Credit: Dangerous Minds / Pro Wrestling Illustrated

The ‘sport’ of professional wrestling may be fake, but the life of a professional wrestler is anything but a walk in the park.

If anything, the easy part is taking a few tumbles in the ring and occasionally cutting your forehead open to give your match a bit of colour. Much like being part of The Rolling Stones, you’d do that for free; it’s everything else you get paid for.

Wrestling is a solitary, expensive business. You spend most of your time driving through empty highways in the dead of night, plaster peeling from the aforementioned cut on your forehead, wondering whether the money you got from selling T-shirts will cover the gas tank home.

Naturally, outsiders would expect that would change when you hit the big time in WWE or AEW, but the truth is, it doesn’t. Sure, the money’s better, but as WWE superstar Bayley told the host of FS1 in an interview, that doesn’t really go that far when you’re responsible for paying for rental cars, hotels and food when you’re on the road. After all, when you sign with WWE, you’re not technically an employee of theirs, you’re an independent contractor.

So yeah, you get a pay packet that sounds impressive on the surface, but then silly things like getting to shows, eating and sleeping get in the way. Then another big ol’ chunk of your pay goes on taxes because, y’know, you’re an independent contractor. Neither does the wage cover health insurance, in an industry where you drop yourself on your head for a living.

So, money can get very tight very quickly unless you’re a main eventer. However, you’re very famous to a tight-knit community of fans; surely you can use that to your advantage? How about making a YouTube channel, like Xavier Woods or Zack Ryder did over a decade ago? How about taking bookings for indie shows? How about getting on OnlyFans, or Patreon, or hell, Twitch streaming can pay through the nose these days. Nope, sorry, not allowed.

You may be an independent contractor, but the contract you signed clearly states that you can’t work for any other wrestling company than WWE, and any side hustle has to be approved by WWE. If they do approve it, they now get a cut of the money. If they don’t, dream on. You might have noticed this is a crock of utter horse shit. Let’s call a spade a spade here; it’s not a fair deal, so why don’t the wrestlers form a union?

That’s surely the answer here, each of them stands up to the greedy suits that are exploiting the living shit out of them and tells them that they’re not working until the standards improve around here. Well, that’s just it. They tried that. Namely, Jesse ‘The Body’ Ventura tried that all the way back in 1986. He tried to change the industry at its core shortly before the then-WWF staged Wrestlemania II.

Ventura was a smart man, and he knew that in the lead-up to Wrestlemania, a huge gamble for the company, the locker room could have Vince McMahon over a barrel. If they refused to work the show until their demands were met, they were set. The only issue was that someone with Vince’s ear caught wind of what was going on. Someone big, dumb and yellow as the T-shirts he’d rip off his body when he got in the ring. That’s right, Hulk fucking Hogan ratted out Ventura like a coward.

It’s easy to pin the blame entirely on Hogan. Fun too. The truth is, though, that professional wrestling is an inherently conservative industry. Everyone’s out for number one, and everyone knows how precarious a job in it is. People have had Hogan’s clout since. If Steve Austin had the same idea in 1998, or The Rock in 2000 or John Cena in 2009, they would have had a similar chance at changing the industry.

Hell, Cody Rhodes was hooting and hollering about a wrestler’s union when AEW was starting to take shape. Shortly after the company formed in earnest, hype about a wrestler’s union died down. It’s completely dead now that he’s back in the WWE. Can’t imagine why. Hopefully something changes in good time, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

In the meantime, if you can blame Hogan for something, do so. He almost certainly deserves it.