Take up thy wrestling boots and walk#112 - Writers vs. Wrestlers
Submitted by Pt2 on Thursday, August 18, 2005 at 12:09 PM EST





Welcome once again to the column that feels strong about right and wrong and doesn’t take trouble for very long, Take up thy wrestling boots and walk. I’m the columnist obsessed with eighties wrestling themes, Pt2, back once again from the land of the Rougeau Brothers “All American Boys” and Dusty Rhodes “American Dream” back once again to share my thoughts on the Nirvana that is professional wrestling.

Many thanks to everyone who corrected me about the date of the last title change in the last column. I don’t pretend to remember the dates on which everything happened in 2000-2001, so I looked it up online, and it seems the information I used was suspect - it had Kurt Angle winning the title in 2001 on PPV instead of on RAW. So to everyone with a better memory than I (even those who e-mailed me correcting me after I’d posted an amendment myself), Thanks for letting me know. And for reading the last one, obviously.

Virtually every time you read something written about WCW, the criticism that you can’t seem to avoid is that “Wrestlers writing the shows really killed any chances of success”. Whether your reading about Kevin Nash booking himself to beat Bill Goldberg (incidentally, who else would you book to beat Big Billy but a 7 foot monster?), Ric Flair letting Mick Foley and Steve Austin get away while he was booking the show, or Dusty Rhodes giving Cactus Jack Amnesia, to Hulk Hogan being given creative control.... the list goes on and on.... and on and on.... and if I really wanted to look it up and research it, I’d probably have to add on another six or seven on and on’s to that.

The wrong man in the job can certainly hinder a company then. Many of the bookers in WCW were given their position more through a certain amount of star power in the ring than for any gift in the creative arena. I’m sure that Ric Flair and Dusty Rhodes, Kevin Sullivan and Kevin Nash will all say that first and foremost, they were wrestlers, and even if they aren’t as critical of their performance as many of us (and remember people, hindsight is 20-20, and don’t get carried away with your own talents just because you happen to be decent at EWR or whatever that game is called now), they’ll say that realistically, they got the job based more on who they are than their being the best man for that job.

But they were wrestling men, and ultimately, that means they all deserved a shot at the role.

No one will know the wrestling business than a man who has been involved with it, and although there is a conflict of interest about having active workers booking shows that they are on (especially when we consider things such as ego and personal dislike), I would rather have an active wrestler booking my shows than someone who has no experience within the business. For all the negatives that come with an active wrestler, they at least don’t have to completely re-learn what they are doing in order to write shows that work.

And if your not familiar with the business, that is almost exactly what you have to do. People often say that the more you write, the better you get at all kinds of writing, but that’s crap. If you write nothing but prose, even if you do it all day long your not going to be able to write a good Shakespearean sonnet in Iambic Pentameter: and it’s much the same with wrestling. I don’t care how many seasons you spent writing the punchlines for Dharma and Greg or some other god awful sitcom, this is a totally different branch of the entertainment industry (and that’s if you like Vince’s term of “Sports entertainment” - me, I prefer to think of it as a completely different Industry, you know the “Wrestling Industry”) and you have to spend some time around it to know where to start, let alone how to do the whole damn thing well.

That’s why I’m so worried about the direction the WWE is going, where almost all their writers are more familiar with sitcoms and Hollywood style situations and are more likely to give me something that more closely resembles “Who’s the Boss?” than The Rock vs. HHH. Why when you have veterans on your roster to advise THE MOST SUCCESSFUL PROMOTER IN WRESTLING HISTORY would you bring in people likely to turn a title match into a Tony Danza on a pole match? Why do they need people who don’t have the first clue about business terms or practice when they have the likes of Vince McMahon, Arn Anderson, The Undertaker, Ric Flair, Triple H, Dean Malenko, Jim Cornette (Still working there in some capacity) Michael Hayes and a host of other wrestlers who have been in the game so long that they have a pretty damn good idea of what works.

I think at the end, it all comes down to one simple thought process. If the WWE is bringing in new writers, then they obviously think that there is a problem that needs to be fixed. If your show is getting ratings that you are satisfied with, then you don’t take the show away from the guys getting you those ratings, you only change if you think that you are under performing and can do better. And if you need somebody to take you back to the glory days, how are they supposed to get you there if they weren’t watching the glory days in the first place? They won’t know what they are aiming to do, other than one thing: They’ll have a Nielson rating in their head and ideas about what worked for them one time on NBC.

Face it: As much as a lot of us think he is an arrogant ass, If you were a promoter and if you had to choose between two people to book your wrestling show, JBL or the writer who annoyed JBL by asking how the fake blood keeps pouring out of his head, which would you want, the person who just exposed their complete and total ignorance not only to the practices of wrestlers, but also to the sacrifices they make in order to entertain - or would you choose the proven WWE mainstay, who’s been a multi time WWE champion, a tag champion, and has been with the company through good gimmicks and bad for the past 9 years or so.

To be honest, I don’t think it’s all that difficult a question there. Now, if these new writers are willing to learn from the older guys around them and listen to what the wrestlers say, they could learn to become great wrestling writers. But if they leave and the WWE brings in more writers with no experience of wrestling, or the current crop just completely ignore the talent and give me the by god horror of a Judy Bagwell return, then expect some dark times up ahead.

WCW learned the hard way that having wrestlers book their own angles wasn’t a great move. But their biggest success (nWo) came from the minds of wrestling men. The McMahons will continue to hire outside writers at their peril. Not because they’ll go the way of WCW, because lets face it, they are still the only major league game in town, but Vince and Steph may feel their pockets get a little bit lighter, because there won’t be oh so many happy campers putting money into them.


That’ll do it for this one. Just a reminder that voting closes in a matter of days over at wrestlingfanshof.co.uk, so get your votes in if you haven’t already, and make sure that you check out the results on the 23rd of August!

Any feedback, drop me a line at takeupthywrestlingboots@gmail.com

Until next time, all the best.

Pt2








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