Once and for all! Here and now! Is professional wrestling fake?

[cemaphonic]

31. Oddly, it didn't really develop from high school and collegiate/olypmic wrestling

I always thought it did, since having wrestled in high school, it's a pretty boring spectator sport if you don't understand the scoring rules, and I always figured that pro wrestling was an attempt to jazz it up.

It actually came from carnies and their strongman attractions. As Hayabusa said, they would challenge the hometown heroes to last in the ring with them, but they had a handful of (well-kept secret) moves to rig the matches in their favor. Over time, this coalesced into a bunch of different regional companies with their own territories, rosters, traditions and "rules." Mostly these regional promotions stayed out of each others way until Vince McMahon took over the WWF from his dad, and expanded it into a national company, buying out most of the regions in the process.