by Chris Marshall:
I planned to write this article about a month ago; the Royal Rumble1 was just about to take place, so it actually made sense to do it back then. Of course, if you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans. I kept pushing it off because it seemed like a lot of work for such little reward. After doing the data analysis, however, I think I might have found something interesting.
The original idea was to treat the Rumble as if it were an actual athletic competition and perform a statistical analysis2 in much the same way as I would for a legitimate sport. For example, how much does starting position affect a wrestler's finishing position? Does the number of opponents eliminated by a wrestler have any bearing on how far they make it?
The first draft of this article addresses these issues, and it will eventually become another part of my Royal Rumble Sabermetrics series, but I decided that they could wait. At first I had no demographic variables, so I added two: race and age3. In order to make it possible to run a t-test, I dichotomized the racial variable into white and non-white. I ended up creating a second racial variable, black and non-black, for reasons I will explain later. Anyway, the results were a little troubling.
First, a quick caveat. My data set only consists of the 11 Royal Rumbles that were held between the years 2000 and 2010. 2011 was excluded because there were 40 participants instead of the normal 30, and this would have thrown off some of my variables. The data were compiled before the 2012 Rumble took place, so they are also not included.
But 11 years give quite a large sample. During that time, 137 different wrestlers participated, 43 of whom were minorities4. Of those, 18 were black. They competed in 101 and 51 Rumbles, respectively. In other words, 30.6% of Royal Rumble entrants were minorities, and 15.5% were black. Compared to the general population, this is a pretty satisfactory level of representation5.
The problematic aspect of this is how well they do once they are in the ring. Professional wrestling is not, of course, a legitimate athletic competition, so a wrestler's performance is scripted at least in part. Therefore it is impossible to explain away the results in terms of athletic skill or competitive drive or any other reason why people win things. The admittedly hyperbolic conclusion is simple: the WWE does not care about black people.
When I first ran the numbers6 for my original race variable (white vs. non-white), I found that there was basically no difference between the finishing position of minorities and non-minorities, at which point I assumed I'd wasted my time by creating the variable in the first place. My next test, though, showed something peculiar.
Success in the Royal Rumble is less about where you finish and more about how you perform. A participant who enters the ring first, lasts 30 minutes, and eliminates three or four guys might only finish in 15th place, but he will still be viewed as having a “successful” outing. It is in these measures that the troubling racial disparities appear.
White wrestlers each eliminate an average of 1.2 other wrestlers, while non-whites eliminate a mere 0.7 each. More striking is the average time spent in the ring. The time comparison (here measured in seconds) reveals that white wrestlers spend an average of 212 more seconds in the ring than non-whites: three and a half minutes, in other words. For those who aren't statistically inclined, the numbers under the “Sig. (2-tailed)” column indicate that there is less than a 2% probability that these results are the product of chance. Since 2000, the participant with the shortest ring time has been a minority eight times. The position of longest ring time has only gone to a minority twice in that time.7
But then I remembered something else from my earlier data mining: Rey Mysterio, a minority wrestler, had the second highest mean time spent in the Rumble8, averaging 39 minutes per outing in each of his four appearances. This seemed like a clear indication that without Mysterio driving the numbers higher, the disparity would be even greater.
At this point I chose to fine-tune my analysis and focus exclusively on black wrestlers. I recoded the racial variable into black and non-black and ran the same tests. As I expected, the differences became even larger. In the picture below, you can see that non-black wrestlers spend over twice the amount of time in the ring: non-blacks last an average of 11.3 minutes, while blacks are eliminated after around 5.3 minutes. The significance column indicates a (virtually) 0% chance of this being a statistical accident. Additionally, non-black participants eliminate three times as many opponents as their black counterparts.9
These are relatively indisputable statistics, and I have a strong suspicion that they would only become worse if I included data from pre-2000 Royal Rumbles. As I mentioned, the lack of a statistically significant difference between races in finishing position is meaningless; a black wrestler who enters 27th and immediately gets thrown out will still finish higher than a white wrestler who enters third and is thrown out 15th. Still, the very fact that the white wrestler stays in the ring that long makes his participation more meaningful. For every stat that matters, there is a significant racial divide. Perhaps most importantly, a black wrestler has never won the Rumble.
Obviously these numbers are only representative of the Royal Rumble itself and cannot safely be generalized to other aspects of the WWE Universe. I don't actually think that Vince McMahon or the WWE as an organization are racists, but professional wrestling as a whole has never been the most racially progressive sector of society. While there have been several individual black superstars, most have been relegated to the purgatory of the undercard and midcard. Foreign (or barring that, foreign-looking) wrestlers are often forced to portray the most blatant of their homeland's stereotypes.10 There is clearly a lot of work left to be done.
The solution to the problem is not as simple as it seems, of course. Wrestling is scripted entertainment, but it would be counterproductive to push a black wrestler to victory just for the sake of fulfilling a quota. The Royal Rumble is just a symptom, and all the black champions in the world would do little to cure the underlying disease. The WWE would be very well served to do a better job of pushing minority characters in general. R-Truth, Kofi Kingston and Mark Henry are the only high profile black wrestlers in the company right now. David Otunga, Teddy Long and Booker T are prominent (usually) outside-the-ring personalities. Surely there is room for more.
1 An annual event in which 30 wrestlers compete for a title shot at Wrestlemania. Two fighters start in the ring, and every two minutes a new wrestler enters. The only way to eliminate someone is to throw him over the top rope.
2 Special thanks to Monday Night Warriors, from whom I got most of my statistics.
3 I acknowledge that I've conflated race and ethnicity here. These are two completely distinct concepts, and I understand the difference. I've simply done it because it makes analyzing the data and explaining the results easier.
4 There were some difficult decisions here. I universally coded mixed-race wrestlers as non-white just to be consistent.
5 In the general population, minorities make up around 34% of society. About 13% of Americans are black.
6 An independent-sample t-test. Basically, a way to compare the means of two variables to determine if there is a statistically significant difference between them.
7 Shortest: Epico, Santino Marella, MVP, Shelton Benjamin, Booker T (twice), Tazz, and Faarooq. Longest: Batista and Rey Mysterio
8 Or the highest, if you, like the WWE, pretend that Chris Benoit never existed.
9 An average of .39 eliminations for black wrestlers and an average of 1.18 for non-black wrestlers.
10 A very short list of examples: Yokozuna, Mr. Fuji, Iron Sheik, Tatanka, Abdullah the Butcher, etc.
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