Zachary Haines may be the ideal fan to sustain the World Wrestling empire after a bruising year on Wall Street.

The 28-year-old owner of an Ohio wholesale business has been hooked on professional wrestling since he was 14. Each year, he spends thousands of dollars on VIP travel packages for Wrestlemania, the championship extravaganza making its South Florida debut this weekend in a headliner match featuring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

When he comes home, Haines usually puts two new souvenir Wrestlemania chairs in his finished basement, where framed works of art by professional wrestlers hang from the walls. And as he and his wife jump up from their front-row seats to holler at Triple H, the Undertaker and their other favorite wrestlers, Haines says it doesn’t bother him that the victories get scripted by a team of writers working out World Wrestling Entertainment’s Connecticut headquarters.

“It would if I knew what the outcomes are going to be,’’ said Haines, who will be attending his 14th Wrestlemania at Sun Life Stadium in Miami Gardens on Sunday. “But I have no idea. I have seen the craziest stuff happen.”

That kind of devotion fuels the nearly $500 million WWE generated last year through ticket sales, video game licensing deals, pay-per-view revenue and merchandise sold around the world.

It is a corporate empire that traces its success back to the days of Mr. T and Hulk Hogan during the Reagan years. Yet it still produces top-rated cable shows, accounts for almost a half-a-billion dollars a year in revenue, and generates enough profit to pay its famous CEO and ringside provocateur, Vince McMahon, more than $100 million in dividends and salary in just the last three years.

But faced with waning profits, drooping attendance, and an ill-fated venture into the movie business, WWE approaches its biggest weekend of the year facing doubts about just how far fan loyalty can carry the company.

“They’ve got their fingers in so many pies now,’’ said Michael Kupinski, an analyst with Noble Financial Capital who follows WWE stock. “They have to, in my view, start concentrating on what the WWE is good at, and what makes them great.”

WWE saw its share price drop 28 percent in the last 12 months, from $12.05 a share to just under $8.80 while most of Wall Street was on a bull run. Last week, CNBC’s Jim Cramer declared WWE stock a “sell.” A disastrous experiment in the movie business played a large role in the slide. Attendance at WWE bouts is down 8 percent for the year, television audiences for WWE’s hit Raw cable show have shrunk in recent years, and WWE’s talent scouts and writers haven’t yet landed a red-hot young wrestler ready to hook a new generation of fans.

As a result, the real-life financial stakes for Wrestlemania 28 may be even higher than the fictional ones inside the ring.

“It’s going to be interesting to see how it plays out in Miami,’’ Kupinksi said. “They’re certainly trying to draw against their original fan base. And getting back to their core by bringing back The Rock.”

If Wrestlemania is the most celebrated day on the WWE calendar for fans, it’s also the most profitable for the company.

Last year’s Wrestlemania XXVII in Atlanta generated $36 million in revenue for WWE, including $24 million in pay-per-view dollars. The price isn’t cheap — WWE said the average Wrestlemania fan paid $55 to watch last year — but Wrestlemania generated 1.1 million buys around the world in 2011, according to WWE regulatory filings.

The annual smackdown rotates around the country and is considered such a draw that WWE recently began inviting cities to bid on the event with a package of tax-funded subsidies.

To win Wrestlemania this year, Miami-Dade sent a box of stone-crab claws from Joe’s to WWE’s Stamford headquarters and pledged up to $2 million in cash, free venue space throughout the county and other donated services.

“It’s the first event in Miami’s history to use SunLife Stadium, the AmericanAirlines Arena and the Miami Beach Convention Center,’’ said William Talbert, president of the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau. “This is not just the stadium being full. This is a major event.”

Fans can pay $40 to visit a four-day WWE expo at the Miami Beach Convention Center that opens Thursday night. For $80, they can watch WWE’s Hall of Fame induction ceremony at the AmericanAirlines Arena Saturday night. Holders of VIP tickets have the chance to spend $300 for a WWE charity party in a Star Island home, with proceeds to benefit a local hospital. The most deep-pocketed of fans can pay $2,500 to join three friends for a foursome with a WWE star in a pro-am golf tourney at Doral’s Blue Monster course.

It all leads up to the main event, Sunday night’s Wrestlemania. Out of about 70,000 available seats, roughly 1,700 were still for sale on Ticketmaster Friday. There were another 6,000 available on Stubhub, a resale site, with seats going for as low as $17. While almost one out of every two tickets on Stubhub were going to Florida buyers, site spokeswoman Joellen Ferrer said purchases were coming from as far away as Dubai and Finland.

All of the $1,500 ringside seats were gone from Ticketmaster, but were selling for $2,500 and up on Stubhub. Ferrer said one fan paid $7,400 for a seat in the third row.

Fans with those tickets actually sit in souvenir Wrestlemania folding chairs featuring silk-screen images of the night’s headliners. Haines obtained his chair collection for his Cincinnati basement through the VIP tickets, with fans encouraged to walk out of Wrestlemania with chairs in hand.

“If you go through the airport after Wrestlemania, you will see people carrying their chairs,’’ said Andrew Stein, interim chief marketing officer for Kmart, where fans can buy the Wrestlemania chair for $75 after spending $30 on WWE action figures, sheets, t-shirts, video games or other merchandise sold at the department store. “It’s part of the phenomenon of Wrestlemania.”

WWE reported an overall profit of $25 million last year, and Wrestlemania contributed about $11 million to the bottom line. Television sales, pay-per-view buys and tickets from WWE’s scripted live events, including Wrestlemania, account for about 70 cents of every dollar the company brings in. Last year, the company’s revenue hit $484 million, up 1 percent from 2010 and down 8 percent from an all-time high of $527 million in 2008.

WWE is best known for its weekly cable shows Smackdown and Raw, which will air live from the AmericanAirlines Arena on Monday April 2. That will be one of WWE’s roughly 320 live events throughout the year, 80 out of them outside of the United States. The tally doesn’t count bouts by WWE training outfits performing at small venues, including a recent appearance by the Florida Championship Wrestling squad at Miami-Dade’s County fair.

Each year, WWE characters land on the Top Five list in the action-figure category, behind whatever movie is hot at the moment. (Last year, WWE finished second to Transformer action figures, WWE CFO George Barrios said.) And with WWE’s weekly Raw and Smackdown cable shows now broadcast in 60 countries — more households in China receive WWE programming than do homes in the United States — the company sees its brand poised to hook growing middle classes in Latin America, Asia and India. On March 1, WWE announced the opening of a Miami office to run its Latin American operations, including the key markets of Mexico and Brazil.

“We’re like an action telenovela,’’ Ed Wells, WWE’s senior vice president for international operations, said in a telephone interview from Buenos Aires. “Our storyline continues week to week, 52 weeks a year.”

In May, WWE will bring its stars to Rio and Sao Paolo for the first time. As usual, the wrestlers will berate each other in English; WWE executives say their characters are so well-known, no translation is needed for the 80 bouts it holds worldwide. That included a stop last year in Abu Dhabi, where Wells said the audience had no problem following the action.

“They knew every catch phrase, every gesture, every gimmick from every super star,’’ Wells said. “Our international crowds can chant along as well as anyone.”

As Wrestlemania readies for its 30th anniversary in 2014, the company sees opportunity in a new media environment, with plans for a stand-alone WWE channel and a partnership with Google for fresh digital content. Executives cite statistics they say prove WWE’s advantages in a digital age: 8.5 million “likes’’ on Facebook (compared to 5 million for the NFL), WWE superstar John Cena’s 1.7 million Twitter followers (Tim Tebow has 1.4 million), 270 million views on WWE’s official YouTube channel (still far behind the NBA’s 766 million views).

But WWE also faces competition from the upstart popularity of “ultimate” fighting bouts and mixed-martial arts. And then there is the perennial challenge for McMahon and his creative team: keeping fresh what a WWE employment ad for its writing staff described as “the last of the great variety shows on television.”

On Sunday, Cena, 34, will take on The Rock, a one-time University of Miami tackle who gained fame in the WWE in the late 1990s. He left wrestling in 2004 to pursue a successful movie career, but now he’s back in the ring at age 39. It’s a casting move that some fans see as a lack of confidence in WWE’s current roster.

“Bringing Dwayne Johnson to Wrestlemania is indicative of how their current stars are viewed,’’ said Sergio Hernandez, who writes about the WWE for Cageside Seats, an independent blog. “They don’t think they can get to the level they want with their current stars.”

Wrestlemania producers often reach beyond the WWE roster for novelty bouts — Jersey Shore’s Snooki joined in a tag-team match last year, and Mickey Rourke took on WWE regular Chris Jericho when Wrestlemania went to Houston in 2009. Still, talent is enough of an issue that Barrios had to address it this month at the annual Roth investors conference in Laguna, Calif.

“One of the things we are going through is a fairly significant shift in the roster. Some people wanted to retire. Some of the people, we wanted to retire,’’ Barrios told analysts. “It has forced us to energize the next wave of stars... We have them in the fold today. We just don’t know who they are.”

Whatever talent gap WWE may face as Cena and its other stars age, it will mean the latest challenge for McMahon, who has managed to become the last man standing in what was once a competitive wrestling industry.

McMahon started his own promoting career in 1971 shortly after graduating from East Carolina University and joining the family business. His father enjoyed success as a small-time promoter, and gave his son the uphill task of filling seats for matches in Bangor, Maine.By the early 1980s, the younger McMahon had bought his father’s company, and was expanding telecasts limited to the Northeast into national syndication. In 1985, he orchestrated the biggest show yet: Wrestlemania. Held in Madison Square Garden, it featured Hogan versus Mr. T and mixed pop culture with the spectacle of wrestling, with MTV favorite Cyndi Lauper in one corner and the Iron Sheik in another.

At the time, other wrestling outfits vied for television audience and ticket sales. But by the start of the 2000s, McMahon’s WWF had knocked the competition out of business.

“I am not necessarily a Vince McMahon fan,’’ said Joseph Hamilton, 73, who wrestled as the Assassin and then ran a WWE training camp in Georgia before McMahon deployed a moving crew to shut it down overnight in favor of a new one in Tampa. “But the fact still remains the guy has been a brilliant business man.”

With lucrative cable deals and a cadre of stars who had mostly signed away their likenesses to the company (not to mention their gestures, voices and gimmicks, according to contracts made public in stock filings and court papers), McMahon and his family were on their way to reaping millions — if not billions — from their wrestling empire.

McMahon ran the company from the early days with his wife, Linda, who went on to serve as CEO. Their personal fortune helped make Linda a player in Connecticut politics, and she left the company in 2009 for a failed Senate bid. She is running again for the GOP nomination for the seat currently held by Joe Lieberman.

Their son, Shane, was a WWE wrestler until he left in 2010 to launch a Chinese cable venture. Daughter Stephanie serves as a top WWE executive. Her husband, Paul Levesque, is a popular WWE wrestler known as “Triple H” and also serves as executive vice president for talent of the company.

With some 40 million shares of special voting stock, Vince McMahon has full say over the company. And while he’s best known to the public for his menacing appearances on WWE programs as a stern ringmaster, off camera he is described as an exacting CEO. He has had one famous flop: the XFL. Unveiled to much fanfare in 2001, the outlaw version of football — looser tackling rules, teams named Hitmen and Maniax — folded after one season with horrible ratings.

And while McMahon’s bid to take on the NFL got far more attention, he is now in the midst of another plot to take WWE beyond its popular cable shows and live events to become more of a stand-alone entertainment company. WWE reported spending $34 million on six films starring its wrestlers in the last two years, an effort designed to broaden WWE’s reach from die-hard fans to young moviegoers. But the movies only brought in $20 million in revenue, adding to a nearly $30 million loss for the studio arm that helped send companywide profits down 52 percent last year to $25 million.

Despite the beating suffered in movies, WWE plans to double-down on that venture that Barrios admits was initially a “disaster.” Still, WWE will spend as much as $20 million more on the studio, this time with Fox and other Hollywood partners. One project in the works: reviving the 1993 campy Leprechaun horror flick. Along with a new digital channel being developed as part of Google’s takeover of YouTube, WWE plans an even bigger play for viewership. Sometime this year it plans to launch its own cable channel, one that could rival USA (host of Raw) and SyFy (host of Smackdown).

Attendance dropped 8 percent at WWE events in 2011, a slide company executives blame partly on a still-shaky economy. They note that a smaller roster of events in 2011 skewed the number, with average attendance down just 4 percent. Toy revenue dropped 15 percent in the fourth-quarter, and overall licensing revenue was off by 23 percent.

The two-hour Raw program that airs live Monday nights on the USA Network remains a top 10 cable show, but viewership has been dropping for the last two years, and the average of 5 million viewers is off about 11 percent compared to 2010.

Last year’s retirement of Edge, a WWE stand-out, along with injuries of some leading wrestlers, including Latin favorites Rey Mysterio and Sin Cara, didn’t help. WWE executives also point to competition for wrestling’s young-male demographic as they turn to streaming video, not to mention video games.

Indeed, a look at WWE’s bottom line over the years hints at how much harder it has gotten in the wrestling business.

In 1999, the company made $56 million profit on $251 million revenue. In 2010, before its movie studio took a dive, revenue hit $471 million and profit ended the year at $54 million.

Barrios, the CFO, sees the missteps in the movie studio and lingering economic woes as contributing to a bad year and obscuring the otherwise successful run of WWE in the digital age. Attendance at live events in the U.S. and television ratings rebounded in the fourth quarter. Operating profits — before taxes, depreciation and other items — hit an all-time high in 2010.

“2011 was a tough year for us,’’ Barrios said. “But how do I feel about the future? Just about every brand metric we look at feels good to us.”

The company officially dropped the word “wrestling” from its title last year in an effort to reposition “WWE” as more of a generic entertainment brand. With an exploding amount of outlets for digital content, WWE see its deep fan base as even more valuable.

“We’re going to do really well if we can monetize an increasing amount of original content,” he continued. “We have this massive brand with a huge audience that’s passionate about what we do.”

Not to spoil the fun, but Wrestlemania isn’t really a wresting match. It is more like wrestling theater.

This is hardly a secret among fans, with top WWE executives behind professional wrestling’s biggest night readily describing the show as scripted entertainment and not a real sport. They point out that only athletes can accomplish the kind of flips, pile-drivers and grappling that will dominate the action Sunday at Sun Life Stadium. But a look at documents made public over the years by World Wrestling Entertainment leaves little doubt that the ring is a stage where scripts determine the winners and losers.

“WWE develops and produces the last of the great variety shows on television, combining all the elements of entertainment: sitcom, talk show, soap opera, action-adventure, and drama. With 52 weeks of original programming, without an off-season or re-runs, it is quite a creative challenge to keep characters and story lines interesting and compelling. That’s where you come in! ”

— Current WWE employment listing for “Creative Writer”

“We create compelling and complex characters and weave them into interactive entertainment that combines social satire, action adventure, drama, mystery, athleticism and humor. The interactions among the characters reflect a wide variety of contemporary topics, often depicting exaggerated versions of real life situations and typically containing "good versus evil" or "settling the score" themes.”

— Description of business from WWE’s 2003 annual report to investors.

“Any [trademarks] including ring name, likeness, personality, character, caricatures, voice, signature, costumes, props, gimmicks, gestures, routines, themes, used by or associated with WRESTLER’S performance in the business of professional wrestling or sports entertainment... are hereby assigned to and shall belong to PROMOTER in perpetuity...”

1996 booking agreement between Owen Hart and Titan Sports, Inc, a precursor to WWE. Hart, 33, died during a 1999 telecast after falling from the rafters in a botched entrance. The WWE’s grim television announcer told the audience: “This is not your typical wrassling storyline. This is real.”

Hart’s widow recently sued WWE for using footage of Hart in various videos; the WWE denied any improper use.

“Wrestlemania...is the exploitation of our most basic need for story, exploiting our human desire to win; for justice to prevail; for us to come back against all odds and achieve the achievable.”

— From the “History” section of WWE’s Wrestlemania Bid Requirements package sent to municipalities interested in hosting the event.

WRESTLER shall take such precautions as are appropriate to avoid any unreasonable risk of injury to himself and to others in any and all Events. These precautions shall include, without limitation, pre-match review of all wrestling moves and maneuvers with wrestling partners and opponents; and pre-match demonstration and/or practice with wrestling partners and opponents to insure familiarity with anticipated wrestling moves and maneuvers during a wrestling match.

--Clause from 2012 contract between WWE and Paul Levesque, who wrestles under the name Triple H.

WRESTLER shall use best efforts in the ring in the performance of wrestling services for a match or other activity, in order to provide an honest exhibition of WRESTLER’s wrestling skills and abilities, consistent with the customs of the professional wrestling industry; and WRESTLER agrees all matches shall be finished in accordance with the PROMOTER’s direction. Breach of this Section 9.6 may cause a forfeiture of any payments due WRESTLER pursuant to Section 7 and may entitle PROMOTER to terminate this Agreement, but such breach shall not terminate PROMOTER’s licenses and other rights under this Agreement.

— Other clause from Levesque contract mandating his matches end the way WWE wants them to end.

When wrestling superstar and best-selling author Mick Foley comes to South Florida later this week to chat with fans, he may get some questions about how his schizophrenia is going or whether he still lives in basements and boiler rooms. Or about his best friends and frequent conversationalists, a rat and a sock puppet. But he doesn’t expect any questions using the F-word. You know, fake. As in, isn’t pro wrestling fake?

“If this was 1985, yeah, I used to get that a lot,” says Foley, whose derangement, unusual confidantes and sketchy living arrangements were all the products of the imaginations of pro wrestling’s burgeoning corps of scriptwriters. “All our fans in this country are way past that. They use the E-word, entertaining.

“Overseas, though, we still hear it some. At that match in Munich” — an infamous 1994 encounter in which Foley’s head got tangled in the ropes of the wrestling ring, and unscriptedly came away without an ear — “even the nurse in the hospital asked me if pro wrestling was all gefälscht, fake. You’d think the one time you should get the benefit of the doubt would be when the nurse is standing there holding your ear.”

Foley’s meet-and-greet with fans is one of dozens of events here next week in connection with Wrestlemania, the sport’s garish, gaudy and gargantuan Super Bowl, which is expected to draw 70,000 fans to Miami Gardens’ Sun Life Stadium next Sunday and another million-plus on pay-per-view television.

Americans have always loved pro wrestling, going back to its origins in Civil War-era saloons, but the love is no longer one that dare not speak its name. Marrying itself to television and gloriously proclaiming its dissimulations as Hollywood entertainment rather than athletic fraud, wrestling has become a big and beloved business.

For WWE, the corporate Leviathan that controls much of the sport, Wrestlemania may be its annual highlight — “the signature event, the capstone event of the company, its most hyped, ballyhooed and elaborately produced event,” as wrestling historian Steven Johnson describes it — but financially, it’s just a drop in a very big bucket.

With half a billion dollars in annual revenue, a pair of hit weekly television shows (one, Monday Night Raw, is closing in on its 1,000th episode, more than Lassie or Gunsmoke) that pull in 12 million viewers a week, three magazines, a movie studio, a music company and a merchandising empire that partners with everybody from Walmart to Target, WWE’s corporate ledgers are even more epic than the operatic story lines it concocts for its wrestlers.

And wrestling has gotten into not just America’s pockets but its head and heart as well. Hyperventilating celebrities from Aretha Franklin to Donald Trump line up to appear at WWE events. Minnesotans chose a former wrestler for their governor and George Clooney has taken one for a girlfriend. Mickey Rourke’s movie The Wrestler was nominated for three dozen film awards, including two Oscars, and impressed Bruce Springsteen enough that he wrote and recorded its theme song.

If you’ve ever used the words smackdown, body slam or tag team you’ve sipped wrestling’s cultural Kool-Aid. But don’t worry, you’re not alone at the party. The French semiotician and literary theorist Roland Barthes once wrote a lengthy essay on the philosophical and artistic merits of pro wrestling and its “spectacle of excess... a grandiloquence which must have been that of ancient theatres.”

THE DARK SIDE

Not to be outdone, Washington Post editor Jeff Leen wrote an entire book. “It’s a cauldron of emotion and symbolism where people vicariously act out their feelings through these contestants in the ring,” says Leen, whose book The Queen of the Ring followed the career of 1940s and ’50s female wrestling champ Millie Burke.

“People do the same thing through soap operas and reality TV shows. You could psychoanalyze until the cows come home. But essentially, for some people it works like a drama. People know Shakespeare is not real, either.”

If you think Leen is speaking figuratively about psychoanalyzing wrestling audiences, just read Passion Work: The Joint Production of Emotional Labor in Professional Wrestling in the Social Psychology Quarterly. Or chat with Dr. David Reiss, a San Diego psychiatrist who has led seminars on the possibility that wrestling fans view the matches as symbolic reenactments of childhood trauma. Though, he quickly adds, a flying forearm smash — even when you’re just watching it — is not widely regarded as an effective treatment among mental health professionals.

“Watching wrestling is not the most healthy way of dealing with childhood trauma,” he says. “Sometimes it’s really pretty dysfunctional....There’s surely a dark side to it, and it ain’t therapy. But in a way, it can be useful.”

Wrestlers (a word that makes WWE publicists, who prefer that they be called “entertainers,” frown in icy displeasure) themselves generally see the appeal of their sport in simpler terms.

“Americans are drawn to struggles between good and evil,” says Adam Pearce, who will be competing here this week in an event sponsored by the National Wrestling Alliance, a much smaller rival of the WWE. “And we love our sports. Pro wrestling has married the two.”

Pearce usually works as a villain, or “heel” in wrestling parlance. (A good guy is a “babyface.”) He doesn’t go for subtle Freudian undertones. “I have the gift of gab, so I can get on the microphone and antagonize people pretty easily,” he says. “All I try to do is get people to hate me to the point where they want the good guy to beat my ass. It’s that simple.”

Pearce has also been a wrestling scriptwriter, penning almost everything that was said or done on cable-TV network HDNET’s Ring of Honor Wrestling between 2009 and 2011. He created characters and their dialogue, crafted story lines and choreographed the matches. “Wrestling is like any other kind of a show, it’s gotta be written,” he says. “But if the wrestler was someone I knew understood the concept of what we were trying to do, I’d give them as much leeway as I could to work their own personality into the character. That comes across as more organic, and wrestling fans respond to that.”

Boy, do they. WWE’s vast collection of characters and story lines — which often purport to take a backstage peek at life within the company — blurs the line between show and reality so frequently and so thoroughly that fans (even though they understand the outcomes of the matches themselves are pre-determined) are often confused about which is which. That can be tricky when you’re dealing with themes like corporate corruption, extortion, violent crime and sexual infidelity.

The latter has not always been with living human beings. A 2007 WWE story line on necrophilia — Google the name “Katie Vick” if you must know the details, but expect a visit from your local vice squad afterward — freaked out not only fans but the wrestlers who had to perform it. As Dr. Reiss notes: “Even wrestlers thought it crossed the line, and when wrestlers think you’ve crossed the line, well....”

“We’re a unique business,” agrees Paul Levesque, who’s WWE’s vice president in charge of talent as well as a popular wrestler performing under the name Triple H. “If I go on the Jay Leno show, I stay in character. He wants to interview Triple H, not Paul Levesque who plays Triple H. There’s a weird line of reality that isn’t crossed.”

INSULTS, SWINDLES

Other times it is, but not from the direction you might expect. In 1999, Levesque’s Triple H character was cast in a fictional on-stage feud with WWE Chairman and CEO Vince McMahon, who often plays himself as a treacherous corporate heel. As part of the supposed feud, Triple H “married” McMahon’s daughter Stephanie. Four years later he did it again, this time with no quotation marks.

“I know it’s confusing to the fans sometimes,” says Levesque. “Guys get fired or quit on-stage, and people aren’t sure whether it’s real or not. The best example of that, I think, was when we had Vince McMahon killed in a car bomb. Donald Trump, who’s a big WWE fan and a friend of Vince, called and said, ‘I know it’s probably just part of the story... but could you just tell me if Vince is OK?’ We’re like the last magicians: Is it real? Or Unreal? Nobody knows.”

The frequent story lines in which McMahon insults, swindles, brutalizes and otherwise tyrannizes company employees (for a while he forced malcontents to come on-camera and press their lips to his derriere, a bit known as the “Vince McMahon Kiss My Ass Club”) are a good example, nearly everybody agrees, of why pro wrestling resonates with its fans.

“When you look at the real world, a lot of people feel that way about their jobs,” says Levesque. “They’re thinking, ‘this is a terrible place to work, my boss is an idiot, I don’t want to work there anymore.’ But they can’t go into the office and hit their boss over the head with a GPS, which is what [WWE wrestler] Stone Cold Steve Austin did to McMahon. For blue-collar people disgruntled with their lives, it’s a great fantasy.”

Yet even if fans are sometimes confused about whether an on-camera feud or firing is real, wrestling historians say it’s nothing like the old days, when the sport insisted everything was genuine and a startling number of spectators accepted that. Johnson, who has written three books on the sport, recalls interviewing a couple of well-known heels of the wrestling world of the 1960s.

“They were a tag team known as the Masked Medics, and they were supposed to be these doctors who had gone horribly, horribly wrong,” he says. “They would drug their opponents or make them pass out with secret holds. And when they wrestled at the old Jackie Gleason Auditorium on Miami Beach, they said, they were so hated that they had to arrive and leave with a police escort. The cops would bring out the dogs to keep the fans from killing or maiming them. Now that’s a heel."