Dolph Ziggler Talks "Nerve-Wracking" Blind Date, NY Times On Pro Wrestling Gaining Acceptance, More
- As noted, the second season of Swerved, which debuts on-demand tonight on the WWE Network, features a segment where Paige and Dolph Ziggler go on blind dates, as seen in the video above. During their separate dates, Paige and Ziggler wore shock collars and were instructed what to say by the other.
"Not just a shock collar like they have for training dogs," Ziggler told Zap2It. "This is on the upper part of my groin, on high, and I'm sure somehow screwed with to be higher than high.
"I cannot explain to you how nerve-wracking and sweaty and scared and on the edge of my seat I was that day," he continued. "Even if the episode comes down to make it look like I was on this blind date for five minutes, it was 45 minutes to an hour of my looking out of the corner of my eye, afraid to sit down at any moment, trying to have a realistic blind date with someone."
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- The New York Times Magazine recently posted an article looking at pro wrestling gaining acceptance with mainstream media. They noted that people don't criticize wrestling for being "fake" as much today because "the rest of the world has caught up to wrestling's ethos." They also wrote:
With each passing year, more and more facets of popular culture become something like wrestling: a stage-managed "reality" in which scripted stories bleed freely into real events, with the blurry line between truth and untruth seeming to heighten, not lessen, the audience's addiction to the melodrama. The modern media landscape is littered with "reality" shows that audiences happily accept aren't actually real; that, in essence, is wrestling. ("WWE Raw" leads to "The Real World," which leads to "Keeping Up With the Kardashians," and so forth.) The way Beyoncé teased at marital problems in "Lemonade" ? writing lyrics people were happy to interpret as literal accusations of her famous husband's unfaithfulness ? is wrestling. The question of whether Steve Harvey meant to announce the wrong Miss Universe winner is wrestling. Did Miley Cyrus and Nicki Minaj authentically snap at each other at last year's MTV Video Music Awards? The surrounding confusion was straight out of a wrestling playbook.