I used to blog quite a bit about the pro-wrestling scene. For over a year now, I’ve pretty much stopped watching all current pro-wrestling. The problem is that I simply dislike the products heavily and find nothing compelling anymore. I do have a few people that I like, but I simply do not want to spend more time watching a product that I’ve lost a great deal of passion for.
I still like pro-wrestling but I’ve pretty much limited myself to older shows from the 80’s, 70’s and some early 90’s. Although I can appreciate the athleticism of the current generation of pro-wrestlers, I feel that the art of pro-wrestling really has been lost. Instead, most people are pretty bland with generic interviews, generic moves and generic grievances. The emotional part of pro-wrestling is pretty much lost on me and I feel as though I no longer am watching a competition nor something where unique characters really have a chance to define themselves.
I think the worst part about the current climate of pro-wrestling is the booking. There’s very few people you can latch onto because the development times are too short and you don’t see the gradual growth of anyone. Probably the only last person that seemed mildly interesting was CM Punk, but the matches are not what I would have liked to have seen in his feuds.
In watching the evolution of pro-wrestling, I think back to some great insight Bobby Heenan had described in a few interviews about the major issues with the industry. The most salient point he made was saying how the people on the inside had screwed up in allowing the general public to know how their tricks had been done. Although various TV shows had exposed pro-wrestling as being scripted and that the general public pretty much knew this as fact, the big thing was that the people on the inside for the most part continued to guard the tricks in pro-wrestling. With movies like The Wrestler, the Montreal Screw Job and even the little DVD interviews with wrestlers, you pretty much have little left to protect.
At this point, the industry pretty much is nothing more than a live stage show with (disposable) stuntmen. The wrestling itself, while more acrobatic, really isn’t “wrestling” any longer. You don’t see how someone locks on a hold and their opponent figures out how to reverse it. If the reversal does occur, it’s more like a cliche because there’s little thought really put into how these reversals are done, except on the fanciness of a flip. But none of it looks “realistic” and most matches end up boiling down to a series of trading moves. In fact, if anything pro-wrestling looks more like an arcade game than anything “real.”
I remember watching a youtube video with Al Snow and how he partly blamed Randy Savage vs Ricky Steamboat at Wrestlemania 3 as being part of the slow decline in pro-wrestling in terms of moving from just selling tickets to showmanship. I can partly see where he’s coming from but I don’t really consider that the true precedent. For me it’s just not being able to believe in anything anymore. Even knowing that the pro-wrestling wasn’t real, the draw to me is always the characters, the growth of people and the storylines that make me engage in the wrestlers. The stuff that exist today lack these elements. You don’t have the Roddy Pipers, the Jesse Venturas, Bobby Heenans, Jim Cornettes, Arn Andersons, Tully Blanchards, Ernie Ladds, etc. anymore.
Part of the problem seems to be that the wrestlers aren’t allowed to control the image they want to present for themselves. I think that element has hurt the industry more than anything and you can definitely blame the WWE on that aspect. When there were more than a single dominant company, one of the fun things to see was when a wrestler jumped ship and seeing how they could survive in the other federation. Like when Ric Flair came to WWE for the first time or Kerry Von Erich challenging Ric Flair for the NWA title or when the Road Warriors entered the NWA.
I write this after reading the recent TNA TV taping results and seeing the most recent PPV. Although by comparison the PPV was one of their better ones, the elements I described above made me glad that I stopped watching. For instance, Hulk Hogan buried Robert Roode and praised James Storm. Next thing you know Robert Roode lost and Storm won the title. I don’t get why Hogan would publicly state these things. It simply makes TNA look terrible and pretty much spoils the product as well as revealing the obvious bias in booking. But again it goes back to how Heenan mentioned that the people inside the business are the ones destroying it simply because they’re revealing their own tricks. Well, it’s a real shame because this just demonstrates that the posting of results are more important than watching them. So I guess until these elements are fixed, I’ll simply stick to my older pro-wrestling videos.