Dispatches from the Wrestling Underground: The Business Mark

Columns, Features

Recently, a writer for another wrestling website coined the term bark, or business mark, to describe a not so new but as yet unidentified group of fans within the wrestling community. The business marks, he lamented, were fans less interested in the actual wrestling and more in the corporate side of the industry: the ratings, the buy rates, quarterly earnings, and all sorts of other numbers relating to a company’s business. And in a way this writer has a point. Discussion regarding wrestling today has little to do with a promotion’s product and more to do with its business, or, if it does, the quality is inevitably determined by how well its producing for a company financially.

As was alluded to, this is not a new phenomenon; wrestling fans have been concerning themselves with the business side of things for almost fifteen years. With the advent of the Monday Night Wars, wrestling promoters began to condition their fans into a notion of brand superiority based on meaningless numbers. Beating Vince McMahon and his WWF in the ratings meant Eric Bischoff’s WCW was a better company regardless of whether the product being produced legitimately reflected this opinion or not. The much vaunted 82 weeks in which WCW beat the WWF in the Nielsen ratings became more important to both company’s than the shows they were producing. In an attempt to turn back the tide, Eric Bischoff began hotshotting money matches like Goldberg vs. Hulk Hogan and infuriating pay-per-view distributors by running long at Halloween Havoc ’98 and then giving away its main event, Goldberg vs. DDP, for free the next night. The fans began to take notice, and many never turned back. It became clear to many that the business side of a wrestling promotion was more important/interesting than the matches and storylines driving that business.

Today’s business mark can be seen as an evolution of those earlier fans, and even an evolution of the wrestling fan to its natural conclusion. The business mark is the true end of fandom. In what plays as somewhat parallel to the stages of human life, the cycle of the wrestling fan began with the birth of the oblivious mark, a fan that thinks everything was real, and then grew into an in-the-know smark, a fan that knew it wasn’t but didn’t care, and now finally nears its end with the business mark, a cynical observer that cares little for the wrestling. Where marks once found joy in the plucky face finally beating the cowardly heel and smarks found themselves lost in great promos now business marks can only find pleasure in numbers that are abstract to anyone beyond accountants and TV advertising executives, things and people that have nothing to do with wrestling.

Many would ask for a solution, a way to turn back the clock, but none exists. Wrestling itself has evolved from a semi-legitimate sport to a form of entertainment to an industry. Wrestling sought to legitimize itself by moving from a world populated by carnies into a business filled with executives. Granted, both worlds and the people found in them tend be heavily steeped in deceit, but the men guiding wrestling chose to turn it into a business. And their fans should be viewed as a direct response to that. If a wrestling promotion chooses to stop viewing itself as a wrestling promotion and begin calling itself a company, changes its wrestlers to superstars, chooses championships over title belts, and even erases the very concept of a fan in favor of a faceless universe, then it would be hard to blame the fans for buying into what they’re being sold; because at the end of the day, it’s just a company selling a product. No wrestling. No fans. Just a business and its consumer. The true end of fandom.