In a recent column Pulse Glazer responded to Disco Inferno’s criticisms of Bryan Danielson. Since then we’ve had a little debate on this site, and HHH and Mark Madden have weighed in across the net. Rather than join the debate over who is the best, I’d like to reply to the general notion of a best in this business. Specifically, that there is no such thing.
Japan, Mexico and the United States have drastically different cultural views of professional wrestling and very different seminal styles. Even within the U.S. a company like Ring of Honor runs considerably fewer shows and a drastically different approach to matches than WWE. There is little foundation for an objective comparison of professional wrestlers nationally, let alone internationally. Austin Aries does not wrestle in a similar environment or with a similar schedule to Hiroshi Tanahashi. You can say whose performances you like to watch more or argue the merits of matches, but a qualitative comparison of actual ability is not possible based simply on watching shows from each promotion.
Such ignorant criticisms led people to slam James Gibson before his debut in ROH, which proved totally unwarranted as he made audiences across their circuit fall in love with him wrestling an almost entirely different style and character than he had done in the WWF and WWE. Similarly ignorant comparisons led people to say CM Punk would never “get over†in WWE. The truth is that we don’t know how Shingo Takagi would fare in TNA or how HHH would fare in CMLL. Speculation is fun but wildly unreliable.
Even if all companies and countries had similar environments, what would the best professional wrestler in the world be the best at? It’s not a real sport, so it isn’t like being the best 210-pound MMA fighter or featherweight boxer, to be judged by points or wins. This is a performance art and there are different strengths, and the opinion of who is best at the entire art is so arbitrary and hinges on so many complex judgments that the statement itself borders on meaninglessness. You can make statements like:
“Jack Evans is a better high-flyer than Jimmy Rave.â€
“Claudio Castagnoli works better with flyers than Chris Hero.â€
Those are viable comparisons.
“Claudio Castagnoli is better than Chris Hero†is a lazy and incomplete comparison. Better at what? Professional wrestling? What in professional wrestling is he better at? Everything? That’s patently untrue. Hero has more dynamic crowd interaction and is a much better talker for English-speaking crowds. There is no one grid of characteristics and strengths that makes one a better wrestler. You can compare wrestlers’ aesthetic ability at areas of professional wrestling, you can say who you’d rather watch, and you can posit what you consider to be the most important abilities, but an actual “best†is preposterous, and when written is generally is a synonym for “my favorite.â€
Professional wrestling isn’t alone in this bad comedy. Literature, my first love, is overrun with debates on the greatest writer or writers, or American novel or play. Even more often even the top literary critics will blatant compare American novelists to old playwrights and pretend they know the superior writer. Trust me when I say you will live a happier and healthier life when you realize you’ve got enough time to read and love the works of both John Steinbeck and William Shakespeare (or to watch the matches of El Generico and Ultimo Guerrero). Chances are you will not die tomorrow or next year. You don’t have to commit and clutch to one super-special guy. The truth is that there are a lot of phenomenal high-flyers in the world, and no amount of high-flying makes them a better professional wrestler than the almost perpetually grounded Yuji Nagata. You can enjoy all manner of quality performances and facets in wrestling, as Vinny Truncellito discussed in his column, “To each his own.â€
This debate seems to have flared up when Bryan Danielson proclaimed himself the best wrestler in the world and his fans began to agree. The title followed him for years. Critics alerted to it seem to forget or willfully ignore that Bryan Danielson the character is not Bryan Danielson the person. In interviews Danielson has laughed at the question of whether he thinks he’s the best. His character says he’s the best because his character thinks this is real and thinks he is the best at a competition. Do you think Mark Callaway really thinks he’ll live forever just because the Undertaker says he’s immortal? Beyond that, many of those who we often consider the best wrestlers don’t think they’re that good. Chris Jericho is enormously humble out of character, and every time Chris Benoit and Eddie Guerrero were called one of the best during their lifetimes they would name others they thought were better (including each other). Those wrestlers who get into petty arguments over their legacy, like Bret Hart, risk seriously hurting how they are viewed.
Though two men are in a match, the matches are often constructed by more than just the two performers. Especially in WWE there are agents who put together stories for matches. Supposedly Pat Patterson has scripted the grand story of every Royal Rumble for years now. Since most guys have very small roles in those matches and he thought up most of the hour-long thing, maybe he had the most to do with it. Since it’s almost always my favorite match WWE puts on in a year, maybe I should call him the best wrestler in the world. Heck of a job for a retired IC champ.
But beyond the surface is the problem that you have no idea how much input and pressure goes on backstage at No Mercy or Glory By Honor to put on a certain kind of match. You don’t know if Kofi Kingston has been instructed to do certain things, but all impressions of backstage environments suggests they vary wildly from company to company. Not only do companies have different general styles, expectations and limits on performances that we’re not privy to, but the producers and agents are often reining wrestlers in different directions. They want you to sell for a certain period of time, express pain in a certain way, limit you to specific offense and/or push you to do other things, do this at a certain time and next week just tell you to call it in the ring – and we, the audience or critics, aren’t informed as to what was ordered in advance. We have precious little information on how much autonomy the wrestlers are exercising, especially in companies like WWE where there is known to be a lot of mentoring. This leaves it much easier to judge a match for what it is than the wrestlers themselves.
Comparing matches is saner. It’s perfectly fair to say that you found Nigel McGuinness Vs. Bryan Danielson from Driven to be a better match than Shawn Michaels Vs. John Cena from last year’s Wrestlemania because of the complexity of moves, more believable animosity expressed through the appearance of physicality, and a general level of energy around the match. But it is very unfair to forget that guys in WWE can wrestle between 200 and 300 days in a year, whereas Ring of Honor has yet to hold that many shows this decade. This causes two great rifts. First, WWE’s wrestlers get much more experience at certain kinds of matches than ROH’s guys do. Second, WWE’s wrestlers are getting banged up on far more nights a year. CM Punk and Samoa Joe mentioned this in their joint shoot, that the road schedule for other guys and in other time periods was so different as to make that work incomparable to their own. Shawn Michaels Vs. Jeff Hardy from Raw this year was great, but you can’t expect what some extremely talented guys risk in ROH every few weekends to be risked by guys who wrestle four or more nights a week. The WWE roster has more debilitating injuries than ROH on average as it is. Risk assessment and how rested the guys are differs wildly between the companies, making it even harder to objectively compare what guys are better at what when they go all out.
WWE pushes guys to hundreds of shows because they’re in business. WWE, TNA, ROH, CMLL, NOAH, Dragon Gate and DDT are all run for profit. Professional wrestling is an art form that is run as a business, like all art forms. There’s often a moronic idea that the best wrestler is he who “draws†the most money. Nevermind that one guy never constitutes a show. For all we like to joke about Flair wrestling a broom, he wrestled Vader, Terry Funk, Nick Bockwinkel, Hawk, Lex Luger, Ricky Steamboat, Sting, Randy Savage and Hulk Hogan, and did so on shows with a heck of a lot of other wrestlers. Is one match a main draw for some shows? Yeah, but even that has at least two competitors. Maybe that makes Rock and Austin the best wrestler in the world.
And looking at recent top pay per views like Summerslam having two main events, and some Wrestlemanias boasting as many as three with the final match actually being a surprise, praising one guy as the top draw gets more dubious all the time.
I often chuckle reading fans reminding their peers that this is a business and it’s about money. When a guy writes this he is essentially saying that it doesn’t matter if he enjoys it or prefers it to something else, it just matters that some promoters get his money. It’s more understandable that money would be a motivator for people working in the business, but people paying for the entertainment sticking to the same lines are depressing to see.
Economic pseudo-philosophy has poisoned a lot of thought in the last few hundred years. It’s a topic reaching far outside and above professional wrestling. But compare this absurd notion of making the most money making you better to other forms of art and entertainment. Just the first book of Harry Potter more than eclipses the total sales of everything Haruki Murakami has written to date, but does this make J.K. Rowling the superior technical or literary writer? Do they automatically give Oscars to whichever films make the most money? As I’m typing this Rihanna’s Disturbia is #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, but is it really the most moving music you’ve heard all year? Is the best-selling videogame of the year the most entertaining one you played? Let’s not even get into all the harmful chemicals that go into fast-food at McDonald’s or the kids in all the sweatshops that make what goes onto Wal Mart’s shelves. This whole notion of bottom lines serving as scores for how well you’ve done morally or aesthetically is ridiculous, and this is coming from someone who actually read six of those Potter books. It may make you the richest man or the most bankable professional wrestling commodity, but it does not make you better at anything in the ring. It means the most people have paid to see something you’ve done, which is its own achievement.
HHH told SLAM! Sports, “Vince doesn’t make anybody. Wrestlers make themselves. Stone Cold was brought in to be an extra, but he created a character that people went nuts for. So he became a star because of the fans.â€
It’s an extension of the attempt to justify a wrestler by his supposed drawing power. Of all the extensions it’s the kindest, but if Austin didn’t win the King of the Ring and his character was dropped into three-minute matches on undercards, losing more often than he won, he wouldn’t be a legend. How far would the Rock go if he was one of five green-clad male cheerleaders getting their asses handed to them by HHH and Shawn Michaels? Companies have to give wrestlers opportunities, and more often do a lot more than just let them talk or have long matches. All the television time, marketing investment, commercials, cross-promotion, music, video packages, lighting, championships, pushes and framing a wrestler as important damn sure help. We’ve had investigative journalists and social psychologists experiment in this. We’ve put world-class musicians on street corners, and you know what happens? Pedestrians walk by them and try to keep from making eye contact. Presentation is enormous. Wrestling fans need look no further than to how the highly publicized, promoted and staged Wrestlemania performs compared to Backlash.
Quality product and presentation can only be made effective by distribution and market penetration. A bigger company like WWE is vastly more capable of introducing its product to consumers, reminding them it is available, getting them to fall into routines of viewing and convincing them that their stories, wrestlers and/or titles are important. More people will see Raw just flipping through the channels this year than will even hear the name ROH. To compare one wrestler’s ability to another using supposed drawing power, especially if the two wrestlers are in different companies or countries, is preposterous.
We all have our preferences and intuitive feelings on who is better at what. I much prefer to watch Bryan Danielson in ROH than HHH in WWE, and Danielson has many more matches on my Top 100 list for the year so far. But HHH has at least two matches on that list, and even though I’m incredibly tired of him, to say the man is talentless is demonstrably untrue. More important is to recognize that while I love my ROH, I also love Edge, John Cena, MVP, William Regal, Shelton Benjamin, the Hardy brothers, the Undertaker, Chris Jericho, Shawn Michaels, John Morrison, Umaga and Santino Marella. It’s a much more rewarding hobby for having many favorites at various things in various promotions than narrow-mindedly following one best in the world.
Also this week:
-My sister, Deirdre, was diagnosed with Bell’s palsy last week, which scared the Hell out of us because any kind of paralysis is confusing and it can be linked to even more dangerous conditions. The hospital told us that Bell’s palsy is inexplicably on the rise in the northeast, so take care of yourselves. I want to wish Deirdre a full recovery. I love you and even with only half a face you’re a hundred times prettier than me.
-David Ditch gives an overview of the G-1 Climax tournament and a fair and balanced assessment of what might give Takeshi Morishima a chance or hold him back if he ever heads to WWE
–Mark Buckeldee also hits up Japan
-Pulse Glazer looks at the performances of guys who passed from ROH to WWE and TNA, as well as some visitors from Pro Wrestling NOAH
-We’ve got a podcast with Larry Sweeney!
-And for something entirely different, check the Bathroom Monologues at www.johnwiswell.blogspot.com
