Newer Than They Think / Professional Wrestling

• While people had been accusing pro wrestling of being a work since at least 1930 (there being evidence of worked matches as far back as the 1880s and the sport being almost entirely worked by 1920) the accusation that the pro wrestlers were actually all friends who hung out when not in matches wasn't even remotely true until the late 1990s and was still the exception rather than the rule until the collapse of WCW. (As late as 1970, some feds such as All Japan Pro Wrestling had a truce in which wrestlers would agree to take photos together but it was a truce.) Pro wrestlers not only were often hostile about "having to lose to inferior athletes" but even when they were amicable would still work as hard as they could not to be seen together in public if the were differently aligned, let alone feuding^note Some wrestlers took this so seriously that they would make sure they lived in a different school district than anyone they were feuding with, so their children wouldn't have to hold up Kayfabe in class. Sometimes even babyfaces would avoid one another in public, given the degree thereof. Wrestlers became more friendly as the business shrank, and thus more could afford to be and conversely, many literally couldn't afford not to be seen together, needing all the help on road trips they could get.
• In the post-territory era, most people seeking to enter the business are recommended to a "wrestling school", a fairly new concept that had its roots in the 1950s with areas such as the "Hart Dungeon", which weren't schools so much as the basement/attic/barn of some wrestler with a ring in it (if you were lucky). Before that and sometimes after, the standard practice was to simply beat on a promising athlete while no one was around the ring and if they kept coming back, actually start training them. By the 2000s, entire facilities dedicated solely to training pro wrestlers had became somewhat common, though even then, quite a few were still basically barns.
• Prior to the mid 1980s or so, one fall was not the standard pro wrestling match, as it would become in the majority of regions. In Mexico, two out of three falls is till the standard singles match and isn't even uncommon in tag team, tercia or even the wildest of Gimmick Matches.
• The concept of a "choreographing matches" is largely the product of the 1990s, namely a specific match between Hulk Hogan and Ultimate Warrior, which was considered to be an instant classic^note Though Hogan and Warrior got the idea from the match between Randy Savage and Ricky Steamboat at WrestleMania III. Traditionally, the idea was simply to decide who would win and who would lose, maybe a couple other spots and a time limit, with the majority of the wrestling being improvised based on how crowds reacted. Attempts to repeat the success of Hogan and Warrior through choreographing persisted well into the 2000s but remained mostly frowned upon by the wider wrestling community (in part because most of these efforts failed to live up to it, including Hogan and Warrior's attempts to duplicate their own success.)
• While the concept of a "tap out" had been around since at least the 1970s, these did not become common in pro wrestling until Tazz in ECW, especially as far as USA pro wrestling goes, where verbal submission was most common.
• The image of The Undertaker with which so many people are familiar today (black tank top, trench coat, grinning cattle skulls on the tights, and a wide-brimmed homburg hat) was not how the he originally dressed: in earlier eras he was costumed more as a medieval executioner or a "Ming the Merciless" type, or as a literal undertaker in a suit and necktie! He didn't adopt the "classic" look until 2004, after having spent four years as a basically non-supernatural biker. Furthermore, he hasn't worn the homburg or the trench coat or worn his hair long since 2012, but fans still picture him that way.
• WWE didn't acknowledge Vince McMahon on-camera as the company's owner and boss until the emergence of the "Mr. McMahon" heel character in 1997. Until then, Vince was merely the announcer, with Jack Tunney playing the role of "WWF President" when needed.
• The Big Show's "Goliath" beard was not sported by him regularly until 2008, when he returned to WWE after many had assumed he had given up on the business to become a boxer; prior to that, he usually had only a thick mustache. Similarly, he was not bald until 2004.
• Monthly pay-per-views didn't become standard until the mid-1990s (and WCW did them first).
  • Similarly, weekly live wrestling television only dates back to WCW Monday Nitro. Monday Night RAW was often taped in its early years.
• The use of music to introduce wrestlers is both this and Older Than They Think. It was happening as early as the 1940s (when classical music was the arena standard)... but the use of Hard Rock or Heavy Metal dates only to about 1980 at the earliest ^note  the Trope Codifier is generally thought to be the Legion of Doom using Black Sabbath's "Iron Man" — and even then, it was more the custom to (with permission, of course) use existing rock songs rather than commission Jim Johnston and others to write or co-write new ones.
• There was virtually no coverage of pro wrestling written outside kayfabe until the 1980s. The first "dirt sheet" was The Wrestling Observer Newsletter, published in 1982, before which all wrestling journalism (such as it existed) treated the storylines as real and the matches as legitimate competitions.
  • The term "kayfabe" itself applies here. Although often assumed to be a very old term, the earliest record of its existence dates to the 1988 The Wrestling Observer Newsletter Yearbook.

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