Professional wrestling has been around since the 1800's premiering as a circus act. It has amassed thousands of fans throughout that time, but it is evident that within the past century professional wrestling has achieved a significantly larger audience reaching the millions. What is the reason for this massive increase in viewership for professional wrestling? My answer is because people all over the world love and desire all forms of entertainment, and professional wrestling in the past 100 years has been transformed into something coined sports-entertainment thanks to the style of wrestling implemented by the World Wrestling Entertainment and its creator and current chairman, Vincent Kennedy McMahon. I chose to write my senior thesis about how Vince McMahon developed a synergy between cable television and WWE and how this synergy has produced outstanding accomplishments for sports-entertainment. Professional wrestling in the modern era cannot and should not be viewed or deemed as a professional sport, it is simply a means of entertainment that was built by Vince McMahon. .
My love for professional wrestling took off when I was seven years old in 1998. I was on a family vacation in the Bahamas walking around in a food market when I came across a small television screen showing a very bloody man screaming in pain while trying to get out of a submission move. The match that I was so intrigued by was "Stone Cold" Steve Austin vs. Bret "The Hitman" Hart in a 60-minute Ironman match for the World Heavyweight Championship. I remember this time so vividly mainly because I have never witnessed such violence and blood being aired on television. But what really kept me watching was this gory violence being intertwined with a sense of sportsmanship between the two wrestlers; I was just a little kid fascinated with something brand new I have never seen before on television.