Professional wrestling has been around for a very long time. It has gone from being a sport that was witnessed at carnival events and transformed into the sports entertainment spectacle that you see today. Former wrestlers were viewed as superheroes and people that could save the day in an action flick. Since then, wrestlers use their real name more often than not and we’ve lost some of that childhood innocence that wrestling used to have. Wrestling is more like a soap opera where the wrestlers play the role that they’re told to play and use real life drama to try and get the fans attention. This new reality has made it hard for the wrestling fan to accept certain characters based on preconceived notions of the individual or based on the fact that the wrestling fan has been conditioned to watch wrestling in a certain way that they no longer understand how to form a logical thought and cheer or boo for what they prefer to see inside the ring. This makes it hard for the creative team to come up with new ideas or to push new wrestlers because the fan simply isn’t buying into what’s being given to them anymore. Therefore, we offer up a few examples of story lines that have been overused or simply won’t work anymore in the modern world.

– There was once a time when a wrestler being fired meant something in this industry. In the territory days, a wrestler firing could have signaled a legitimate disagreement between the promoter and the wrestler and meant that the wrestler was being blackballed from a certain region. During the Monday Night Wars, a wrestling firing meant that an individual might be jumping ship to another promotion and this was their swan song by the booking team. A wrestling firing today usually means that the individual is being fired to take time off from an injury, personal reasons (rehab) or needs time off to go and shoot a movie. When wrestlers get fired and then show up on television after only 2 weeks then you lose all credibility with your fan base.There is no competition for a company such as WWE and the wrestling fan knows that if the wrestler gets fired then there is nowhere else to go. Where is the wrestler going to end up? The Indy Scene? Mexico? Japan? This story line has been done to death and simply isn’t believable anymore.

– I’ll admit…The Undertaker having the ability to get up from the dead or rise from the grave is badass. Even seeing the druids or having a flash of lightning go across an arena is pretty cool. But, wrestling fans know now that the undertaker ain’t going to be embalming anybody and doesn’t bury people in cemeteries. If anything, most fans now think that the Undertaker has a pretty hot wife and enjoys watching UFC events a lot more then he should be. The creative team at WWE headquarters have tried to modernize the Undertaker over the years. He’s been a bad-ass biker guy and even a cult leader at one point. They’ve tried to make the Undertaker gimmick into more of a magician’s parlor trick than anything else by having the undertaker use creepy psychology to psyche out his opponents but it simply hasn’t worked very much. As a change of scenery, the WWE writing team should just make the undertaker into a MMA type of fighter and see how that works for the time being because the days of Paul Bearer and the urn isn’t going to work out.

– In the early 90s, there was an explosion of cruserweight/lightweight wrestling and luchadores that invaded America. Their high flying stunts and outrageous costumes were fun to watch. In the professional wrestling world;a promoter’s ideology is similar to the NFL where ‘Anybody Can Beat Anybody on Any Given Sunday’. This concept might work for real sporting events but isn’t as true in professional wrestling. No wrestling fan is going to believe that Rey Mysterio Jr. can beat the Big Show or Brock Lesnar. In WCW, they got the right idea when Kevin Nash jacknife powerbombed Mysterio and made him fold up like an accordion. We realize that this is just entertainment. Also, we realize that someone small beating up someone big can be a big moment and a major upset like when the 1-2-3 Kid beat Razor Ramon once on an early edition of Monday Night Raw. Unfortunately, when you have a small person beat up a large individual, it takes away the large man’s credibility and no longer makes him be feared by the wrestling fan. A wrestler such as the Big Show or Mark Henry have been beaten easily so many times by people that are much smaller than they are to the point that they are no longer viewed as a major threat in the same vein that Andre the Giant was back in the 1980s. If you push a large wrestler an an indestructible monster like how the WWE creative team is doing with a man like Mark Henry then the wrestling fan believes the hype and legitimately feels that this wrestler can destroy every wrestler that crosses their path inside the locker room.

– The typical easy excuse to make a wrestling feud more heated and personal is to involve the face’s family in the feud. A family member is as personal as it can get and having the family be present in the arena as they are insulted helps to create a lot more heat with the crowd than if the individual just made a joke about someone’s family without even acknowledging who they are in the crowd. The 1992 WWE Summerslam took place in Wembley, England and featured a main event between family relatives Bret ‘The Hitman’ Hart and the British Bulldog. Bret’s sister was married to the British Bulldog and most of the Harts were in attendance for the event. This was a purely technical match that pitted long time family friends against each other and was built up right because it showed the desperation in each Hart member’s eyes as they saw two family friends trying to injure each other. This tactic has been used up way too much and has even gotten negative attention for featuring real life drama to draw viewer attention. The WWE did story lines involving Eddie Guerrero’s wife shortly after his death which were borderline inappropriate. ECW had the Sandman’s young boy disown him and be brainwashed by Raven which can’t be good parenting for a young little boy. They also involved Torrie Wilson’s father in an angle with WWE diva Dawn Marie that featured him dying as a result of Marie’s sexuality and gold-digging ways. Sometimes these storylines don’t even involve the wrestler’s real life family as they use actors to portray family members which just makes things even odder. Either way, this seems to be cheap heat for a feud that has been done to death and is only a great idea when the writers have nothing else original to come up with.

– Celebrities and wrestling have a storied history together. Actor Mr. T. was involved in the first ever Wrestlemania main event with Hulk Hogan. Actors or actresses often feel that they can act and become anybody – even a professional wrestler. History tells us that this isn’t the case. Most celebrity wrestling feuds often take away time and space from real professional wrestlers who are seeing their opportunity slip through the cracks as they have to watch from the sidelines while some celebrity who can barely do a clothesline is getting major TV time. Wrestlers won’t argue mostly because a celebrity helps to increase PPV buyrates and gives them extra revenue but deep down they wish that they were in that ring instead of the celebrity. For every Mr. T. or Lawrence Taylor; we’ve had to endure the likes of Drew Carey, Karl Malone, Jay Leno, Snooki and even David Arquette who was made the WCW World Champion which is the biggest insult that there is for a pro wrestler. The fans aren’t buying what these celebrities are selling and more often than not these celebs should stick to the announcer’s booth or stay at ringside rather than actually wrestling in the ring.

-The wrestling world likes to come up with all sorts of weird gimmicks. More often than not; the individual who is doing the gimmick has nothing in common with the gimmick that he is trying to get over with the crowd. Vince McMahon wanted to have a huge Sumo wrestler as a WWE Superstar. Unfortunately, nobody on his roster was Japanese or fit the bill as a Sumo wrestler. But Wait! He did have a 500 pound Samoan man who they could dress up to look like a Sumo wrestler! This is how we were given ‘Yokozuna’, the Samoan Sumo wrestler with no actual Sumo background whatsoever. How about Kofi Kingston? The Jamaican man with the Jamaican accent who suddenly lost his Jamaican accent and is now from Ghana, Africa? Why is there an Asian dude wearing a cowboy hat in the ring trying to talk with a fake Texas accent? Why is the Islamic militant who is preaching hate against America really an Italian from upstate New York? What does a repo man do to beat me up? Don’t mess with me or I’ll steal your car! It’s things like this that make little sense and often leaves the wrestling fan scratching their head in confusion.

We believe that the wrestling fans of today are smarter than this. Professional wrestling used to be more fun and carefree with more PG gimmicks but then reality set in and we no longer have this blinded love for things that made little or no sense back in the 80s and early 90s. We realize that writing new scripts every week and trying to come up with new and original ideas can be a difficult task to follow. Let’s give the wrestling fan a little more credit and try to come up with some ideas that make a little more sense with the real world that we live in today.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, August 6th, 2011 at 10:26 pm and is filed under Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.