As someone who watches a lot — some would say “too much”¹ — wrestling, it’s usually difficult for me to determine just how much a given bit of sports entertainment ephemera has made its way into the public consciousness. For pro graps in particular, the kind of stuff that “even people who don’t care about ___ know” can be surprising because of the way it works as a bottom-feeder/filter system for the broader pop culture universe.

The thing that you can almost guarantee every single person who has ever heard of professional wrestling is aware of is “WrestleMania,” which is happening this weekend for the 42nd time in WWE history. In addition to being the most famous, it is also the show whose purpose is most commonly misunderstood. It’s usually posited/framed as culmination of the WWE calendar. This creates or reinforces the idea the show offers a kind of valedictory address for the company and industry at large in a given year, much in the same way the Super Bowl is in football or the Oscars work for film.

But WrestleMania has about as much in common with the Super Bowl as the New York Jets do.² The Super Bowl, while similarly surrounded by spectacle in a way that obscures its primary purpose, exists exclusively to crown the champion of a specific season. Mania’s raison d’être runs a little bit closer to the Academy Awards, with wins and loser dictated by a process that has less to do with merit than who you know and how much they like you, but with one key difference: When you watch the Oscars, although they show bits from nominated movies, at no point during the telecast do the people involved start actually making movies themselves in real time.

That event, and nearly every other award ceremony like it, exists as an advertisement of whatever artistic endeavor being honored as an idea worth celebrating, while not being examples of the craft³ themselves. There’s real value in providing this kind of platform that even goes beyond the good press that the awarded works receive after being put on a pedestal. But the material effect on the field that’s being observed is still indirect.

While winning an Oscar has helped many an actor or director reach the next stage of their career, even in ways that feel direct, those things didn’t happen as a result of winning the Oscar, as much as they variations on a theme of commonly associated after effects of doing so. An Oscar win makes you an Oscar winner, yes, but it does not make future movies you are in Oscar movies, just movies featuring an Oscar winner.

Additional Oscar movies and performances are not a function of the initial win in the same way that, if Rocky won the WWE title at this year’s WrestleMania, he would become “contractually obligated”⁴ to defend that championship and with a semi-regular cadence of championship matches simply because he would actually be the reigning and defending champion. Which puts WrestleMania in a very specific culture space, where what is happening while the audience watches is the thing itself and not just a reference to it, while also serving as a symbolic catch-all celebration of the industry and the company.

The purpose of Mania is to serve as a showcase for the industry⁵ through the prism of a single company’s vision of what it is and should be, and in that way it serves a similar purpose to the NBA All-Star game. At least in the way that it tries (and often fails) to balance quick-hit aesthetic/entertainment values. Though Mania carries with it a sense that the competitive results being achieved actually matter going into the immediate future.

Which is sort of what makes it, along with the Royal Rumble⁶, makes the Showcase of the Immortals perhaps the perfect wrestling show to force introduce the concept of the art form to your friends. And, to get to the “obscure sports” part of this week’s newsletter, it’s the kind of signpost/signature event that can be sorely lacking when trying to find an interesting on-ramp for the people in your life who, while they might not think they’d like rugby or cricket or curling or snooker or squash, would almost certainly fall in love with these kinds of things if given the chance.

Especially for Americans, who have a tendency to gravitate towards tentpole events as not just a way to introduce themselves to concept with which they are not familiar, but often lean towards only engaging with a given thing through these tentpole events as a personality trait in-and-of-itself. The outsized influence of series like the Triple Crown in horse racing or the Grand Slams of tennis/golf completely overshadow nearly every other aspect of these sports. Over the past two decades, it has gotten to the point where they shape the behaviors of different governing bodies across the spectrum in attempts to figure out which of their existing events can be retrofitted to feed into the big three, four or five tournaments that offer exposure and interest for the sport above a replacement level.

The idea of having easy to digest bits to be able to bring to potential fans becomes especially difficult to navigate when dealing with just how many different variants exist of almost every sport outside of the North American bubble. While American sports offer splits between field and box lacrosse, or arena and full-sized football, the field of play being shrunk or expanded is about as far as these things are ever thought out.

As we discussed last week (and beyond) both the frequency and size of the variances between something like 7s vs. 15s in rugby or T20/Class-A/First-Class cricket can mean that finding just the right speed for each individual new obscure sports recruit must be more heavily curated than simply just putting on the same show every year and hoping that even if it wasn’t as good as last year, it won’t be the year everything finally stops working the ways you’ve always feared⁷.

It’s a good challenge to have though, and it’s kind of fundamentally why we started this newsletter. To figure out for ourselves, and then broadcast out to you, which of the world’s silliest and most spectacular sports are worth your time, money and (more importantly at this point) attention.

We hope to eventually get to the point where we become a respected voice in the very specific niche of introducing hundreds and thousands of fans to the weird world of wacky sports from across the globe. But for now, we’re just going to to take it (Metro Bank’s Women’s) One Day (Cup 2026) at a time.⁸