This weekend, some of the world's most visible professional wrestlers will take the ring in State College, but don't expect to catch the action from your couch. This one isn't for the cameras.

World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) will be pulling into town again when the grappling gladiators from both The CW and the Sci-Fi channel merge together for Smackdown/ECW Live! The tour will be hitting the Bryce Jordan Center at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, featuring matches like the World Heavyweight Championship Match, the Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW) Match and the WWE Tag Team Championship Match.

Having been to State College more than a dozen times, WWE is not a stranger to Happy Valley, said Bernie Punt, director of sales and marketing for the BJC. This time around, however, the entertainment company will be bringing about a new dual-divisional billing.

ECW, once a competing pro wrestling league with WWE, has since been absorbed into the latter as a division of WWE. Saturday, the wrestlers from ECW and another WWE division, Smackdown, will square off for ticket-payers' eyes only.

Unlike other WWE events that have come to State College in the past, this particular performance will be a house show, which means it will not be televised.

Punt said the show will offer a new perspective for WWE fans simply because it will not be on TV. While televised events break away for commercials or have other moments of downtime, a house show features more intense, non-stop action.

"This is more hardcore for the hardcore fans; the real fans come out to this," Punt said. "A lot of people said they prefer the house show over the live event because it's pretty unpredictable. With the house show, you get a lot more crowd interaction since nobody has to cater to the TV audience."

Although Punt estimates that around 50 percent of the audience will come from outside Centre County, the WWE likes coming to Penn State because of the student population.

"They're invigorated by the 40,000 students that live here, and the energy that surrounds the place," Punt said.

Matt Whittle (junior-secondary education), one of the many Penn State students who follow professional wrestling, developed his interest as a young boy watching afternoon wrestling programs once the Saturday morning cartoons had finished. Nostalgic moments like that seem to form a common vein among wrestling fans. Phil Levitsky (junior-business) said he first watched wrestling as a boy and reminisced about what drew him to become a fan.

"All boys sort of watch wrestling when they're little," Levitsky said. "When you're younger, you like it because you're impressed by [wrestlers'] strength. When you're older, you sort of know what they're doing, and you're impressed with the finesse of it all."

Both Levitsky and Whittle admitted that once they were a little older, they came to acknowledge the behind-the-scenes staging of pro-wrestling, but they still watch shows like ECW and Smackdown because of the story lines and characters.

"It's almost all worked out in advance, and I understand that, but it's still interesting. It's like choreography, almost," Levitsky said. "I mean, if I were to tell someone that with every football game the outcome was ... decided, it wouldn't make a difference. Regardless if it's decided or not, you don't know what's going to happen, so it doesn't matter."

In addition to watching RAW on Monday nights, Whittle is also a fan of the independent wrestling circuits like the Ring of Honor, based in Bristol, Pa. One particular character that Whittle followed on the Ring of Honor circuit, CM Punk, eventually moved up to ECW and is now a top wrestler.

"It's really cool because it's like seeing the band that you're a fan of getting signed to a major label," Whittle said.

It's the theatrics of the wrestling that appeal to Whittle, and he said with more popular shows like ECW, the characters and the matches just make sense.

"If your match isn't telling a story, then it's not engaging the crowd. There has to be a good guy and a bad guy, so the crowd can get behind the good guy," Whittle said. "I think I prefer the simplicity of ECW, compared to the other shows and circuits who over-complicate things."

David Parry, an assistant professor of philosophy at Penn State Altoona, said fans should appreciate pro-wrestling as a performance art rather than a sport. Parry teaches a pro wrestling seminar at the Altoona campus and regards himself as an expert on professional wresting.

"Everyone over the age of 10 knows that it's a performance art." Parry said. "WWE isn't lying to anyone about what it is, so I don't see the problem. They know what it is; they advertise it as what it is."

Parry said that although pro-wrestling could be seen as a "fake" sport, he is pleased that it differs from other sports in that it doesn't have anything to do with illegal gambling.

He went on to explain that almost any company in the entertainment business, such as the NFL, is subject to gambling. Because of the amount of people who bet on games, these sports entertainment corporations then have to be worried about competition and their players' shaving points.

"Take Major League Baseball for example," Parry said. "At one point, [a team] fixed the World Series ... At least with wrestling, no one in their right mind bets on it. WWE doesn't portray it as competition anymore, and there never was a sports book or a bidding industry that grew up with it."

Although illegal gambling has never been known to be coupled with pro wrestling, the WWE and other independent circuits have been receiving a lot of negative attention recently concerning steroid use within the industry. When there are wrestlers like ECW's Chris Benoit, who last summer committed a double murder-suicide linked by police to "roid-rage", people turn and blame the industry. Parry, however, said it's not necessarily the industry's fault.

"For the wrestlers who are contracted with the WWE, it's possible for them to undergo a serious drug-testing program," Parry said. "But for other wrestlers who are individual contractors with individual promoters, they can't really be monitored. It's hard to catch people that don't want to be caught. People can figure out ways to beat almost any test."

Because the competition in pro wrestling is extremely intense, Parry said many wrestlers feel pressured to use stimulants in order to gain that extra edge on the others.

"There's a lot of competition for very few slots at the top. There are a lot of people who want to be those top people and who are willing to do just about anything to get there. They just have the wrong idea of what you have to do to get there," Parry said.

Levitsky said that despite all of this, he thinks WWE has begun to take steps in the right direction by adding more thorough monitoring.

"Especially with mainstream wrestling, they walk a very tight rope," Levitsky said. "You look at pictures of these guys five years ago, and then look at them now: everyone's lost weight along with their cut. So yeah, I'd say the industry is taking steps in the right direction, but whenever there's competition, there's going to be someone out there who is willing to take that risk."