The Oldest Booking Sheet

On May 17, 1993, a skinny kid nobody had heard of pinned Razor Ramon on Monday Night Raw. WWF had already put him on television twice, as the Kamikaze Kid and the Cannonball Kid, and he lost both times. After the upset he got a name that stuck: the 1-2-3 Kid, after the count.

The crowd knew what it was watching. So would anybody who sat through Sunday school. A boy too small for the armor beats the champion everyone else was afraid of. That story was old long before television.

Here is the claim. Whatever the Bible means to you, whether scripture, literature, or a book your grandmother kept on the nightstand, it is a well-told story. Pro wrestling tells its stories with the same tools. Booking, the work of deciding who wins and why, is mostly the craft of using them in the right order.

Am I a Dog?

Goliath comes out of the Philistine camp and does what every heel champion does. He cuts a promo. “Today I defy the ranks of Israel! Give me a man, that we may fight together” (1 Samuel 17:10). He sets the stakes himself: if Israel’s man wins, the Philistines will serve Israel, and if he wins, Israel serves them (17:9). Saul and all Israel “were dismayed and greatly afraid” (17:11).

The manuscripts do not agree on how big he was. The NRSVue follows the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Greek: four cubits and a span, around six foot nine. The traditional Hebrew text says six cubits and a span, over nine feet. Either way he is the biggest man on the card, in bronze, carrying a spear with a shaft “like a weaver’s beam” (17:7).

Then a shepherd volunteers. Saul tells him, “You are not able to go against this Philistine to fight with him, for you are just a boy” (17:33). Saul puts his own armor on David, and David cannot walk in it, so he takes it off (17:38–39). Goliath looks at him and “disdained him.” “Am I a dog, that you come to me with sticks?” (17:42–43). David answers:

You come to me with sword and spear and javelin, but I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. (17:45)

One stone. “There was no sword in David’s hand” (17:50).

Wrestling has been running that match for as long as there has been wrestling. The Kid is one version. Rey Mysterio is the biggest one. He won the 2006 Royal Rumble to earn a world title match at WrestleMania, and then Randy Orton cheated to beat him at No Way Out and take the shot away. The general manager made the match a three-way instead. At WrestleMania 22, Mysterio pinned Orton and left with the World Heavyweight Championship. For as long as Rey held it, WWE called it the World Championship, because he was not a heavyweight.

The Code

Every wrestling show runs on a code nobody prints. Wait for the tag. Stay in your corner. Do not use the chair. Do not hit a man while the referee is down. The face, the good guy, keeps it. The heel, the bad guy, breaks it.

Breaking it is not the whole job, though. The heel breaks it and brags. He tells you he is the real victim, the only honest man in the building, and that the rules are for suckers. Being a heel is doing something you know is against the rules and boasting about it. That irritates the part of us that wants to do right and not steal from our neighbor. The heel does not care. He does it anyway. That irritation is the heat, and I wrote about what heat is for in Let the Heels Be Heels.

Jesus spent a lot of breath on exactly that man. Luke says he told one parable “to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt” (Luke 18:9). Two men go up to the Temple to pray. One is a Pharisee, part of a movement devoted to strict keeping of the law. The other is a tax collector. The Pharisee prays:

God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income. (18:11–12)

That is a heel promo. He thanks God for himself and points at the guy in the back. The tax collector will not even lift his eyes: “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” Jesus says the second man went home justified, “for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted” (18:13–14).

Matthew keeps going. Do not sound a trumpet when you give, “as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others” (Matthew 6:2). And later: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful but inside are full of the bones of the dead” (23:27). These are particular religious leaders arguing with a fellow Jew, not a people.

Hypocrite

The Greek word in those verses is hypokritēs. Before it meant a fake, it meant a stage actor, someone playing a part. Jesus’s sharpest word for the self-righteous was, in effect, performer.

That puts wrestling in an odd spot. Every heel is an actor, and everyone in the building knows it. The man swinging the chair goes home and is, often enough, a decent guy. The performance is out in the open, and that is the deal. The hypocrite Jesus is talking about plays the part and swears it is real. Wrestling is honest about the act. The whitewashed tomb is not.

All These I Will Give You

The heel’s favorite pitch to the face is the shortcut. Join us. Grab the chair. Look the other way while the referee is down, and the title is yours.

Matthew has the biggest version of that pitch anyone has ever made:

Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory, and he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” (Matthew 4:8–9)

“Away with you, Satan!” (4:10).

Every kingdom in the world for one bow. No heel has ever offered a better deal, and it was turned down. That is the face’s whole problem. The shortcut never leaves the table.

Turns

A turn is when a wrestler switches sides, face to heel or heel to face. The Bible has both.

Judas is one of the twelve. He goes to the chief priests and asks, “What will you give me if I betray him to you?” They pay him thirty pieces of silver (Matthew 26:15). Wrestling learned the same lesson: the betrayal that draws the most heat comes from a partner, not a stranger.

Saul runs the other direction. Acts finds him “still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord,” on the road to Damascus with letters authorizing arrests (Acts 9:1–2). A light, a voice, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” (9:4), three days blind. Then he is preaching in the synagogues, and the crowd does not buy it: “Is not this the man who made havoc in Jerusalem among those who invoked this name?” (9:21). Every wrestling fan knows that reaction. A heel who turns face usually does not get cheered on night one. He has to earn it.

Shawn Michaels did both. One was a storyline, and one was his life.

The storyline came first. In a segment that aired in January 1992, on the set of Brutus Beefcake’s talk show, the Barber Shop, Michaels superkicked his tag partner Marty Jannetty and threw him through the glass window. The Rockers were finished, and Michaels became one of the great villains of the decade.

The real one came ten years later. A back injury had ended his full-time career in 1998, and he spent years after that fighting a painkiller problem. He became a born-again Christian on April 24, 2002. That August, at SummerSlam, in his first WWE match since 1998, he beat Triple H. In the years after, he knelt to pray during his entrances.

I am not going to treat Shawn’s faith as an angle. It was not one. But it is hard to look at the man who put his friend through a window, and then at the man on his knees in the aisle, and not see the shape of Acts 9.

Hard but Blessed

Life as a face is hard. He is outnumbered. The referee is always distracted at the wrong moment. He loses matches he should win. He could cut the same corners the heel does, any night he wants. He does not, because he knows that is what a fool does.

Jesus never told his followers it would be easy. “In the world you face persecution, but take courage: I have conquered the world!” (John 16:33). “Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness” (Matthew 5:10). And he told a story about two men building houses, one on rock and one on sand. The same storm hits both: “The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew” (7:25). The wise man does not get a lighter storm. He gets a house that stands.

I wrote in In Good Company that if you are pushed around for doing right, you are in good company. The Other Cage covers what it costs a face to stay one outside the ring.

The Bible also has a literal wrestling match. Genesis 32 leaves Jacob alone at night at the ford of the Jabbok, a stream east of the Jordan, and “a man wrestled with him until daybreak” (32:24). When the man sees he cannot win, he strikes Jacob on the hip and puts it out of joint. Jacob still will not let go: “I will not let you go, unless you bless me” (32:26). He is renamed Israel, “for you have striven with God and with humans and have prevailed” (32:28). He got the blessing, and he got the hip.

Wait for It

Much of faith is patience. So is much of being a wrestling fan. We sit through the face getting screwed, through the distraction, the low blow, the run-in, and the referee who counts three on the wrong man, because we believe a night is coming when he gets his.

Cody Rhodes came back to WWE at WrestleMania 38 in 2022 and said he would finish the story: win the WWE Championship, the one title his father, Dusty Rhodes, never held. He won the Royal Rumble in 2023 and lost to Roman Reigns at WrestleMania 39. A year later, at WrestleMania XL, the match was booked under Bloodline Rules, which meant Reigns’s family faction was allowed to interfere. Everything was stacked. Cody won anyway, and ended a title reign that had run 1,316 days. Then the other top faces came to the ring to celebrate with him.

Two years. That is what a payoff costs in wrestling, and the people who paid it were the fans who sat through WrestleMania 39.

Christians are waiting for an ending too. Habakkuk put it plainly:

If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come; it will not delay. (Habakkuk 2:3)

Paul wrote that “hope that is seen is not hope,” and “if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (Romans 8:24–25). And Revelation promises the happy ending: “he will wipe every tear from their eyes” (Revelation 21:4).

I do not think the end of the world is a WrestleMania main event. But the posture is the same: you sit through the bad weeks because you trust whoever is writing the story. Jacob held on all night. The blessing came at daybreak.

A Bad Rap

Wrestling fans get a bad rap. So do Christians. In both cases a lot of it comes from a vocal minority.

Wrestling has its own gatekeepers. They decide you are not a real fan because you watch the wrong promotion, started too late, or cheered the wrong guy. They try to make the whole thing toxic. Avoid those people. Notice, too, who they sound like. “I thank you that I am not like other people.” The gatekeeper is the Pharisee in the Temple, praying about the casual fan in the back.

And ignore the ones who make fun of you for watching at all. Nobody tells you a movie is fake. There is nothing wrong with liking pro wrestling. It is one more way of telling stories, and a lot of its stories are borrowed from the Bible.

Jacob did not leave the Jabbok with a belt over his shoulder. Genesis ends the match like this: