Concussion in professional wrestling: agency, structure and cultural change

ABSTRACT

In this article, we utilise the social dynamics of concussion in professional wrestling to examine and critique calls for cultural change as a solution to the crisis of concussion in sport. Drawing on interview data from wrestlers, promoters, referees and healthcare providers in UK professional wrestling, we illustrate the experiences, attitudes and subcultural norms exhibited in relation to concussion. Despite increasing concerns that brain injuries present unique risks to long-term health, wrestlers continue to embody a culture in which pain is ignored, and ‘playing’ with brain injury is linked to notions of masculinity and wrestling identity. We further explore the organisational features of wrestling, which facilitate and compound these risk-taking behaviours, and conclude by identifying the structural-cultural causes of concussion in wrestling. In sum, economic precarity encouraged risk-taking behaviours, while the ‘free agent’ status of many wrestlers obviated the potential for any continuity of healthcare or paternalistic protection. Moreover, changes to the dominant performative character of wrestling led many to undertake increasingly risky moves, and the serial nature of character development and the centrality of interpersonal negotiations in workplace practice threw precautionary attitudes into conflict with self-identity and social reputational concerns. We therefore conclude that existing public health interventions designed to address concussion in sport, and particularly the concept of cultural change, need to diversify from predominantly medical and psychology-based models and embrace more holistic, structural conceptions of culture.

KEYWORDS:

• Brain injury
• injury
• performance
• professional sport
• promoters
• structure
• violence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We do not use Kalman-Lamb’s work uncritically.Despite its obvious debt to Marx, Kalman-Lamb’s thesis is largely ahistorical. Kalman-Lamb acknowledges that such historicism would be ‘a worthy project’ (Kalman-Lamb 2019, 521) but it is actually fundamental to completing a thesis linking social reproductive labour and violence to (the development of) capitalism and to counter prior research (e.g. Elias and Dunning 1986) which argues that violence as a structural feature of sport predates capitalism and has developed in style and substance across the capitalist period relatively independently of structural economic change. Additionally, the work suffers from a simplification of the embodied affective dimensions of sport. Contrary to Kalman-Lamb’s reading, Elias and Dunning (1986) attribute ‘affective deprivation’ to a range of factors including but which also cannot be reduced to, capitalism.

2. While no sign or symptom of concussion is alone sufficient to provide a clinical diagnosis, it is recommended that participants withdraw from activity following any loss of consciousness (McCrory et al. 2017).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the British Academy [SRG20\200575]

Notes on contributors

Dominic Malcolm

Dominic Malcolm is Professor of Sociology of Sport at Loughborough University. His research interests focus on the intersection of sport, health and medicine and in particular the sociocultural aspects of concussion in sport. He is also Editor-in-Chief of the International Review for the Sociology of Sport.

Anthony Papathomas

Anthony Papathomas is Senior Lecturer in Sport and Exercise Psychology within Loughborough University’s School of Sport, Exercise, and Health Sciences. His research is informed by interpretivism, and he deploys qualitative methodologies to explore the experiences of marginalised groups. Anthony’s principal focus is mental health in sport and specifically athletes living with mental illness. His research has been funded by organisations such as the English Institute of Sport and the International Olympic Committee.

Claire Warden

Claire Warden is Professor of Performance and Physical Culture at Loughborough University. Her work focuses on interdisciplinary modernisms, performance practices and the intersection of sport and art. She is the former chair of the British Association for Modernist Studies, co-editor of Performance and Professional Wrestling (Routledge 2016), co-founder of Arts Council-funded Wrestling Resurgence, and co-hosted the first wrestling symposium at the Houses of Parliament in November 2022.