach that it was because we decided to have an underground WrestleMania in someone’s living room.
So, I can understand why New York Giants management and fans might have been a bit concerned when they watched Monday Night Raw this week, the WWE wrestling event held at Madison Square Garden. At the event, some current Giants – including rookie running back Cam Scattebo and fellow rookie Abdul Carter and a few other teammates – ended up in a ringside confrontation with wrestlers known collectively as Judgement Day. After a heated exchange, punches were thrown – namely by Scattebo – security broke it up, and the show continued. That seemed to be the talk of the town Tuesday morning, perhaps the most exciting Giants related highlight of the year.
To state the obvious, it was all fake – or perhaps better described as staged, because I’m guessing it still hurts to throw yourself around a ring after a pulled punch. No one got hurt. And John Cena didn’t then invite them for a battle royale in his final WWE performance. But, and this is the rub, Scattebo is currently out for the season with an ankle injury. And Carter, the Giants first round draft pick, was benched for the first possession last week because he fell asleep and missed the team’s walk through. So in both cases, perhaps living your best life on national television might have felt a bit off message. And if Scattebo somehow injured himself more in the shoving contest, you can only imagine the outrage. Perhaps even more to the point, the Giants are 2-9 on the season, somehow a half game worse than the Jets only because they’ve played one additional game. They just fired their head coach, and their rookie quarterback Jaxson Dart is just coming back after a concussion. So when your desperate and increasingly angry fan base sees two of your top rookies – one injured and one sleeping through meetings – joking around at a Wrestling match – you can imagine how that plays out on social media and talk radio.
There’s an argument here about the responsibilities of professional athletes, especially those that earn millions and millions per season. On the one hand, there’s an unwritten expectation that with that salary, paid directly and indirectly by fans, you’re supposed to be all in. The wins and losses are supposed to hurt you as much as the folks in the bleachers. It’s why fans hate seeing athletes out at a bar after their team loses. They want them home feeling miserable, like they do. On the other side, a large salary shouldn’t mean you’ve signed your life away. And assuming you don’t hurt yourself, shouldn’t a pro athlete be able to live a semi-normal life, or at least one outside the field or court? To get to any kind of answer, you have to go pretty deep into everything from the psychology of fandom to the economics of sport, trying to figure out why athletes become both glorified and dehumanized in the stretch of a single week.
Should Cam Scattebo have wrestled, or at least almost wrestled while on injured reserve on a bad ankle for a losing team. It’s wasn’t the best idea. But, I’m old enough to remember when the world’s greatest athletes used to go on a show called The Superstars, where stars from different sports would compete in things like bike races and dead lifts and an obstacle course that looks like it was built on a grade school playground. The kind of stuff that is tailor made for injuries. You could never, ever, ever do that now – the mere thought gives agents and owners nightmares. That’s perhaps the real answer. Professional athletes aren’t just people anymore, if they ever were. Which is why they should leave the wrestling to college track kids back early from winter break.
Keith Strudler is the Dean of the College of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. You can follow him at @KeithStrudler.
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