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There are two terms from the world of professional wrestling that I want to introduce you guys to if you’re not familiar with them already: ‘work’ and ‘shoot’. ‘Work’ basically means whatever is apart of the act. The Rock may call Seth Rollins a cringy piece of shit, but when they get backstage after the promo, The Rock may say, “hey, man - I was just workin’ out there” as a way to acknowledge that while he did go unnecessarily hard on Rollins, it was all just apart of the show. A ‘shoot’ is the opposite. I’m not sure where these terms started, but my guess is that it’s part of wrestling’s origin as a carny sideshow. If a wrestler tells another wrestler before their match, “I’m gonna shoot on you,” it means, essentially, “I’m gonna beat your ass for real.”
Now, allow me to land this plane. There’s a phrase among the wrestling community that basically means you’ve gotten so far deep into the act that it’s real to you now…that’s when you “work yourself into a shoot.” You’ve run the bit for so long that now you live the bit yourself. Back in the day, the WWE booked an angle where the Macho Man Randy Savage would increasingly grow paranoid because he thought his friend, Hulk Hogan, had lust in his eyes for Miss Elizabeth. The two met in the main event of WrestleMania. The thing was…Randy Poffo, the man in real life, was incredibly protective of Elizabeth and began to suspect there really was something going on there. He had worked himself into a shoot.
A couple of weeks ago, in tossing out a myriad of different scenarios that could mean utter chaos for the Tennessee Titans, I landed on one where the team drafted Alabama edge rusher Dallas Turner.
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