All Pro Wrestling has always been...scripted. And even the best of them never made enough money to be able to risk serious injuries that'd lay them up for too long, or possibly force an early retirement. They'd be battling (I can use battling without air quotes, I might use it on "fighting") 3-5 days a week, at least, just trying to make ends meet and maybe save a little for retirement (not many of them did so well on that end of things, though).

Generally speaking, as I understand it, there'd be an understanding of who'd win and who'd lose, whether they'd put on a little play in the ring aside from the fighting, any really splashy moves that would definitely be included, and other such details. Otherwise, it would be up to the two wrestlers themselves to figure out how they'd make the broader strokes happen for the rest of the match.

That said, some wrestlers were better than others at not hurting their opponents, or getting hurt themselves, but generally speaking, while it's obviously not full contact KO, it's not exactly Chinese Opera, either. They're really getting thrown around, tossed, stretched out in painful (if not as painful as they'd be otherwise) holds, etc. So injuries were a fact of life for pretty much every wrestler, which isn't all that surprising, given how easy it is to get injured just doing high-impact gymnastics work like some of the stuff wrestlers do, without figuring in contact work and grappling and whatnot, and that's without figuring in taking falls outside the ring, getting hit with chairs (even if they may not always be as solid (or solidly swung) as they look), etc.

Some wrestling circuits and owners and managers all encourage more 'close to reality' wrestling than others, of course. And there will always be eager young people wanting to be stars in the ring ready to feed into the machine.

And I'm not even really "into" wrestling, I'm sure Cena or numerous others could give you a much more in-depth or informational answer than I did.

Yeah it's very real. I don't really follow it but it wasn't like this sad "it's fake" thing for me like finding out Santa Claus isn't real (I was at about the same age though..) if anything I appreciated the sport that much more: I was an opera singer when I was a kid so I loved the theatrics, knowing that the rivalries weren't necessarily something that gets taken off the field like it does in other sports.

I could actually see this as being really cathartic and fun, especially for a former NFL player like Crews. I quite literally ran off the field during pee wee football training, but a lot of it was a bunch of contact like this, something that you can't do in the NFL (but of course could, to a certain extent, in the XFL.) God, the late 90s sure were a haven for this kind of stuff.

Mr. T would be ashamed.

Wait, maybe he was.

Faaaaaat asses!

Oh fuck, it's the wrong Steiner bro! Oh well rick is funny too.

I remember this. WCW tried doing a crossover invasion angle with Battle Dome. It was one of the dying wrestling company's last desperate attempts at getting publicity.

My bad. Just saw IZ's comment and subsequent thread. If PoETV was a real website it would offer a Delete function, but, you know.