Wrestling with Research: My Research on Wrestling

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Thomas Christaldi ('23), a Communications major, conducted research on the innerworkings of wrestling under the mentorship Dr. Perry Johnson (Annenberg School for Communication). This research was supported by the College Alumni Society Undergraduate Research Grant.

If you had told me prior to college that I was going to complete an original research project totaling almost ninety pages, I would have laughed in your face. I always envisioned research as something only conducted by people in lab coats, hunched over in a dark lab mixing together the highly volatile contents of various test tubes. Over the course of my college career, as I realized this wasn't the case, I began to make a list of all of the things I enjoy. I figured that, if I was going to write a thesis, it ought to be something I'm invested in. This list consisted of a lot of things, but very few of them were very obviously related to Communications. I found myself continuously drawn to wrestling, though. Its scripted (but NOT fake) nature leads to pro wrestling having a very complex constructed reality (something insiders call "kayfabe"). This reality, I felt, was just begging to be explored in a scholarly sense. With the help of my advisors, Dr. Johnson and Dr. Woolf, as well as pretty much every other Annenberg faculty member I could get ahold of, I narrowed this focus to "worked shoots." These moments, which appear to break wrestling's script without actually doing so, have been analyzed in isolation, but never longitudinally.

Conducting this research consisted primarily of doing something I would have been doing anyway: watching wrestling. Once I chose the five case studies I'd be analyzing, I immersed myself in them, watching them over and over, reading as many articles about them as I could find, and talking about them to anyone who would listen. This research also gave me an excuse to attend as many local wrestling shows as possible, which I'm certainly not complaining about.

Perhaps my favorite part of doing this research was the opportunity it gave me to introduce others to one of my passions. After hearing about my project all year, my roommates invited a bunch of our friends over for a surprise Wrestlemania watch party. I've been trying to get my friends interested in wrestling for quite literally over a decade. Had I known all it would've taken was a ninety-page paper, I would've written one ages ago!

In all seriousness, I won't pretend this research was always easy. Half of the time now, even months after finishing my research, all I want to do is watch wrestling, and the other half of the time I never want to watch wrestling ever again (though I am VERY excited for Wrestlemania in Philadelphia this April!). That said, the skills I've gained through doing this project, despite how niche of a topic it covered, have proven quite transferable: Starting a career in news, I've been well-equipped to discern fact from fiction thanks to spending hours looking at a blending of the two. And since wrestling media is often fan-driven, rather than scholarly, I've also developed a sense of when an article that seems relevant on the surface may not be reputable in actuality. 

To anyone considering conducting research, I highly recommend doing it as long as there's a topic you're particularly passionate about! Even if you can't see the obvious pathway from your passion to a scholarly project, take some time to wrestle with it (pun intended) and I'm sure you'll figure it out. - Thomas Christaldi

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