Managing Expectations, Nintendo, And Your Problem With Wrestling

There’s a canyon of difference between “wrestling sucks right now” and “I don’t like wrestling right now.” It’s a sort of mature difference, because saying the first one instead of the second means you look only at the product. That’s fine; you can totally just look at the product, but doing so means you’re leaving a lot out. It means you’re not taking current market trends in mind, current economics, and future projections. It also means you’re not really looking at yourself, where you are in your life, and if wrestling is a thing you should really be watching right now.

Wrestling is a fairly evergreen product with a mature audience and a well-defined market. As it stands right now, pro wrestling is about as popular as its going to be without a heavy rebranding effort. Returning wrestlers like the Rock won’t change that much, because nostalgia by definition only satiates the current audience, and has little to no effect on growing business.¹ And without a new company, a new direction, or a huge reason to change, wrestling will pretty much be like it is for the next while. This is easy to predict, because wrestling has been basically the same thing since television showed up. Bad guys win too often, good guys are always overtly lame, corruption exists at every level of political power, and the show is run lazily for maximum profit. Any sense of “vision” is enacted on the smallest of independent scale, and only the really great (read: profitable) ideas get to the big times, where they are coated with vanilla and served cold.

This is cynical, but only to the point of wrestlings obvious deficiencies. And for each one of those, it has an equal or greater number of obvious positives. Professional Wrestling at its absolute worst is more entertaining than 90% of all of television, because it is not afraid to be silly and have fun and trip over its own logic and laugh at itself and do things no other medium can get away with. It is a circus of blood and paint and everyone—literally everyone— is doing their job to the best of their ability to make sure the audience has a great time. Even the worst pro wrestlers in the world are shooting for that. Even Chyna is shooting for that. No, Raw isn’t a great venue for solid wrestling matches or simple story telling, but it’s has never been like that. Monday night Raw has never been that great at the things traditional wrestling fans want, and you’d think after 18 years people would get it through their head not to expect 20 minutes out of Beth Phoenix.

WWE says this themselves. You want long matches? Go to a house show or buy a PPV. That’s their actual statement on the matter. You can criticize WWE all day long about tons of legitimate things, but you cannot say they don’t manage expectations perfectly well. If you watch the goddamn program, you know what to expect, and what not to. Since the brand split, Smackdown has been the show with the slower pace and often better wrestlers. Heat/Superstars/ECW/NXT has been the show for rookies and old guys. PPV has been the place where the wrestling fan is serviced to the best of the rosters’ ability. If you’re not happy with this arrangement, tough. This is what WWE thinks will entertain most of the people most of the time, and that’s really totally good enough for them.²

Let me repeat what I said earlier: “wrestling sucks” and “I don’t like wrestling” are two very different things. WWE is fine with this. TNA is fine with this. TNA is a company absolutely secure in what they want to be. They’ve produced 9 years of recorded television, and from day 1 you could see how this was gonna go. Various regime changes and management restructuring have done literally nothing to change the course of that ship. The same goes for Ring of Honor, Chikara, and any other wrestling company built on a certain angle or belief. They know what they are doing, and they could care less if you disagree with that notion. They’re sorry to lose you as a customer, but they don’t have an active suggestion box. I could make a career out of bitching about wrestling, and wrestling would never once care about that I thought, because what’s the point of making us happy when we tune in anyway, because even bad wrestling is pretty good television?

I.

Could.

Make.

A.

Living.

Bitching.

About.

Wrestling.

Did a light just go off in your head? Did something just kind of come together for you? It sure did for me. A few years ago, when it became utterly apparent to me just how cynical and sad the 24 hour news cycle had become, I began to notice similar patterns in wrestling journalism.³ The sad pay walls. The up-to-the-minute disappointment and I-know-better tirades. The “if they don’t turn this around right now, the whole things going tits up” rants. The terrible web design built to hit you with pop ups and spam to take tenths of pennies, because these people would rather have tiny dividends off shitty ads than respect your time and attention. The copy and paste sites, the places that take a paragraph from the observer and call it an exclusive. The thieves. The whores. The hypocrites who kiss Eric Bischoff’s ass when he grants them an interview but calls him the devil the rest of the year. These people make a living making you unhappy about a thing you used to love. And you let them. For a long time, I let them. What’s worse, for a long time I let them dictate what I did and didn’t expect out of wrestling. And that tension made me hate it.

When you let someone who is paid to hate something help form your opinion, you’re never going to be happy. This applies to a lot, and you can take that idea and let run over your entire online existence.

The worst part of it is that because we believe these people are the professionals, we begin to emulate them. We, the independent amateurs who began writing about wrestling believing that we could do it too, eventually slid into the same shitty habits our predecessors profit from. I’m not saying don’t put ads on your site. I’m not saying don’t charge for your content. I’m not saying don’t split your article into a bunch of pages. I am saying cut it out with the pop ups, because nobody likes that garbage. These are decisions you have to make, and every time you turn one of these things on, you’re implicitly suggesting how little you care about your audience, and how your content is perceived. I am saying its easy to fall into these habits, to fall into cynicism, and to entirely blame the product. But when all the product does is all is be itself and not apologize, sometimes I have to wonder if the product isn’t the problem.

When every wrestler who leaves the WWE says negative things in a shoot interview, when every old guy thinks wrestling was better in his era, when every 25 year old thinks wrestling was great when he was 16, and when we was nostalgic over an event we hated at the time, the problem isn’t wrestling. In these cases, wrestling doesn’t suck. The problem is that we don’t like wrestling anymore, and that’s not wrestlings fault. We have outgrown it, or our tastes have changed, or whatever, but wrestling is the same it’s ever been.

I’m going to go back to the Nintendo argument here: if you like Mario, someday you won’t like Mario. Someday, You’ll think Mario was better when you were a fan. Someday, you’ll see a new Nintendo console, and think that you’d never buy it because it isn’t as mind blowing as the SNES, or the N64, or whatever your console was when you were young, and you’ll completely forget that every single Nintendo console in history has been comparatively underpowered and initially unimpressive, especially the one you really loved once.

One day, you’ll reminisce over Survivor Series 2011 and forget that the Rock and Cena match was built on a terribly shaky premise with hours of lame scenes. You’ll do this in the same way people reminisce over Savage and Steamboat.⁴ Okay, maybe not Savage and Steamboat, but you get my point.

I get sad when I look over at online groups for tv shows like community, and how that connection can turn a fan into an evangelist. And then I look over at the IWC, and see that connection turn a fan into a cynic. It’s a poisonous, contagious environment full of jackals and hokum-salesmen, the worst of journalism and sometimes the worst of the Internet. Wrestling is worse for their contribution. But despite them, wrestling will go on being wrestling. Fans will go on liking it and then then not liking it. Kids will cheer John Cena, and then grow up and look at the new version of that guy and not like him as much. Really old guys will look back and reminisce on how they liked it more when they thought it was real, as if being successfully duped is a form of praise. It’s amazing how memory works, how fandom works, and how deplorable we can get when we don’t get what we think we want.