Take up thy wrestling boots and walk - Wrestling court - Wrestling vs. the IWC
Submitted by Pt2 on Tuesday, October 18, 2005 at 9:13 PM EST





Welcome once again to the column that is like the television show Cops in one respect, and that is it’s innocent until proven guilty, Take up thy wrestling boots and walk. I’m the man who pleads the fifth, Pt2, back once again here on LOP to serve Hard time on people who think that Brock Lesnar doesn’t look like a partially peeled onion.


An accusation has been levelled several times by wrestlers, promoters, etc et al and the rest of the entourage – The accusation has been levelled that the Internet, and more specifically the Internet Wrestling Community (IWC) is responsible for the death of wrestling; or at the very least, the traditional form of wrestling.

Naturally, prominent members of the IWC refute this, claiming to be fans, and nothing more – and that a decline in wrestling’s fortunes has nothing to do with the presence of spoilers on the net, and people talking about wrestlers personal lives and associations, and the general speculation and increase of knowledge would actually help the business – if the business would help itself.

Well, now, as a very peripheral member of the IWC who doesn’t really have to buy into the major arguments if I don’t want to – after all, the IWC doesn’t make me any cash – I’m going to judge their arguments. In this column, I’m going to play judge and jury on the IWC, as we examine Is the IWC guilty of Wrestling’s murder?

Ok, maybe the court room stuff is all a bit dramatic – let’s get down to the real business here. Wrestling numbers are down, and what is left of the WWE audience are either members of, or get serious information from, the IWC. The Internet Wrestling Community is no longer what it was in the days of 1998 and 1999, a few thousand people letting people know that Shane Douglas actually didn’t like Kevin Nash very much. The effects of the IWC are far reaching in that you can very quickly find out what has happened on a taped show, what is likely to happen over the next several months, all the surprise appearances before they happen, who is likely to work with who, who likes who, who’s dating who, who yadda yadda yadda…… as you can probably see, you can find out so much online if you actually want to look for it that there isn’t really any need to watch the shows anymore.

Taped shows were the main problem, I think. After all, you can’t really “Spoil” RAW – the quickest way to find out what happens is to watch it, and if your satisfied just hearing the results afterwards instead of watching the show, then you probably weren’t going to watch anyway. But shows like Smackdown! That have been taped and the “B”shows do have the problem of people being able to log on and find out who won the matches days before the broadcast purely because someone was in the arena that night.

But if that was the major problem, then why are RAW’s ratings much lower than they used to be? I know the comparison might be a touch unfair here – ratings are technically up since the jump back to the USA network and the last time that the WWE was on USA was at the peak of their recent success – but at the same time, I also feel it’s a very valid point, if Spoilers were the major problem that the Internet posed to the wrestling business, then numbers for shows wouldn’t be down quite so much, and if you disagree with that, then I think one thing can be considered an incontrovertible fact:

If spoilers were the main problem facing that the IWC poses to the wrestling industry, surely the live shows figures would be higher, at least to the point where they are not comparable with the figures of the “spoiled” show?

And lets be honest here people – Raw’s figures have been very comparable with the viewers that Smackdown! Had been getting over the past couple of years – when you consider the advantages that RAW has had, in fact it probably works out that Smackdown! Has occasionally done better ratings wise than RAW. And lets not bullshit ourselves here people – Wrestling is not the only televised product that has to put up with this kind of thing. While it has reached almost epidemic proportions in the field of wrestling, how many other TV shows can you go online and find spoilers for a season before it even starts? I’ll give you two guesses at a multiple choice answer – it’s either none or fucking lots. I’ve run into the occasional spoiler or two for Sitcoms I like that haven’t started yet when I haven’t been looking for them, just trying to find out when the hell I’ll get to see them again.

So yeah, the spoilers argument doesn’t hold out. It isn’t the ability to find out a shows results before hand that is limiting wrestling’s draw power, because it does seem that people who are watching the one show are watching the other – whether they read the spoilers before watching or just ignore them completely.

So what about that other bulk of information that you can get online? After all, how else do I know that Michael Hickenbottom and Paul Levesque are good friends? More to the point, how do I know their real names? Surely I should know them merely by their alter ego’s and believe everything that was force fed to me by the WWE, that they were once friends but have since become involved in a feud that has crossed many years in a desperate quest to prove to people that they are better than the other guy.

But I don’t believe that. Partially because ever since Vince McMahon and Terry Bollea lifted the lid on the wrestling business in order to draw more families and kids into the arena’s and make more money from T-shirts no one has really bought the intense hatred like a small percentage of wrestling crowds actually used to, but more likely of the precise reason is that I can log on to the internet and find out virtually everything about their professional lives, and to be perfectly honest, if I was interested in looking I’m sure I could find out a pretty worrying amount about their private lives too. But unlike some of the obsessive you find online, I believe private lives are just that, and to be frank…. I don’t really care how many times ring rat x slept with wrestler y in motel z, it’s not something that appeals to me.

But anyway, back on topic.

The truth is, what happens now, more often than not, is that we have actually become too smart for our own good. Not in the way that you actually think, because when you actually step foot in the ring, you realise how much you don’t know (and can’t know until your involved), but we definitely know too much in other ways. Confused? Let me try and ease you through this.
With the exception of the occasional angle or match result, wrestling is actually pretty straightforward. Once you’ve watched it for a while most of the things you see on TV can be predicted. You know after a while that despite the comeback HHH isn’t going to lose a match to a midcarder. You know that the title isn’t going to be put on a relative unknown – and the internet makes that all the more apparent, because a lot of the time any heady optimism that you can take in gets ground out of you by the realism of the rest of the world.

Now that’s probably a bit harsh. You can’t really blame other people for grinding out your optimism – but lets be honest here. The Internet does make more people more aware of peoples position on the card, and the idea that might be planted in your head of a Shelton Benjamin main event push will disappear as someone else who doesn’t share your “glass is half full” view of life will point out all the flaws in your half baked idea.

The fact is, midcarders don’t win major titles, and the fact is, with the Internet and everything that is written about every last wrestler on the internet, you pretty much know every workers position in his respective company, and that is just all the more true when you talk of the WWE. While previously, when someone started winning matches for some people there was an element of surprise, now we all either follow the wrestling news online or know a wrestling fans who does, and that sphere of influence means that we knew Matt Hardy didn’t “Gate crash” RAW, and that when John Cena challenged the babyface Brock Lesnar following Wrestlemania XIX that he wasn’t leaving with the championship – just as much as we knew he was leaving with the belt at Wrestlemania XXI.

Wrestling always had very familiar aspects – but with the inclusion of what we can learn from the net, all that extra information that is now oh so easy to attain, it does just make it all the more predictable, and that is what hurts wrestling. Knowing the long term plans for a storyline means that often, especially in the modern climate where creative booking seems to have become something of a thing of the past, you can predict who is going to win every match in a feud, and rarely lose. And that itself could be the major problem. We have reached a point where the wrestling climate is safe, and we know almost everything that was behind the curtain. While there is always the chance of surprise if there are companies dukeing it out for the bragging rights of being the top wrestling company, if there is no danger then there is no need to shake things up – and so politics, backstage relationships and the rest of the stuff that we can all find out about takes over as the main motivation for the product, because it must help keep the stars happy.

The question is: Is the process permanent? If I walk away from the net tomorrow, and never log onto a wrestling website, can I start watching wrestling the way I used to watch before I knew that Wrestler x was dating diva y and that Jim Ross likes to take ambiguous jabs at wrestlers in his company and make vague references that the old days were better. I’m pretty sure that I don’t need to know it all, and it’s certainly no drug – in that respect I can walk away from it. But lets be honest, I’m not certain that without top storytelling in the ring, I’ll ever be able to forget some of the things that I didn’t know in my younger days. Without a masterful performance by the likes of HHH or HBK, Ric Flair or Chris Benoit, without that level of skill in the ring will I ever be able to forget what I now know – I think we all recognise the total difference between a midcarder on their way up, and a midcarder that the champ is beating cleanly. I think we can all tell the difference between the night the champ is dropping the title, and the night the title is being teased as a build up to a later match. And I’m not certain that any amount of time away from wrestling on the internet can wipe that. I’m not convinced that any amount of time away from wrestling completely could get rid of it, now I think of it.

So, in reality, this is the way it is. The Internet hasn’t killed wrestling. The kids will come into it and see it with the same wonderment that we always have. People reading things on the internet are still watching it. Numbers aren’t down because of the net, they’re down because the product isn’t as strong as it once was, and there is no one like Austin or The Rock who people can get behind. What the net has done is created a negative culture – We’ve created a situation where we can’t be happy with the basic wrestling product that we were happy with before, because we know it all before hand. Now, we have a situation where we can only be truly happy and satisfied with an exceptional wrestling product, similar to the 1996 WCW or 2000 WWF – and we can only be satisfied with it in a time where the WWE has no real commercial imperative to put on shows of that quality. Vince McMahon is known to be at his best with his back to the wall. The modern wrestling ambience doesn’t put him in that position.

So I guess we’re all kind of our own worst enemies. But for some reason, despite the fact that I never (or rarely) leave the shows thinking “wow” anymore, I like most of the rest of the members of the IWC that I speak with, still watch the shows, buy the PPV’s, and go to the live events.

In that case, not only is the IWC not responsible for the death of wrestling: but wrestling isn’t even dying. Remember that all the people crying doom and gloom for wrestling are probably still watching too. And they’ll probably still be watching when they have to pull something out and the product does give us the weekly moments that make us go “wow” again.


That’s it. All feedback to takeupthywrestlingbootsandwalk@gmail.com and I’ll reply to you at the first convenient moment.

Do you think you can convince people of a wrestler’s greatness? Check out www.wrestlingfanshof.co.uk and follow the instructions to find out how to have your say on a wrestler by writing an article.

Ok, take care people.

Pt2









*NEW GALLERY* AMAZING Recent Pix of Candice Michelle Soaking Herself for Diggnation! WOW!

• Quick Links -
  [Back to LOP] [News Archives] [Results] [Columns] [Forums]