Monday Night Blah
In the interests of adding yet another entry to the endless “The Present Will Never be as Awesome as the Past” argument, this past Monday I headed to the Staples Center to attend the live broadcast of WWE Raw. I brought along with me a large piece of poster board, each side of which carried one of the following two messages:
- THIS IS RATINGS GOLD (to be used either literally or ironically)
- NACHO BREAK (exclusively for literal use)
These were the final drafts of a long thought-out, deliberative process that at other times included the following, inferior messages:
- I’M NOT WATCHING THIS
- SET TiVOS TO FAST FORWARD
- I DON’T LIKE YOU
- I WANT MY MONEY BACK
- DOES ANYONE KNOW THE MONDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL SCORE?
- WOOOOOOOOOOO!
- I BOUGHT A RELATIVELY EXPENSIVE TICKET FOR THIS SEAT AND AS SUCH HAVE A FINANCIAL COMMITMENT TO WATCHING THE REMAINDER OF THIS BROADCAST. YOU THE HOME VIEWER, IN CONTRAST, HAVE NO INCENTIVE TO STOP YOU FROM CEASING TO WATCH THIS LESSER ON-SCREEN PRODUCT IN FAVOR OF A SUPERIOR ONE, OR, IN THE ABSENCE OF ANY SUPERIOR PRODUCT, ENGAGING IN ANOTHER ACTIVITY ENTIRELY. (cut in the interests of brevity)
And no, the irony was not lost on me that I was actually planning in advance to heartily disapprove of the show that I was paying money to see. That’s kind of my point here.
Monday was only the second time I had ever brought a sign to a wrestling show; the first time was in July of 1998, when I proudly lofted the eight feet in length “SUCK IT!!!!!” sign that my buddies Mark and Joey had lovingly handcrafted the previous day.
My point? In 1998 (also known as the third Golden Age of pro wrestling), I would never have dreamed of bringing a sign for the express purpose of expressing disapproval. I wouldn’t have expected any need of it. Sure, even in 1998 I knew I wasn’t going enjoy every last bit of the show – I believe the card that night featured both Marc Mero AND Mark Henry – but it never occurred to me that the show might be so bad as to make me want to express my absolute disgust to a national television audience.
Not so today.
And the fans know it: of the approximately twenty thousand fans in attendance, I’d say a good 70% of them were wearing officially-licensed wrestling apparel that they had purchased sometime in the 1998-2001 period. I myself was rocking the Cactus Jack t-shirt I found at the back of my closet – purchase date: May of 2000. With few exceptions, we were right to do so (Memo to the guy with the Roadd Dogg Jesse James “Roll tha Dogg a Bone” t-shirt: Its time has passed, if indeed its time were ever here to begin with).
What’s more, the WWE knows it: Monday’s show featured Shawn Michaels and Triple H doing their circa-1997 Degeneration X shtick in both the opening and main event segments, surrounding segments that included 80’s mainstay Hacksaw Jim Duggan, an evil Russian named Vladimir Koslov and a twenty-minute bit in which Stone Cold Steve Austin drove a Budweiser truck in to the arena and soaked the ring in “beer,” a gimmick that was truly monumental the first time they brought it out in April of 1999. The WWE either believes that what made them successful once is sure to make them successful again, or that clinging to the past will make their audience more likely to tune in for the future. Their current ratings suggest otherwise.
And here’s the thing: forced nostalgia aside, it was actually a pretty good show, the highlights of which were an absolutely ungodly pop from the largely-Latino Los Angeles crowd for Rey Misterio, emerging heel brilliance from Umaga and Mr. Kennedy, and the transcendent irony of the aforementioned Duggan starting a “U-S-A!” chant as his Mexican tag team partner Super Crazy fought two guys from Tennessee.
Wrestling is a remarkably simple enterprise. While it’s not easy for an individual wrestler to put on a good performance, it is thoroughly easy for a wrestling company to put on a good show. The WWE has the talent, but for some reason it insists on using its talent in ways that no one wants to watch. At least, not since the way they wanted to watch in 1998.
Comments(3)
Having been alive during the First Golden Age of Pro-Wrestling, and arguably the only One (technically, successive ages are only a reflection of what was the original). Names like, Ray Patterson, Pepper Gomez, The Black Orchid, and Kenji Shibuya come to mind. During the Golden Age, there was little room on the spectrum for its minor programming status, and wrestling was relegated to Saturday afternoons, after the morning cartoons and in-between Shirley Temple movie re-runs (if we were lucky, we would see “Mighty Joe Young”….but I digress). The real point is, there wasn’t enough TV time, or TV networks to provide deleterious programming like Pro-Wrestling, there was only one Wrestling Federation, and only one Champion (and that was Ray Patterson). Fast forward to the present and you have a diffused audience, fringe TV networks that are thrice-removed from the majors showing wrestling that nobody ever watches. There have been other champions, and some have even gone as low as becoming politicians (pitiable). Until Wrestling can unify, like football, basketball & baseball, and focus its TV exposure, it will never achieve the success it deserves, nor will its champions ever attain the glory of its Golden Age.
I agree with your conclusions (which I take to be “today’s wrestling sucks” – am I right?), but I disagree heartily with your reasoning. At the same time I’m extraordinarily jealous of you – it sounds like you grew up during a peak time for Bay Area wrestling (how much money would I pay to see a guy challenge his enemies to test his abs by jumping onto them off of ladders and driving Volkswagens over his midsection, as Pepper Gomez did? A lot). But the quality of wrestling at that time had nothing to do with a unified nature – if anything, wrestling was even more stratified then than it is now. Ray Patterson (who I couldn’t find any mention of in my histories – can I assume you meant Ray Stevens, who spent a lot of time in a tag team with Pat Patterson? Easy mistake), as champion of the Nothern California territory, was only one of at least 26 champions in the United States alone, not counting the various secondary titles for each territory and the “undisputed” NWA World Heavyweight Champion, a title that I don’t believe Stevens ever held.
And if anything, the stratification of wrestling at the time actually contributed to the quality of the product. Wrestlers would come in, do their thing, and once the audience got tired of them they would move on to the next territory, to be replaced by another wrestler who had already honed his craft in, say, one of the Texas territories. I dispute that wrestling today needs to be unified to succeed, because I contend that it already is unified, under the virtual monopoly of the WWE (and no, I don’t count TNA or any of the various indy feds as viable competitors). This hurts the product. We get the same old wrestlers shoved down our throats year after year, with only green, inexperienced wrestlers to replace them.
For that matter, recent history has shown us that wrestling is at its best when the product, and its audience, is diffused. The second Golden Age of wrestling (or the first reflection of the first, or whatever) came when Vince McMahon was doing his level best to wipe the floor with the established and stagnant NWA in the mid-80’s, and the third came in the late 90’s when WCW put up a substantial challenge to the now-stagnant WWF. Wrestling, for better or for worse, is not like other sports. Unification (further unification, that is) will only hurt.
I just have to say to the above…
Suck it…..