WWE Declare They Are Wrestling
With Vince McMahon now removed from his WWE executive duties, the company is back to being a wrestling promotion, rather than a sports entertainment organisation.
In what was a direct order from then- boss Vince McMahon, the company was promoted under the banner of sports entertainment, rather than professional wrestling. He even discussed this on an edition of The Stone Cold Podcast in December 2014, claiming that pro wrestling is what his father worked in.
Per WWE’s official Twitter, however, WWE is once again a wrestling company. They joined in with a social media trend, simply tweeting the word “wrestling”.
wrestling
— WWE (@WWE) September 1, 2022
Following Paul ‘Triple H’ Levesque taking over WWE creative and talent relations, it was reported that he would be pushing for pro wrestling over sports entertainment, as indicated by the legendary Jerry Jarrett. Speaking during a Q&A session in North Carolina, Jarrett claimed how he learned of this new direction:
“They didn’t tell me not to tell anybody. So I’ll tell you, Hunter called, this week, the Raw crew and the Smackdown crew and said, ‘My father-in-law and Stephanie’s father…We admire him and we respect him. He reached success that we would never know without him, but we don’t know how to do it his way, and we’re not going to try. We’re going to try a new way’…and I think the new way is to put wrestling instead of sports entertainment. I mean, that’s pure speculation on my part.”
It’s become clear in recent weeks that this is the case, with a number of WWE main roster matches being booked to represent wrestling, rather than the character-driven sports entertainment. The likes of Ciampa and Dolph Ziggler have benefitted greatly from this.