Shooter (professional wrestling)
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A shooter is a professional wrestler who has a background in legitimate fighting (such as mixed martial arts), or otherwise has a reputation as a tough guy. This is based on the professional wrestling slang term shoot, meaning "real," as opposed to worked, which means "scripted" or "staged" and refers to the vast majority of events in wrestling. As such, shooters are "real" tough guys; they don't just play them on TV.
These wrestlers often gain their skills from martial arts (Ken Shamrock) or amateur wrestling (Kurt Angle) backgrounds. These kinds of shooters are sometimes referred to as stretchers (from their ability to use legitimate holds on their opponents to stretch them). Others are just generally brawlers (JBL) and some are just naturally big and strong so fighting them is generally impossible (André the Giant). There are also (although rarely) those who are considered all those things and are sometimes referred to as invincible (Brock Lesnar).
Despite the worked nature of the spectacle, shooters have been around since the beginning. Originally, the NWA World Champion was typically a shooter or "hooker" (Lou Thesz is the most famous example), in an effort to keep regional champions and other contenders from attempting to shoot on them and win the title when they were not scheduled to do so.
Wrestling promoters have also used shooters as in-house "enforcers," to put in matches against those wrestlers who have committed some transgression. The WWF has used Bob Holly and the Acolytes Protection Agency (Ron Simmons and John Layfield) in recent years in this role.
The average wrestler, while not regarded "legit" by athletic standards, is tougher than the average person. In past times, most promoters required all of their wrestlers to possess some toughness, so that if they were involved in a brawl they would not make "the business" look bad by losing to a common bar patron.
Other wrestlers often attempt to challenge well-known shooters backstage to gauge their own toughness in impromptu grapples. For example, Kurt Angle was generally considered the toughest shooter in WWE (understandably so, given his Olympic gold medal in amateur wrestling), and stated in his autobiography that nearly everyone backstage that has tried to take him on has failed (the only men he said ever gave him trouble was The Big Show, owing to his sheer size and strength), aswell as Brock Lesnar who also has great amateur credentials with size, and possible speed, advantage on Angle.
