When Did Professional Wrestling Get Started?

Video Transcript

"Hi! I'm Steve Neilson also known as Stevie Slick. I'm with NWA Ultra Championship Wrestling in Salt Lake City, Utah. We are a professional wrestling company and a professional wrestling school whereas people can learn the arts and crafts of professional wrestling. As far as the history of professional wrestling, it's something that's been around a long time. Wrestling is a form of entertainment competition has been around since the dawn of time. However, the professional wrestling as we know it today got its roots in the early part of the 20th century in carnival acts. Carnivals would travel from town to town and they would have a professional wrestler as part of their troupe which was a guy that was pretty well-built, pretty strong and very skilled at wrestling and they would have one of the town folks come in and beat him for a price money. In 9 times out of 10 they, the person from the town would get beat up quite well and the carnival would make the money out of ticket sales and they had never pay out much price money. As things kept going, pretty much they started falling off and people would wrestle the carnival champion so what the carnival would do is they would have a plant in the audience who would then come up and wrestle the champion and be, become and sometimes they'd even have the guy win that they had planted the audience. However, most of the time he would lose the match and the they would travel from town to town and with the same show. At one point, professional wrestling started becoming more standing on its own and they would have a show, and they would sell tickets and they'd put several wrestlers on the show and when we come in. During that first stage, the wrestling was pretty rough, pretty real and more of a competition. As time evolved, it became more and started revolving more into a form of entertainment. When television got involved in it back in the, in the early let's say 50s when television really started coming to into professional wrestling and they started filming the shows and it became very popular. We had some stars like Gorgeous George as one of the famous ones. He'd basically do quite a dancing act and artistic ballet type wrestling moves and was quite the show man. You know, more of a Liberace of Pro Wrestling, to be honest and it became very popular and it started growing and it just has now evolved into the form of entertainment that we see today. It's still very rough and tumble. The rings are a lot harder than people give it credit for and the wrestlers go through a lot more punishment than people think. It's not all smoke and mirrors. But as far as the history of Pro Wrestling, I think it's going to maintain as a form of entertainment in one form or another. I mean the largest grossing event that there ever was for entertainment was this year's Wrestle Mania. In one day event it grossed over 50 million dollars."