NEW YORK -- With an image more of entertainment than sport and an avid following among the young, professional wrestling is generating profits that are anything but child's play.
The business aspects of wrestling have changed considerably over the past several years as wrestlers and promoters, with a leg up from television, exploited the commercial potential of their trade. Endorsements and licensing deals are helping to boost grapplers' incomes toward the levels of baseball and football stars.
It is difficult to pinpoint industry figures.
Wrestling's established base of live, mostly regional events, has been widened by television and its audience of sports fans broadened to include children and yuppies who see it as a campy 'in' thing. A whole new and profitable business has sprung up in promotional items from tee-shirts to toys. Some say the novelty will wear off. Others believe the merchandising opportunites spawned by wrestling have barely been touched.
'Wrestling in the U.S. is certainly in the millions ... what million I don't know, but it is not an inexpensive business to operate,' said Jack Mraz, a lawyer for Jim Crockett Promotions, one of the heavyweight wrestling promoters.
'Wrestling is a high-risk business. If you book a big show and it rains or snows you can lose a lot of money, but with the right conditions you can earn a good return.
'What has changed the business is the cable TV stations,' said Mraz. 'It used to be that promoters stayed within a three- to four-state area, but now they can use television to generate fan interest nationwide. It used to take up to six months to promote a wrestler into a new market, but now it doesn't take any time at all.'
Live events are scheduled throughout the country and overseas by the three major wrestling organizations: the National Wrestling Alliance, the American Wrestling Association, and the World Wrestling Federation. Part of wrestling's shtick is the way each of the three groups refuses to acknowledge publicly the others' existence.
The American Wrestling Association recently won a contract from ESPN, the cable sports channel, to produce two hours of wrestling each week.
The sport has taken advantage of its recent prominence to move into video cassette tapes, with its Wrestlemania and Wrestlemania II extravaganzas, each selling more than a million copies. Neither of these was televised, although Wrestlemania II was carried live in closed circuit arenas throughout the country.
Wrestlemania, an annual smorgasbord of top-name grapplers with a sprinkling of celebrities to attract audiences, was voted Best Sports Video of 1985 by Video Software Dealers of America; its sequel is one of this year's nominees.
The National Wrestling Alliance also has a yearly extravganza, the Great American Bash, a series of wrestling events scheduled throughout the country during the month of July. About 150,000 people attended 14 of the events held during the past summer.
Wrestling has a toehold in broadcast television as well. Four times a year, NBC airs Saturday Night's Main Event in place of its Saturday Night Live program. The wrestling show has had the highest rating ever for a network show in its time slot, a 10.8 percent share of the viewing audience, said Mike Weber, media coordinator for the WWF.
NBC also shows a weekly wrestling cartoon series, Hulk Hogan's Rock 'N' Wrestling.
Hogan, probably the most visible of the current grapplers, is a case of life imitating art. After a cameo roll in Sylvester Stallone's Rocky III movie in which the balding blond giant played the world heavyweight wrestling champion, Hogan became one of wrestling's four world heavyweight champions.
Promoters pay fees to belong to the wrestling organizations, which sanction certain title matches and act as rule-making bodies. Yes, there are rules. The groups insist their wrestlers are discouraged from attacking each other with metal chairs, kendo sticks and worse.
The wrestlers, except those in the WWF, are free agents and can sign with any promoter, splitting receipts, with the more prominent grapplers able to pocket larger chunks.
How much a wrestler can make 'depends on how much the house gross is and where you are on the card, except for title matches, where all that matters is whether you win or lose. You get more money for a three-count, as opposed to a count-out or disqualification,' said Randy 'Macho Man' Savage, currently the WWF Inter-Continental Heavyweight Champion.
'People like to see a championship match,' said Tony Schiavoni, a commentator for World Championship Wrestling, which is produced by Crockett Promotions. 'It's just like boxing. A champion draws people, and the promoter can make a bigger sum of money.'
Title holders can demand a higher percentage of profits from promoters, Schiavoni said. He said wrestlers are shy about discussing their finances in public because 'it can damage their ability to negotiate with promoters.'
'About two-thirds of my income comes from wrestling matches, one-third from the marketing; but that will flip soon from what I understand,' said Savage. 'The spread between a champion and other wrestlers is unbelievable. A champion can make five times as much.'
The WWF's Weber said popular wrestlers like Savage and Ricky 'The Dragon' Steamboat can earn well over $100,000 a year, including endorsement and royalty income.
The WWF presents more than 1,000 wrestling events each year, an average of three every night. Of eight events held at Madison Square Garden in New York so far this year, seven were considered sellouts, said Weber.
The WWF is the largest and most sophisticated of the wrestling organizations when it comes to visibilty in marketing and on television. The NBC broadcasts are produced by the WWF and exclusively feature its grapplers. It holds the Wrestlemania events, a third of which are planned for March.
On broadcast television, the WWF has three syndicated shows, which appear more than two hundred times a week on television stations across the country. Each commands an average 5.8 percent share of the viewing audience, according to Nielsen ratings.
The WWF also produces three syndicated shows for the USA Network: TNT, Prime-Time Wrestling and All-American Wrestling.
Licensing is the latest of the sport's ventures. The volume and variety of promotional material licensed by the WWF is staggering. It includes dolls, posters, glassware, lunch boxes, tee-shirts, books, socks, shoes, umbrellas, clothes, video tapes, and sleeping bags.
'They (the wrestlers) represent a new line of superheroes. They are larger than life to the kids, and the kids look up to them,' said Karyn Weiss of LJN Toys, a subsidary of MCA Inc. LJN currently markets 25 wrestling figures for WWF, including Hogan, Rowdy Roddy Piper, and the Junkyard Dog, plus a host of other articles like wrestling rings and steel cages.
The wrestling figures, indroduced almost two years ago, are 'the top seller for LJN,' said Weber, although recent new products, like the Thundercats action figure line, appear to be popular.
Weiss refused to say how much of LJN's sales were attributable to the WWF toy line, but the company's revenue increased almost 600 percent, from $8.3 million in the second quarter of 1985 to $55.7 million in the 2nd quarter of 1986. LJN's second-quarter operating income increased to $7.8 million in 1986 from just $101,000 in 1985.
The WWF action figures recently were rated No. 4 on Toy & Hobby World magazine's Toy Hit Parade, following Pound Puppies, G.I.Joe, and Barbie Dolls.
Weber said the mechandising has been hugely succesful. 'We turn down products all the time.'
'I don't think advertisers realize the appeal these people (the wrestlers) have,' said Crockett Promotions' Mraz. 'It is in its infancy now.'
Promoters like Jim Crockett retain a number of wrestlers on contract to appear in weekly syndicated shows. Crockett Promotions currently has 42 grapplers under contract, including Ric Flair, heavyweight champion of the National Wrestling Alliance.
Asked if he had any problems getting the wrestlers to participate in the licensing deals, Jim Crockett, president of the company bearing his name, said, 'Not if the money's right. The licensing deals that are signed are in the five- to six-figure range, but I won't give you exact figures because I don't want to cause problems between my wrestlers.
'Rick Flair and Rock 'N' Roll Express (NWA Heavyweight Tag Team Champions Ricky Morton and Robert Gibson) dolls will be out by Christmas,' he added.
Savage said he does not believe that children have a problem differentiating between wrestlers and the action figures. 'It's part of the fanfare that goes with it. It enhances it,' he said. 'My fans are tickled to death when I come out with something new.'
Bob Roop, a wrestler and co-ordinator for Championship Wrestling from Florida,said that while the current novelty blitz has brought in many new fans, primarily yuppies and children, he is not optimistic that its success will continue. 'It's not going to last ... It has crested,' he said.
'Wrestling has changed for the better,' said Roop, 'because the philosophy of violence turned off audiences.' But, he said, ultimately it is exciting matches and wrestlers, not toys and other products, that make wrestling appealing to fans.
Schiavoni and Roop stressed that their organizations promote wrestling as sport and not as entertainment. 'We take (wrestling) seriously,' Schiavoni said.
