Two very different stories are encompassed in the term “wrestling”—the college and professional games. College wrestling has been strong since the nineteenth century and featured in the revived Olympic Games held in Greece in 1896. There are now believed to be around 750,000 participants in the sport nationwide, with a large number concentrated in Pennsylvania and Ohio, the heartland of the sport.

The amateur sport has come under threat from a number of directions, however. First, the impact of Title IX has been felt most heavily in minor sports like wrestling without female opportunity Unwilling to cut into funding for football programs to make money available for women’s sports, colleges tended to cut back on wrestling. Of the 788 schools with programs in 1982, only 247 have programs in 1997.

This has had an impact on the number of scholarships available to wrestlers and has served to increase the intensity of the competition in wrestling. There is a long history of wrestlers trying to lose weight to remain in a lower weight class, but since 1997 there have been at least three deaths at colleges resulting from starvation and dehydration. One wrestler, for example, who normally weighed over 235 pounds attempted to wrestle at 190 pounds. Managing to bring his weight down to 195 pounds, he died of heart failure.

Deaths have also occurred due to muscle-building dietary supplements like creatine.

These events have caused the NCAA to place new restrictions on the way wrestlers shed pounds, ending the use of rubber exercise suits and diuretics. Amateur wrestling was also tainted by its association with John Du Pont, a multimillionaire who had never fulfilled his own wrestling ambitions. After funding the American Olympic team for many years and providing housing on his grounds, Du Pont shot and killed Dave Schultz, the leading American freestyle wrestler, in 1996.

Professional wrestling was transformed after the Second World War with the new medium of television and the establishment of the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA) in 1948 by Midwestern promoters. Instead of merely presenting athletic bouts, as previously these promoters staged athletic soap operas with themes of good against evil and of American wrestlers fighting off foreign enemies—Japanese, Middle-Eastern, or Soviet.

Although these events required great physical prowess and considerable training, the choreography involved fundamentally altered the nature of wrestling as a sport.

The 1980s saw a further explosion of wrestling on cable television. Ted Turner bought out the NWA in 1988 and established World Championship Wrestling (WCW), which became a mainstay of TNT, TBS and USA networks. The World Wrestling Federation (WWF) emerged as the other dominant wrestling federation picked up by a variety of television channels. In addition, many local professional organizations appeared in the late 1990s that promoted the same style of wrestling but in which the wrestlers, with great fan enthusiasm, suffered actual injuries.

Wrestling, with its combination of acting and athleticism, has become central to American popular culture. Commercials and movies frequently feature wrestlers like “Hollywood” (socalled by his detractors) Hulk Hogan, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Sony PlayStations and other television consoles feature games that many children can play from which they can learn moves and holds that they try out with their friends, occasionally with catastrophic results. The death of a young boy clothes-lined by his elder brother, has fueled the controversy about the impact of television violence on the young.

The election of former wrestler Jesse Ventura, as governor of Minnesota on a reform ticket, has illustrated the cultural significance of professional wrestling, helping to determine the outcome of a contest in the sport of name-recognition—politics.