A public comment period is open related to a review of existing Virginia state regulations regarding licensing for professional boxing and wrestling events.
Which I once had an interest in. Seems like a million years ago now, but for a time, I was a licensed wrestling promoter.
Fun times, they were, aside from not being able to sleep at night for weeks leading up to whatever the next show was, out of fear that we were going to finally lose our house on this one.
There are so many moving parts to putting on a wrestling show. Among the more difficult to navigate was the licensing process.
It always seemed arbitrary, the way it was done.
The office didn’t seem well-staffed, and not in that much of a hurry to process applications for events, and because you’re not permitted to advertise a show until the event has been approved, this was a constant hurdle in terms of marketing.
The fees that you had to pay, themselves, seemed not so much to go toward paying actual people who would be on the actual site of an event to make sure that the promoter and the show was on the up and up, as they were there to pay the small staff in the office.
I say that because there were several shows that we put on where we didn’t physically see anybody from the Department of Professional Occupational Regulation, the dreaded DPOR, on site.
I might be exaggerating in the sense that I’m straining to remember anyone from DPOR being at any of our shows.
The proposed regulation review isn’t what I’d hoped when it first came to my attention. I’ve long been of the mindset that wrestling should not be regulated in any way, shape or form in the same manner as boxing or MMA, because pro wrestling, and, yes, news flash here, it’s not a sport.
Pro wrestling is combat theater. The only difference between a pro wrestling show at your local high school or big-city coliseum and, say, a production of Hamilton, is that Hamilton has more expensive sets, lighting, and slightly more in terms of musical presentation.
To use the word arbitrary again, it’s arbitrary to force a wrestling promoter to go through a red-tape-heavy licensing process conducted by DPOR.
If you want to know why you’re seeing less indy wrestling in Virginia, I can tell you with certainty that the onerous state regs are a big factor, because they were for me.
Toward the tail end of my time in wrestling promotions, we started sliding away from putting on live shows and into the direction of doing fan fests and autograph signings featuring wrestling legends, because we didn’t need to go through the state licensing process to do those events, and they brought in just as much in terms of revenue.
Those types of events are also less costly in the sense of needing things like event insurance, and paying for police and EMS to be on-site in the event that things get out of hand, or a performer gets hurt.
In other words, wrestling is still regulated as an athletic event, which is … just preposterous.
These regulations are why I’m a former wrestling promoter, which, we weren’t WWE, or anywhere close.
Our promotion would run one or two shows a year, with budgets ranging between $10,000 and $20,000.
They were run in part as fundraisers – for a local high school boosters club, for Wounded Warriors, and similar type outfits.
We’d have non-profit groups come in and run concessions for us and write them a check at the end of the night for having done so.
We never did lose our house, which, fortunate for us that we didn’t.
People had a good time, some local charities got a hand up for their good efforts.
I’m not sure why the Commonwealth of Virginia doesn’t want these types of things going on, but that’s the sum effect of the regs in place.
So, congrats, on that.
Column by Chris Graham
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