From Guilty Pleasure To Unwatchable: The State Of Pro Wrestling

When I was a teenager, my brother, sister, and I had somewhat of an odd tradition. Every Thursday night at 8pm we would gather to watch what was formerly known as "WWF Smackdown." Even though our Mom and Dad didn’t care one way or another that we were watching it, we would always watch upstairs in my parents’ bedroom for some reason. Maybe it was because even though we were technically allowed to watch it, we still didn’t want dear old Mom and Dad to know exactly how much bad language or scantily-clad women there were, but there was something more than that too. It was almost like we were kind of embarrassed that we actually liked professional wrestling in the 1st place. And I think that’s how a lot of people that I grew up with were, sneakily watching the “Monday night wars” from their parents’ bedrooms instead of downstairs in the living room on the family’s big TV. People who openly liked and talked about pro wrestling just always seemed nerdy to me, which was about as hypocritical a point of view as I could possibly have had. In the case that I would find out that one of my already existing friends watched WWF (sorry, it wasn’t called “WWE” back in my day), it was always a cool moment of a random shared experience…like finding out that both of your favorite basketball players when you were kids was Shawn Kemp or that you both went to the same high school a few years apart from one another (oh, that Mr. Collins…what a riot).

"No, Mom! It's not what you think!"

Now, it doesn’t even seem like a closet guilty pleasure for people anymore. In fact, I’m hardpressed to think of people that I know that really follow pro wrestling at all. My father-in-law and my youngest brother-in-law, Nick, recently went to a live show, but that’s pretty much the only people I can think of…and if you were to ask them if they follow it as much as they used to, I’m sure they would say they didn’t. When channel-surfing, I’ve watched a minute here and there of WWE programming over the last few years, and I feel like I know a lot of the new-fangled characters through name at least. (Grantland’s “masked man” columns make for some good reads.) Due to the demand of a smarter and more aware audience, the complexity and nuance of the storylines seem to be almost as good as ever. To me they fall short of the original WCW-nWo angle, but that may just be nostalgia talking. (Wrestling snobs could probably name a dozen better overarching story angles, but in terms of mainstream American professional wrestling in my lifetime, that was as good as it gets for me at least.)

The real problem for me though is that the wrestling itself is garbage though. One night several months ago, I sat through an entire match of Dirk Diggler vs. Daniel Bryan on “Monday Night Raw,” and the match itself was almost unwatchable. This was a match between a guy (Bryan) who is widely considered the best current in-ring performer in the world and another guy (Diggler) who is considered one of WWE’s best young talents. The match was indicative of just about every match I’ve dropped in on over the past few years while flipping through channels. There was no flow to the match at all. Neither guy seemed to have any real ring presence or an ability to play off the crowd. It seemed like both guys were only concerned with performing big flashy moves. I guess wrestling fans are ultimately to blame for this, as they are always looking for the in-ring performers to do bigger and more death-defying moves. At some point, it becomes like the dunk contest though: everything that is possible has already been done, so it’s hard to give the audience something they haven’t seen before. Because of that, pro wrestling has kind of resorted to the Gillette razor philosophy, where the product is improved by slapping on another blade every year.

I have an idea…instead of throwing the guy through 3 tables, how about we make it 6 tables, 2 ladders, a blow-up doll, and a goat?

Anyway, when you watch wrestling nowadays, it feels like you are watching 2 guys perform an exhibition of finishing moves for 8-10 minutes. I appreciate the athleticism and all of that, but these matches are almost too fast paced and frenetic for their own good. Most present day matches don’t seem to contain any kind of story within the match itself at all. Heck, guys like Ric Flair and Hulk Hogan probably should have hung it up a good 20 years earlier than they did, and Hogan for one will never be considered a great in-ring technician, but we are talking about maybe the 2 greatest pro wrestling careers ever…and they only had like 2 or 3 moves each! Also, to piggyback on that point, there are so many big moves in these matches nowadays that nothing is really believable anymore. Back in the day, they used to sell Undertaker’s “tombstone piledriver” to the point that you thought the other guy would be in the hospital and out of the ring for 6 months recuperating from a spinal injury. Now, a guy gets hit with a sledgehammer, thrown through the announcer’s table, and gets 3 “finishing” moves, and he will still win the match. These videos take some time to watch, but you tell me what’s better: the Daniel Bryan-CM Punk match from earlier this year or the last few minutes of this DDP-Sting match from like 13 years ago. The flow of the match, the crowd energy, the overall cadence…maybe I sound like an old man (dated, dazed, and confused), but to me at least it’s no contest. I guess they just don’t make ‘em like the used to.