Raw sucks.
Smackdown sucks.
Triple H holds everybody down.
Undertaker won’t sell to anybody.
TNA’s just a bunch of acrobats and brawlers.
Jarrett won’t step out of the NWA Title picture like he should.
The WWE doesn’t have a strong tag division/women’s division/midcard/cruiserweight division anymore; all they care about are muscleheads.
The industry is in a slump and it’s getting worse.
Hey, wait a minute, you’re thinking, I’ve read this before! Last week, as a matter of fact! Yeah, last week, this schmuck used the same damn intro for his column! The nerve of him, the lazy prick!
Hey, you pegged me; I am reusing the intro (but I did NOT sleep with that young intern … as a matter of fact, I was up all night!). Last week, it served a purpose: to showcase the typical negativity one can find in the Internet Wrestling Community, and to serve as a segue to my counter-punch of positivity. I think it came off quite nicely. And this week is no different; it serves a purpose, being to showcase the typical negativity one can find in the Internet Wrestling Community. But this time, I’m not gonna counter with some light, fluffy list of good matches, or my favorite WrestleMania moments or whatever.
No, I’m going to, quite simply, give you a humungous piece of advice, one that you, as a fan, should carry out immediately and in perpetuity, until the day you die. It is (and it really does deserve the bolding and italics I’m gonna apply):
Think for yourself. Stop listening to what the IWC says.
Stop it. Just stop. From here on out. Almost every one of us is the same damn wolf hiding in the same sheep’s clothing. 1Wrestling, The Torch, 411, Rajah’s, even Inside Pulse … from Meltzer to Keller to Hyatte to Eric S. to myself … please, for the love of God, stop listening to us. You can read us, but for the love of God, stop listening to us. Our opinions are just that: opinions. Personal beliefs, held (quite frequently) in spite of contrary evidence. Not a single one of us. no matter how big the ego, ever speaks the gospel truth. You know how many of us IWC writers have worked in the wrestling industry, actually behind the curtain or in the ring? You can count them on your hands, probably on one. None of us are true insiders … none of know the pressures of staying in 200 different Motel 6’s over the course of a year … or of wrestling in some dank junior high gym with a busted air conditioner on the hottest day of the year for less money then it cost you in gas to get to the event … we don’t know that life. All we know is what we overanalyze on TV, and the drops and drips that get leaked to big names like Meltzer (who [and I bet you never thought of this] might just be spreading disinformation on their behalf … or, quite possibly, being misled himself) and Scherer.
No, sir, every one of us IWC members is nothing more then a talking head, a parrot squawking because it sounds pretty. I’ll own up to it in a heartbeat: check out any of my entries in WWE roundtables over the past year. I am one bitter, hostile, disgruntled fan. I don’t think I’ve had a positive thing to say about WWE product since I came to IP, so I’m one to talk. By now, I’m doing it for entertainment value; I like to think there’s someone out there who enjoys my witty bon mots I use in place of names for WWE talent (Batista=Metrosexual Man!, Shawn Michaels=HBMiddle-Aged Man, Cena=Tapioca Ice). And on those rare occasions where I do write something that isn’t fiction or a review of some kind (which almost never happens), my opinions are quite slanted and in no way representative of the crowd. You’ll scarcely see any of the other guys own up to that; not me. I know who I am and what I am. I’m a disenfranchised wrestling fan who misses
wrestling and loathes the Sportz Entertainment beast that has supplanted it. By no means am I a rarity in these parts, as both I’ve stated and you’ve noticed.
So what is the point of all this? Why am I risking life, limb and the respect of my peers with this column? Because, as much as I loathe what has become of the WWE, and mourn the loss of ECW and WCW even now, five years removed, I recognize one thing: you, the great, unwashed masses … you, the people who read us and don’t have columns … the people who buy house show tickets and WWE theme music CD’s and watch the PPV’s … you are the fuel for the engine. As much as some of us IWC’ers like to believe we have the power to rock the wrestling boat, we amount to almost nothing; the fraction of people on line in this country is small … and the fraction of that fraction who are online and wrestling fans is smaller still, much smaller then wrestling’s audience in total. The numbers don’t lie on that, no matter what the heavyweights in the IWC would like you to believe; we, the writers, the noisemakers, are the extreme minority. The majority of fans treat this as what it should be: a fun show to watch on Monday/Friday/Saturday night, not a subject for Face The Nation levels of debate and dissection. It was the average fans who forced the WWE to turn Steve Austin babyface in 1997 … who forced The Rock into facehood as well (after they had forced him to be a heel, I might add) … sure, the internet helped get Matt Hardy rehired, but believe me, that’s a sin ain’t a one of us is working off, so you won’t be seeing that trumpeted as some sort of proof of our power. The bottom line is, we’re powerless.
Powerless, that is, except over you.
Maybe you’re a teenager … maybe you’re in your 40’s … black, white, male, female, healthy or handicapped, it don’t matter: we wield a power over you. Hell, look at the Matt Hardy thing … a few columnists pitched a fit, and the very next week, there was 10,000 screaming average joe mark fans, chanting “WE WANT MATT!” and “YOU SCREWED MATT!” like the Pavlovian dogs you are. We say ECW was a great organization with top-notch wrestling and cutting-edge storylines? You go out and make The Rise & Fall Of ECW the best-selling WWE DVD of all time, even if you never saw a split second of it before One Night Stand. The IWC turns on Cena and embraces Batista (a move that makes no sense to me)? The crowd follows suit. Ring goes the bell, and so you salivate. I ain’t trying to make you feel stupid or anything, but the fact is that the IWC is as negative as a case of airborne cancer … and you, my friend, are standing right where the IWC likes to sneeze. And the contagion is spreading, folks … the pervasive, rampant negativity that is the hallmark of IWC smarts is infecting the marks like a plague, and, like Ouroborous, the snake which eats itself, marks becoming negative reinforces the IWC to keep up the negativity, and so on and so forth into infinity. If you want to lay blame at the doorstep of who’s created so much fan-based ennui, look no further then right here, friends: we feed you shit, and you eat it up and demand another pass through the buffet line.
As I said last week, I’m doing my damndest to try and live up to the positivity that Gordi tries to espouse each and every week … and there’s no greater bete noire to positivity in the IWC then itself. So, here and now, I draw the line in the sand. I’m not calling out my colleagues; they enjoy what they do and how they do it, and that’s their business, and believe it or not, there’s a place for that kind of writing. I’m calling out you, the average reader, Mr. No Column, Mr. Message Board Poster. I’m looking at you, I’m pointing at you, and I’m sticking a finger in your chest. It’s time for you to rip the bell out of Pavlov’s hand, shine it up real nice, turn that sumbitch sideways and stick it straight up the IWC’s collective candy-ass. Time to start thinking for yourself, folks; stop following all those tired, crusty party lines the parrots in this cage keep chirping on, over and over again.
Don’t reflexively gag when you hear the name Russo just because a hundred IWC hacks have proclaimed him the Anti-Christ of wrestling. What all those halfwits won’t tell you is that, when Shane McMahon suggested to his father that they go with Vince Russo’s sports entertainment concept in 1997, and the WWE overhauled their product, these armchair bookers were glued to their TV’s for the 2 years Russo reigned supreme at WWE … and, I might add, that it was on the strength of his writing that the WWE’s ratings went from low-3’s to 7’s and 8’s. And if you’re hung up on his WCW stint, try to remember his predecessors: Kevin Nash, who booked the promotion into the ground in 1999, and Eric Bischoff, the man who booked the wonderful Hogan-sees-Warrior-in-the-mirror angle. Russo didn’t kill WCW; he just helped bury it. And, since we’re on the subject of maligned creative leaders, Stephanie? Let’s see, she gave us the phenomenal Angle/H’s/Steph love triangle that kept us enthralled for 9 months (regardless of the ending, the angle rocked) … the H’s/Shawn feud started under her watch, as has the recent (and popular) Flair/H’s feud. And she has, minus a couple recent appearances, she has adhered to the stipulations of her 2003 loss to her father, which is more then her father can say to the 1999 stips from the End Of An Era match (and her recent appearances wasn’t as an authority figure, it was as a daughter). So, as much as she’s laid some Gobbley-Gooker-sized turds, she’s had a few successes too.
And really stop and think about the people the IWC worships as if they can do no wrong. Benoit, for instance; technically sound, no doubt. Also very uneven on the stick. And his matches are, while crisp and entertaining, very rarely different from one another; he rarely breaks out of his comfort zone of “three Germans, diving headbutt, side backbreaker, snap suplex, crossface”; you don’t see tiger suplexes, or shoulder breakers, or gourd busters. And, I’m sorry, but his championship reign sucked hard; fought Triple H three times on PPV (four, counting a Raw Iron Man match), Shawn Michaels twice, faced Kane in a semi-main, and lost to Randy Orton. Not exactly a world-beater there. And Angle has his flaws too: namely, he sucks as a face. Absolutely, positively sucks as a face. There’s a reason his only face run lasted 6 months: it just wasn’t good. And don’t even get me started on Batista, the newest IWC golden boy; we could be here all day. Just ask yourself: strip away the one-liners he has written for him in backstage sketches, and put him next to Snitsky and tell me the difference. Now, compare him to Abyss, and tell me who the better big man is.
And don’t take to whipping the recent whipping boys just because popular opinion has turned on them. I’ve seen Cena matches and guess what? He sells, and sells well; Jericho’s last match saw him selling the back consistently, to the point of being unable to hit the F-U twice. Yeah, he doesn’t have a big range of moves … neither does The Rock, and yet you don’t see people (aside from Eric) taking him to the woodshed, do ya? Same with Orton; he had the IWC eating out of his hand, until WWE Creative botched his face turn. Orton didn’t do it; he worked with the material he was given. Creative torched his character. Nobody wants to admit that, which is both hilarious and hypocritical of the 95% of the IWC who hails him to the cross for it, since they all ran to Mark Copani’s defense when the failure of the Muhammad Hassan character was blamed on the actor and not Creative by no less then Vince McMahon himself. And this was for a character, I might add, whom weeks prior, the IWC hated as stereotypical and a thinly veiled attempt at cheap heat, not to mention a mediocre wrestler.
And, really, think for yourself on Triple H. Is he nailing the boss’ daughter? Sure. If you were in the position, wouldn’t you? I’m not saying that excuses it, but you have the boss’ daughter (who, and you all might hate to admit it, but it’s true, is rather attractive, minus the voice) all but throwing herself at you … hard to turn her down. And, frankly, if he has an in-road to the front office someday, how is this a bad thing? Once he is removed from TV and active competition, with how much he loves the business and how deeply is really is a student of the game, he’d be a great candidate to lead the company. I’d rather have him than Shane; remember, Shane is the guy who tried to push Test and Steve Blackman over and over again.
And spare a few brain cells to think about whether the industry is really in a slump whenever one of these talking heads proclaims it so. Yes, the WWE’s viewership/buyrates/attendance is down from the Attitude era …but it’s been fairly stable for some time. It’s not forever spiraling downward. And even if the WWE is choking on their own hubris, let me proffer a shocking revelation: they are not the entire industry! There’s literally HUNDREDS of indy feds out there in the States, and plenty more overseas. When last I checked, Japan has FOUR major feds running right now (New Japan, All Japan, Zero-One and and NOAH), and not so long ago, FMW made it five. Back here in the states, you got TNA talking about house tours next year, going all the way up to Buffalo, NY for some shows … which is in Vince’s backyard! Ring Of Honor continues to expand their fanbase; they just debuted here in Detriot in November, and if there’s an industry slump, you’d find no evidence of it in the sold-out crowd I was a part of. The only “slump” to speak of is the cyclical pattern of the WWE’s fortunes: they enjoy a hot period, then a cool period. We are currently iding the bottom of the bell curve; someday, it’ll curve up again. But sustained performance, no matter how low it might be compared to yesteryear, does not constitute a “slump”.
The point I’m trying to make here (and there is one, believe it or not) is that the rampant negativity that is helping kill this business as it stands right now can be stopped by you, the reader, Mr. Average Fan, by simply turning off your computer and watching what you want, cheering for who you want and booing who you want. We are not the be all, end all in wrestling, you are. Most of us have forgotten how to be just fans; you have that luxury. You can choose to not listen to our garbage and make up your own minds … have your own thoughts … be a fan as opposed to a smark. Stop feeding these bell-ringers by feeding their negative hunger with message board postings of CHRIS MASTURZ SUX!!!1!1! and STEFANIE IZ A HORR!!!1!1!! and me-too emails that they go and print as if it proves the masses are behind them. Be an individual, and first and foremost, be a wrestling fan.
I said last week, and many many paragraphs ago, that my intent here was to present something positive, as Gordi does each and every week. Perhaps the most positive thing I can present to you is to encourage you all to be positive, to not let some columnist’s or some recapper’s biased, slanted, chip-on-his-shoulder viewpoint tarnish your feelings. Cheer for Chris Masters if you want; enjoy CZW, if that’s what moves you; yell out “W-O-R-M!” when Scotty 2 Hotty does The Worm; admit you liked the so-called
Summer Of Suck. I don’t care. Celebrate your wrestling fandom, every facet of it, be it a popular idea or not. Only by celebrating and embracing wrestling on our own individual terms, instead of this Borg-like uni-mind the IWC is currently, can wrestling be made good again. Only through looking for, and celebrating, the positive instead of pointing out and harping on the negative can wrestling grow. Positive fans equal ticket sales, and PPV buys, and bigger arenas, and better rosters, and all sorts of positive rewards.
Rampant negativity? That don’t get you much. Last time the IWC rang the negative Pavlovian bell for this long, our reward was putting WCW six feet under. Ask yourself if being negative is worth that.
