Did pro wrestling hurt itself?

[ecchirebirth]

This has been stewing in my head for awhile ... the basic question is, did pro wrestling hurt itself by being so insular?

 

It seems like pro wrestling has been unpopular with the major media and entertainment industries for years. Most of my life (I've been a fan since 1987), pro wrestling received no coverage in the media.

 

Thing is, I think pro wrestling kind of did this to itself. They so tightly clung to kayfabe and pushed away people who weren't willing to go along with the unwritten rules the business had drawn up. The business seemed to want to be viewed alongside legitimate sports, without actually being one. 

 

[StretchMediatedHypertrophy]

Well, in the UK WWE continues to be shown primarily on a sports channel. I'm not sure pro wrestling has been insular particularly, sure there is a certain outsider mentality - but actors aren't really that much different in that respect.

 

The problem has been a lack of understanding that, to advertisers, it is as much about the type of people who watch as how many. Despite changes over the last few years, WWE is still micromanaged by a 68 year old man with a....let's just say an individual sense of humour. It is only just over two years ago since Vince did the Bells Palsy Jim Ross impersonation. The Attitude Era really hurt them in the long run. Vince Russo may have actually killed the entire USA wrestling business.

 

Wrestling is more accepted by the mainstream media than ever though. I was shocked to find that the UK 'quality newspaper' the Independent features a wrestling section on its website.

[jstout]

The problem is the lack of stars that resonate with the common man and get them to watch wrestling. We're freaks, we'll watch no matter what, but the key is bringing back the people who loved Stone Cold and the Rock (granted, he came back for a while, but everyone knew he wasn't around for good). If wrestling's ratings double, advertisers will suddenly find the will to start advertising on wresting again.

 

I think the WWE has actually been pretty damn decent lately, but I could see where the lapsed fan could tune in and say "Cena, Orton, Triple H still on top? Haven't they been on top for too long already?" Bryan's injury and C.M. Punk's retirement or whatever you call it really hurt the WWE. Reigns is like a pot full of water that's getting hotter, but not ready to boil yet. Glad they're not rushing him out of panic.

 

Get those casual, Stone Cold fans back and you've done it. But that just seems impossible at this point.

[ebbie]

Barrett seems like a big deal in England...

But I think what the OP is saying is true. Tho I think it has more to do with not enough so called water cooler moments. You know, if you are at work the next day, is there anything you remember about the show you'd want to talk about the next day?

The shows are mostly formatted the same and it's mostly match after match after match until something important happens during the main event match then the show ends. Which is why I don't get the hate online for the Steph/Brie stuff. If you didn't watch the show and just read reports or reviews, you'd think it was a total waste of time because they 'can't wrestle.' Well, the crowds are eating the shit up. I promise ya, anyone who has school mates, co workers, etc that watch wrestling and that they spend the following day talked more about that last segment on Raw than any of the matches.

No one in real life wants to talk about 5 star, technical wrestling CLINICS. They want drama. And I wish most people wrestling websites would get their head out of their asses and realize this.

[StretchMediatedHypertrophy]

The common man thing is a complete false flag. The common man doesn't have any money - Walmart and the merging Dollar chains are struggling because their customer base's paychecks have shrunk or disappeared. Same reason many working-class bars have closed and TV advertising just isn't interested in that demographic. Additionally, appealing to the common man can often mean alienating other demographics when you have Austin giving Stunners to Stacy Keibler.

 

Beyond the above, I think the issues are systemic. WWE without competition was always going to be problematic and they've slowly ran themselves into the dirt. Vince should have really given Shane WCW to run as a vaguely separate entity. But he wanted to WIN and be the only game in town. He's now the last buggy whip manufacturer. Throw in the death of PPV, the rise of YouTube and Video-on-Demand and it's looking tough out there. Completely overexposing the product and the roster with 7-8 hours of TV per week (including a 3 hour RAW) doesn't help any - even Lesnar/Cena is a retread at this point. 

[Brian Fowler]

A tangent of something I've been thinking about for a couple of weeks (actually, since whenever we had the discussion about Cesaro doing/not doing the swing as a heel, so maybe it's not even two weeks.)

 

Somebody (and I am far too lazy to figure out who) said something about hot Southern wrestling crowds, and it got me thinking:  Although I know advertisers still think of pro wrestling fans as being either younger kids or low income, lower educated, generally more hick and/or redneck, white people...  I don't think that's the (main) audience of the business ever more, and I think it's my generation's fault.

 

I think pro wrestling is in the final stages of moving from that audience to "geek culture."  Look at how much money Transformers movies make.  There's a big budget TMNT reboot coming out.  The G.I. Joe movies.  Etc, etc.  All interests that (despite having some serious mainstream success in recent years) were aimed at kids in the 80's, and now have become beloved by a certain set of (mostly white, geeky) males in their mid-20's to mid-30's. 

 

Pro wrestling was huge in the 80's too, with Hogan, obviously.  And we have all that evidence that 80's kids refuse to let their childhood go.  Toss in the geekier elements of the 90's boom fanbase as well.

 

I know for some wrestling companies, this is pretty explicit (Chikara is clearly aimed directly at geek culture) but I think WWE is just starting to realize and embrace the shift in the last few years.  CM Punk and Daniel Bryan.  An increasing presence at Comic-Con.  Things like that.

 

I know there are still some old fashioned Southern style indies, but I really think the death of WCW was the end of the broad "redneck" audience that pro wrestling existed for.  In part because it was the last connection to the real NWA days, and partially because people like, well, me, stole it.

[Dre013]

You have a choice...you try to appeal to the current shrinking audience (we are dinosaurs and not the target) by focusing on nostalgia, or you try to find a new audience by appealing to the geek culture. Problem is, they have people who grew up in the old school wrestling industry running things and failed tv writers trying to present a compelling product...which by definition they don't know how to as "failed tv writers".

[OSJ]

Y'all might find it very interesting to go through J. Michael Kenyon's WAWLI (Wrestling As We Liked It) files. In a nutshell, Kenyon spent hours and hours transcribing wrestling commentary from the mainstream newspapers in the Northewest going back to the early twentieth century. What becomes apparent is that wrestling was always viewed as carny and many early reports were very much tongue-in-cheek. That said, there's a real clear evolution that goes from the heyday of Strangler Lewis (radio years and huge business) to a drop-off that that re-kindled with the super-marketable Jim Londos. Then you get another drop-off until the early days of television and Gorgeous George becoming a household name. The 1950s saw the territories really start to boom as it was absurdly easy to get local TV. The 1960s and 1970s were seeing a downturn, you had hot stars in regional areas, but no one that could truly be considered a household name on a national level. Yeah, I was a child of the 1970s and wrestling geek from early on, so I knew who the Sheik was, I had heard of Bruno, but for the most part I knew the guys that did the Portland-Seattle-Vancouver circuit like Tough Tony Borne, Dutch Savage, and the like. Yeah, we got guys like the Destroyer coming in for tours of the area, but for the most part it was the local guys. The NWA champ would come through maybe once a year.

 

Then you got the 1980s and Hulk Hogan making wrestling cool. Wrestling had never been cool before, even in the heyday of Gorgeous George, people watched because there was literally nothing else on and they watched and snickered. The WWF expansion changed that for a time. The Attitude Era changed things for a time, but that audience went away in pretty short order. The danger with trying to be hip and trendy is that your audience is always looking for the next thing to glom onto.

 

I don't think it fair to say that wrestling ever hurt itself by being insular, if anything, the death of kayfabe hurt more than anything else. You don't see the three generations of fans in the audience any longer. You don't see the hot redneck crowds wherein half the people are convinced it's real. (Or at the very least that it's mostly fake, but MIGHT get out of hand for real).  Wrestling will never get that kind of audience back. Those people don't exist any longer. .The very best that one can hope for now is for another lightning-in-the-bottle guy like Austin, the Rock, or Hogan to come along. I've said this before, but from what I can see, Roman Reigns has the best shot at cross-over popularity of anyone in the biz right now. No, he's not the best wrestler, nor is ever likely to be the best. He's not the best promo guy, but he can memorize a script and get his points across. The bottom line is that he has the LOOK* and the charisma to break out from being "just a wrestler".

 

* To paraphrase the late, great Eddie Gilbert: "All the fellas want to be him and all the ladies come to see him." Seriously, he has the football player mystique going where guys are not the least bit embarrassed to cheer for him and he has the rugged good looks that get women to watch. This latter is going to be what may propel him to greater heights than Austin or even his cousin... Austin never drew the female demographic and go ahead and ask your ladies who they find more attractive, the Rock or Roman Reigns. It won't even be close.

[SorceressKnight]

The problem, though, is that going to geek culture is both a blessing and a curse for pro wrestling.

 

Right now, pro wrestling has kind of succeeded in getting away from "the redneck sport" to becoming "the nerds' sport", which helps mainstream pro wrestling- but at the same time, that very fact is what will keep pro wrestling from being mainstream. 

 

If a sport is designed for an audience you know is unintelligent, then you're going to adjust your writing to pander to the lowest common denominator- and when you pander to the lowest common denominator, then you'll make simplistic storylines that anyone can understand. By contrast, geeks OBSESS over the things they love, and they care so much about the objects of their desire they'll make you do the same homework they did when you're writing, nitpicking to a point where you have to have everything down pat so it will stand up to anything they throw at you.

 

This leads to a problem, because Geeks actually care about what entertains them, and the average person, quite frankly, DOESN'T. It's the same for any other geek culture hit show, which are predominantly ignored by the average- simply because they'll never be the normal person. 

 

The average TV viewer is, and always will be, the person who got home from a hard day at work and just wants to turn their brain off and just laugh, or just had a tough day of the boss giving them crap and just wants reinforcement that they're smart by knowing who did it before the main characters did, or just wants to feel better about themselves by watching completely unlikable people and thinking "No matter how much my life sucks, at least I'm not THEM"-  and that will never change, no matter how nerdy the world gets. 

 

Pro wrestling's done exactly what it needed to do in the modern era to go forward...and that's exactly why they'll never reach the heights they did before.

[ecchirebirth]

I really do wonder if keeping kayfabe so strongly was the best thing financially for pro wrestling though. Could they had been more successful presenting themselves as entertainment/characters.

 

I get the whole thing about, that's how pro wrestling makes money, by appearing real to get emotional investment.

 

But, to use a modern example, look at Game of Thrones. It's a TV show, these are actors, none of it is real at all. But people still get deeply emotionally invested, people love the characters and follow them and want to see their fate. 

 

I think some people, historically, may have gotten turned off to wrestling by it's insistence that, this *is* real, we will be taken seriously (this doesn't really happen in the modern day, I'm talking previous eras).

[thee Reverend Axl Future]

But I do think that keeping it real, so to speak, worked within the realities of budget, injuries, skilled work pool and the fact that it is reality - you can't just bring in any element you can dream up. It worked as a sport with an dash of entertainment rather than entertainment with a sports flavor, which might be better served by a traditional movie/TV script & production. Don't forget, the business model was based on arena ticket sales. I think that eliminating kay fabe hurt the biz, but it was inevitable with the advent of new mass media (cable, nationwide news, internet). Think of an era when you could run the same loser leaves town match six times in the same state, or magazines that were written months in advance. Intellectual and aesthetic appreciation has replaced emotional response as the driving force behind hardcore fans. Merely being entertained doesn't keep people consistently viewing or spending money, there is too much competition for that (Game of Thrones, football, etc).

- RAF

[John Austin]

I've been thinking about this, mainly because I had a conversation with a former wrestler who mentioned wrestling needs to go bak to the days of having former wrestlers and keep out the wannabe Hollywood writers. I mentioned how no one knew who Vince Russo was when he started, and he mentioned how he had McMahon, I then pointed out, what wrestling really needs are good editors, the ideas are there, just need some filtering. My point is how can new talent get a shot if they're not given one.