Since Wrestlemania there’s been nothing but stories about John Cena winning an amazing 17th title, blah blah blah… It’s a “History making moment”, yadda yadda yadda…
Like…of course he did. It’s the storyline. It’s quite literally “in the script”.
This isn’t an achievement. Why is this in my sports news next to last night’s hockey scores instead of next to an article about who was the bitchiest on the lastest episode of Real Housewives?
I get it. I loved Wrestling growing up. Back when we all WERE pretending it was real; Macho Man, Hulk Hogan, The Undertaker, etc… But I thought at some point they steered into the whole “entertainment” aspect when most of us grew the hell up and clued into the absurdity of it all.
Because wrestling is a huge business and it has a lot of overlap with combat sports fans.
Yesn’t.
An actor breaking the record for most best performer oscars won in a career would also be newsworthy, yet you can absolutely pay your way to an oscar.
John Cena is remarkable in that he’s such a draw that a multi-billion dollar organization decided to set his career as the new ceiling to break for the next big star, by breaking a record untouched for decades, might I add. That’s newsworthy.
That isn’t scripted, that is a performer being skilled at what he does, as much as I personally don’t enjoy his work.
This is like, the most “I learned something so the rest of the world learned it with me” I’ve ever seen.
Wrestling has been known to be fake for over a century; newspapers stopped reporting on it as a factual sport in the early 1900s.
Hell, it was known to be fakery before it was ever televised.
Kids don’t know until they do.
It’s live action martial arts anime theater. No more, no less.
tl;dr: Should John Cena’s record-breaking 17th title win be in the papers? absolutely. Sports section? Maybe, depends. It is a “sport” in the same way that figure skating or synchronised swimming is.