How can you enjoy watching the sport of wrestling?

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How can you enjoy watching the sport of wrestling? image

Why do people enjoy watching wrestling? Originally answered on February 28th, 2015

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Answer by Christopher VanLangCollege 103 lber

I actually love watching wrestling. Unfortunately, I haven't been in a good wrestling state for sometime so getting the chance to watch quality wrestling outside of the NCAA championship is rather tough. If it wasn't for the fact that I have ultimate frisbee and there aren't viable wrestling options after college, I would wrestle as a past time.

Unfortunately for the sport, it's not an easy sport to watch. For the majority of people it looks like two scantily clad men dancing around each other for 7 minutes and all of the sudden one of them tackles the other and the match is over. Unfortunately that is how the majority of matches are determined.

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Wrestling is essentially a long physical chess battle where one athlete tries to force another athlete to make a mistake. Buvaisar Saitiev is one of the all time offensive greats and while a fantastic and unsuspectingly strong wrestler, truly won bye toying around with his opponents and making them physically uncomfortable.

Below is his 2004 olympic gold match. Purely by his positioning and technique, it seems like he is just hopping around in the center of the mat while his opponent is desperately trying to push his way to the center while constantly seeming out of position and off balance. That's what happens when a really good wrestler goes against a significantly weaker one.

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The same goes for David Taylor's coronation in 2012.
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Wrestling essentially pieces together all of the action that occurs in the 5 seconds of a line of scrimmage battle in football and makes it a continuous 6 minutes. When everyone does their job in football, a stalemate occurs and nothing actually happens. Where things get interesting is when mistakes happen. An Offensive Guard makes a step too slowly and the QB gets sacked. A Defensive End gets pushed out of position and the RB runs through the gap. If you talk to people who watch football, the exciting stuff is always the high catches and the big runs. But for people who really watch football intensely, they know that the really interesting chess matches occur in the trenches.

So the beauty of wrestling is that it all comes down to mistakes or forcing your opponent to make mistakes. When those mistakes do happen, an array of countermeasures get deployed and when those countermeasures get deployed the counter-countermeasures. Sometimes you get some really strange situations like Jordan Leen vs. Michael Chandler's 2 minute scramble.
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I know that for most people, this is all just chaos and two guys rolling around trying to find the other person's leg. But even if you don't find it interesting or exciting, it's impossible to deny that there is a lot of stuff going on. If you watch these matches in a crowd, you'll also realize how many people are simultaneously yelling out instructions and "kill him!!!!" My mom liked to watch wrestling from the start but for the first two years couldn't watch her own kids because it was too intense being in a room with everyone calling for the death of your child.

Because of the multitude of decisions and reactions that have to be made, it's also very clear that ANYTHING can happen at any time. There are too many stories where someone would be up by 10 points only to get thrown to their backed and pinned at the buzzer. The excitement of wrestling comes from watching the long grind only to culminate in a split second decision dictated by the trained rehearsed reactions of athletes that determines the fate of the match. It is that anticipation of greatest coming out of nowhere that makes it exciting.

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