Posted in: Just Business Just Business #35 - Cenothing, Hate Less
By Plan
Aug 26, 2009 - 7:26:56 AM
Just Business #35
Cenothing, Hate Less
“Same old shit! Same old shit! Same old shit!”
It’s a chant that has echoed through so many arenas over the last few years. How it never echoed through the Garden in the ‘80s during the height of Hulkamania I shall never quite know. Maybe it’s because the Internet we all use to further our passion of wrestling and allow us to explore our wrestling fandom in a variety of ways, more so than ever before, is somehow at the same time killing wrestling, right? Yeah, ok.
No, I’m here today to talk to you about an issue that is on the lips of every single wrestling fan to at least some extent, an issue that has been prominent now for the better part of two or three years. Stale product; the same old shit.
We’re all bored of it. We’re all religiously still tuning in through the perhaps vein hope something new and exciting is just around the corner. I stopped watching Raw in its entirety every week back just after Backlash. I still read the results and if there’s anything that sounds remotely relevant I’ll check it out but I have not watched a full two hour Raw broadcast since before Backlash.
I could sit here and type out all the ways why Raw has become shit but we’ve heard them all ten times over by ten different columnists, written out ten times more entertainingly than I ever could. Raw here is just an example of the “same old shit.” But the same old shit is prevalent in so many ways these days it is seriously beginning to piss me off. Raw is just an example. It’s a lead in to the one thing I really, really hate and given the title of the piece I’m sure you can guess just what…or rather who that is.
I’m sure people are going to roll their eyes. If the incredibly unlikely happens and someone who is a part of the industry sees this no doubt they’ll turn their nose up and sneer. What do I know, right? I’m just a fan of wrestling, one of those people that, I’m told by those inside the industry, make the business. How dare I have the audacity to want to express my opinion?
But before you click that back button on your browser, give me a second to explain something. This IS a rant. This will probably be ignorant and unfair. I want to remind you all of the age old adage “We’re all entitled to our opinion”. It is universally applicable and everything I say here will be backed up even if it is through somewhat of an emotional bias.
There won’t be any fancy banners, any pink or italics, no gimmicky writing style. It is going to be candid, it is going to be no nonsense. All will be made clear. So here it is…
Why I Hate John Cena.
Every single week I try to catch at least something mildly interesting from Raw. Seeing as most of the time I utilise replay streams on video sites as opposed to the likes of Youtube, eventually, at some point, I’ll see John Cena. I certainly see him on pay-per-view every month. And everything I see when I see John Cena drives me mad, from the moment he comes lumbering out from behind the curtain to the moment he disappears after whatever pissy little match he just “wrestled”, to use the term loosely.
Take, for example, the way he dresses. He looks like a fucking anthropomorphic Lego brick! You have a guy that we, as fans, are required to believe is a legitimate threat to the top performers of the company. Guys with nicknames like “The Game”, guys argued to be the best ever like Shawn Michaels, guys who, in kayfabe terms, are meant to be the walking fucking undead capable of summoning blackouts and launching thunderbolts from the sky. We are meant to invest in Cena as a legitimate threat against these guys…despite the fact he’s coming out every week bedecked in the latest unimaginatively designed WWE merchandise all sporting his cheesy catchphrases and pissy finisher names on the background of garishly bright pastel colours.
It’s far from getting across the right kind of image is it? I’m meant to think this walking billboard is capable of besting the likes of The Great Khali, for example, who once made mince meat of The Undertaker? Or that he’s better than Shawn Michaels, the man who retired arguably the greatest to ever lace boots in Ric Flair? Or that he’s more capable in the ring than the man who has everyone force-feed us how awesomely amazing he is in every promo slightly regarding him, Triple H?
No, I can’t buy that. And that’s just the tip of the ice berg.
See, after he’s come waltzing down to the ring in his rainbow glory (sorry Skitz!) the guy then graces us with his promos. We’ve seen, thanks to leaked Raw scripts, that wrestlers have their promos written word for word and what that has done is lead Cena into thinking, or at least it comes across this way to me, that he’s nothing more than an actor delivering lines from a sub-par script. And a pretty bad actor at that. Pulling an angry face and shouting doesn’t equate to being emotive. I don’t ever truly believe what Cena is saying, I don’t honestly think he CARES about being a pro wrestling champion. I am always very aware that he is a man reading a script.
I just sit there and roll my eyes at the latest cheesy catchphrase he has to come out with, ready to be plastered on his next blindingly bright t-shirt and matching cap. Those catchphrases, again, are another issue. I have nothing wrong with the use of catchphrases in wrestling. There was a day and age where you HAD to have one. It was as much a staple of being a wrestler as was knowing how to perform a body slam.
One of the most popular ever stars in our beloved company once proclaimed “Just bring it!” to his opponents showing no kind of intimidation and being openly hostile, willing to take on all comers without fear. Now, years later, without The Rock, the WWE have taken someone who was ONCE their most charismatic star and tried to mould him into being a new Rock; it’s a criticism that has been widely lumped on John Cena over time and he’s done himself no favours by not stopping the on-going whinging regarding The Rock in his media interviews.
And am I the only one to have noticed the ever so slight similarity between the “Just bring it!” of The Rock and the “Come get some!” of John Cena? I don’t want some poor man’s Dwayne Johnson, I don’t fucking want the second Rock; I want the first damn John Cena!
But hey, the guy works hard. I will admit he works very hard. His work ethic is more than applaudable and his willingness to go where they want him to go to promote what they want him to promote is great. He certainly does work hard making movies, appearing on chat shows, taking part in adverts and game shows and doing promotional work for the company. I’m glad that we can praise a PROFESSIONAL WRESTLER for working his hardest in everything he does…while showing no development of his move set, no deepening understanding of story telling, nothing really new at all. He may work hard but unless it’s inspecting every match he wrestles with a fine toothcomb and deciding what he can do better or different or cleaner next time then he’s working hard in all the wrong places. Is it any wonder wrestling is going down the shitter when they’re all too busy partaking in “WWE Films” and the like?
The icing on the cake of course is that John Cena is just…there. He has no definable character anymore. He’s almost a parody of himself. He got lucky by finding a rapper gimmick that proved entertaining enough to make people want to see him but if that Halloween segment had never happened Cena would have been gone in six measly fucking months. He was a bodybuilder for god’s sake and there’s a reason LEX fucking LUGER (!!!) never worked! Mazza, my fellow Main Pager and fellow Brit, has a snazzy little banner for his Current Paper Review. On it, you see The Game in character ready for war. You see HBK in character with his slightly cocky lopsided grin. You see Orton in character posing narcissistically. You see The Undertaker in character by…well…being the Deadman. You see Chris Jericho in character by looking unimpressed and disparaging. You see Edge in character with his smug annoying look of one up-manship. And you see Cena…well…he’s smiling…and…erm…posing?
I could keep going. I’ve got plenty of stuff. His seeming lack of true passion for the industry, his innate yes-manism, his general clumsy unprofessional execution in the ring. Hell, I could go for pages and pages and pages but for the risk of you pressing that back button and not having your faith in me that all of this has a serious point paid off I will say only one more thing.
The same old shit really IS the same old shit. People love to call those who dislike Cena “Cena Haters” and go on about how people “forget they’re meant to be booing him.” In short, they seem to deny the legitimacy of the criticisms levelled at John Cena. Well…you know…they don’t just appear out of thin air, these criticisms. There’s a reason they exist.
Cena’s move set is limited. His matches are built on extremely, EXTREMELY repetitive structures. He shows little ability to tell unique stories and even less ability to be the guy carrying the other guy to a great match. You can’t deny what happens in front of your very own eyes. Cena has his “Moves of Doom” that he limits himself to in every single encounter and quite frankly I’m fucking sick of it and I’m fucking sick of that talentless useless hack clogging up my wrestling product!
“Hate destroys a man’s sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful.”
Ok guys, if you’re still here then you’re the ones who will be able to properly critique this column afterwards. I thank you humbly for your patience and your faith but I have an admission to make.
I don’t hate John Cena. In fact, I don’t mind John Cena at all. He has his place in the company and while, admittedly, there are some things about him I do find quite irritating and wish he would focus on improving, I’m far from what is labelled a “Hater”.
I look back over the past few years and find I quite enjoy some of Cena’s bouts. His matches with Edge in 2006, his matches Umaga, Shawn Michaels, Bobby Lashley and Randy Orton in 2007 all entertained me to a high degree. I would say that having a WWE Champion reliant on the right opponent for a good match is a bad decision personally; surely your champion should have the skill level to have great matches with anyone, right? However the number of men who could actually meet that criteria in the company right now are limited at best so I guess it’s a case of making do with what you have until they finally decide they want to go ahead with building new guys up.
But if I don’t hate Cena what was all the above really about? It’s about the bigger picture, the ripples in the pond so to speak. You can take from this column whatever you want but I’m here to say that the phenomenon of “Hating” is not applicable solely to John Cena. I simply used “Cena Hating” as an illustration to show just how ignorant it all is.
The thing is, it’s not the fault of the wrestlers.
Oh don’t get me wrong, it’s far from our fault either. I’m not the type of columnist to consider myself some kind of misplaced martyr, the kind that will sit here and tell you, the reader, the Internet fan, that you killed wrestling and that you do this, that or the other. It’s the bookers, see? It’s their fault. In order to fully explain what my point is, I need to diverge from the idea of “Hating” for just one second.
***
I fear for the future of this industry and I’ll tell you why. It is not because of the stale product or lack of new stars being created in the WWE, though that is a problem that needs fixing right now. It’s to do with something a little less tangible.
Match times on Raw are at a length now that is beyond a joke. Only on ECW and Smackdown can you find decent free tv wrestling in the WWE. Even on pay per view, match times are gradually decreasing as time goes on. The result is this phenomenon of “Moves of Doom” that I guess you could argue, somewhat controversially, started with John Cena. It seems to me, and this is only one humble fan expressing his opinion, that wrestlers of today have fallen into somewhat of a Heffalump Trap; they think they have to get most of, if not all their trademark moves into any given match.
The result? Look at MVP. On Smackdown he was not only one of their hardest workers but one of their most solid performers, putting on entertaining and solid wrestling bouts every week with a myriad of performers. But since moving to Raw, his move set has become narrower, his matches in danger of becoming as samey as those often put on by Cena, lest he have the right opponent. Whether it be the kick in the corner, the Ballin’ elbow drop or the overhead throw, MVP is becoming increasingly reliant on his own “Moves of Doom”. It’s almost as if he feels he needs to do these moves because they’re trademarks and, due to the short time length, they’re ALL he can do.
This is all a testament, a tribute if you will as to how the art of professional wrestling is slipping slowly through our fingers. Guys like Bret Hart, Ted DiBiase Senior, Mr Perfect and others are becoming an extinct species; the type that can mix it up, that can tell whatever story they think needs telling without fear or worry, the type who would be unsatisfied unless they had something different from each opponent…the type who didn’t wrestle trademarks but told stories.
I fear a coming of a dawn of spot wrestling. Not necessarily spots in their hardcore definition but spots in the sense of trademarks, of “Moves of Doom,” of the same old shit never being given even a slight shake up. Will an age come when all wrestlers can and will do, thanks to shortened match times and veterans more bothered about their own reputation than the future of the industry that made them, is lump a list of trademark moves together and expect the audience to believe they’re fighting tooth and nail with their souls to leave the victor? The advent of horrendous match gimmicks like TLC do not help, in which wrestlers probably spend a greater percentage of the match time setting weapons up for the next trashy stunt than they do actually wrestling. In fact, the one TLC I did like because they did a fair bit of wrestling in it, the TLC that took place at Summerslam, has been criticised for being lacklustre simply because they weren’t going from one spot to another without any story telling whatsoever. Are we going to criticise mild story-telling because it isn’t spotty, trashy junk?
My fear of a dawn of spot wrestling in turn leads to another. A fear of a generation of fans that will grow up not knowing about what it means to wrestle a story like the old school veterans I named above did. A fear of a new generation of wrestling fans too impatient to be satisfied with long drawn out feuds, with matches that build beautifully and artistically to a spectacular crescendo, that tease the viewer by leading them one way and then throwing them another. I fear a generation of junkies.
***
“Hating” is the first by product, the first sign on the road to the Generation of the Junkie. How so? This brings me very nicely to the issue that prompted this whole eulogy in the first place.
“We hate some persons because we do not know them; and we will not know them because we hate them.”
John Cena is not the only “Hated” guy in town anymore. Triple H has his fair share of “Haters”, as does Batista. But none of these men are the flavour of the month right now. There is another man being “Hated” and I thought I’d be one of few who seem to want to stick up for the man these days.
Randy Orton has come under a great deal of criticism this past year by a great deal of people. They say he’s robotic, they say he can’t work a microphone, they say he’s boring in the ring, that his matches are all the same, they say he’s over-rated, that he only is where he is because of his second name and his time in Evolution, even that he can’t sell.
Now, as I said earlier, we are all entitled to our opinions and if this is truly the widespread belief these days then it saddens me and, in my mind, further supports the idea of an age of wrestling where everyone has to be fed the obvious or the mundane.
The problem is, whenever I try to defend Randy Orton in person people don’t listen. They don’t want to know him because they’re already determined to hate him. They won’t listen and be willing to at least try to understand the arguments for Randy Orton because they’ve already made their minds up and “aint no one gonna tell me what to think!” right?
So I thought I’d put it all down in column form. The criticism levelled at Orton, in my mind, is so incredibly undeserved and, for the most part, fairly ignorant. Pompously, I label guys like Orton a “thinking man’s wrestler.” He’s a hark back to the old days, when wrestlers making reference to real life inside the ring was a thing of nightmares, when a man would completely envelop themselves in their character. Like The Undertaker. It seems in this modern age people forget everyone we see in a ring is a character, a work of fiction. To some degree, it seems like that observation applies to WWE performers as well. But Orton has his character, has his work of fiction mastered to such a degree he has you all up in arms decrying him for being shit.
No, I don’t mean to make it sound like you hate him because you’re meant to. I’m saying that those “Hating” Orton right now just aren’t thinking about what Orton does. I’ve heard people criticise his promo ability. Now, I’m the first to admit he isn’t that good on a microphone, granted. But consider the character. A cold, icy and unhinged sociopath with no real emotion, just a desire to destroy. If he went out there and started talking like The Rock or shouting like Ric Flair or pulling his hair out like Mankind it wouldn’t be right. Sure, he may “keep you awake” but last time I checked sociopaths weren’t known for their public speaking skills; they were known for hurting people. His timing and pronunciation is odd, yeah…but the character is unhinged, he’s clearly crazy! His promo work perfectly suits the character he portrays.
He is said to be boring in the ring. I ask, how can you be boring when you’re wrestling? To me, boring translates as “slow”. The Randy Orton character is a little like a Terminator. Methodical and purposeful. Everything is done for a reason and that reason is to hurt whoever it is in front of them. He can’t go out all guns blazing, throwing right hooks and running off ropes and doing three sixty back flips. It’s not his character. The Garvin Stomp, for example, perfectly suits the character he portrays. Every movement in the ring, every flexing of his fingers or tick of his head, is all done as a part of the portrayal of the character he has mastered over the last couple of years and if you’re going to complain because his in-ring style is slow and methodical…not spotty enough…then I’m not interested. You can’t criticise something for being what it is. It’s like complaining the sky’s too blue or the grass too green. The next time you want to lash out and call this Orton match or that Orton match boring THINK about what it is he’s doing as regards to his character.
His selling speaks for itself. Look at the 2005 Royal Rumble; he had even those in the back watching convinced he had been legitimately concussed. Look at how he simply went limp and glassy eyed at Wrestlemania XXV when Triple H kicked him in the skull. Whenever he is slammed or blasted with a weapon, his selling may seem a little…odd…a little unlike the social norm…but it fits this sociopathic single minded weirdo killer; it’s inhuman, like the character.
And all of this at the mere age of 29. He hasn’t even hit his prime yet people. Randy Orton is not boring; he’s masterful. Every single action he performs on screen, literally EVERTHING, is done in character as a single minded sociopath intent simply on hurting people and being WWE Champion.
The same can be applied to his tactics of slapping referees or getting counted out or utilising his championship advantage to a greater extent than previous heel champions have. His character, as I say, is one that just wants to enjoy hurting people; if, then, he is proving incapable of hurting whoever he is facing, like Cena at Summerslam for example, why would he not decide to turn tail and run? It makes sense as regards to his character. If you can’t hurt them enough to put them down, live to fight another day, wait until you can.
Randy Orton isn’t into melodrama and he won’t spoon feed us fans into telling us what we should think or how we should react. What he will do is portray his character how he thinks is best and if the world of wrestling fandom has now gotten to the point where they refuse to think about why a wrestler is doing this, if they are just going to start shrugging it off simply by saying “He’s shit and I’ll hear no other,” if the world of wrestling is now nothing more than a world of “Haters” unwilling to think about what they’re watching and put some effort into immersing themselves into the still fictional world of the WWE…well, then…pro wrestling may just be dying quicker than we all thought.
This isn’t about John Cena and it isn’t about Randy Orton really. It’s about how, to me, it feels like a growing number of fans are no longer thinking about wrestling, no longer appreciating the real, subtle multi-layered and multi-faceted and fictional nature of pro wrestling.
Instead everyone seems to be “Hating”. It feels like all people want are spots and to be told how to feel about this feud or that match and I fear that this is the first stepping stone on the path towards the Generation of Junkies.
My name is ‘Plan, doing something a little different and promising to carry on thinking.
Written with thanks to Martin Luther King Jr. and Charles Caleb Colton, from who the quotes used here are derived.
Feedback to: planm4n89@hotmail.co.uk
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