Take up thy wrestling boots and walk #120 - Enlightenment, reversals, and Turning back the clock
Submitted by Pt2 on Tuesday, December 13, 2005 at 12:13 AM EST





Welcome for the 120th time to the only column that thinks it’s cute and knows it’s sexy, Take up thy wrestling boots and walk. I’m the columnist that has a family and Cactus Jack doesn’t give a damn, Larry Santo… I mean Pt2, back once again from the depths of the week to talk about anything and everything that is somehow relevant to pro wrestling.

I remember hearing a rumour a while back, that the WWE was fed up with the business being as exposed as ultimately, they had made it, and that some of the more traditional elements of the dressing room were in favour of attempting a return to a more traditional way of operating, where secrecy would be more guarded, and the business would be protected to a much greater extent.

Lets be honest here, we’re not talking reverting totally back to the AWA days, where backstage wrestlers couldn’t hang out together if they had a different role in the company or had to talk in “Kayfabe” or “Carny” or one of several other words that wrestlers elect to use for the language of the locker room; The days where that was a necessity to protect the business are long gone, and any attempt to return to them would result in failure very quickly. When Vince McMahon and Hulk Hogan let the cat out of the pro wrestling bag to get around some state laws, then they set themselves on a course.

But lets be honest; they can’t go far back up that road now, even if they want to. To some degree they could authorise a complete clamp down: Make everything a need to know basis, make all their shows “live” to avoid the spoilers, and operate a zero-tolerance policy regarding leaking things to the internet; but with their recent ventures towards marketing their “B” shows on the internet, surely that would just annoy the very people they are attempting to draw in?

You see, in reality, it goes far beyond the Internet now. The Internet is a tool that has helped to enlighten fans, and if they were to try to put wrestling back into its box and promote some of the mystique again, then they would have to end the influence of the internet in wrestling – otherwise it is like watching a magic trick that you already know the secret to – but it is important to note that the internet alone is not responsible, and now we have reached a point where the enlightenment itself is a larger factor than the tool. The fact that we know as much as we do is enough to ensure that for our generation, no matter how many spoilers we try to avoid or news posts that we attempt not to read, we know about allegiances, back room politics, marriages, friendships, lawsuits, fines, past disagreements, backstage brawls, heated verbal exchanges, jealousy, dating, cheating, sex, drugs, rock and roll and all the other elements of the human drama that occur backstage in a major wrestling promotions locker room. And the sad thing is that we know about them to such a degree, that even were we not to know the exact people involved, we could soon identify the symptoms from watching their performances and analysing their role on TV, and with little effort deduce what we seek to avoid knowing.

Wrestling has been called a male soap opera – it’s been called that for as long as I can remember, so probably since before I was old enough to think about it in those terms. McMahon and the WWF got around their little legal loopholes by saying to the world, “it’s ok, we’re not a real athletic competition with a great risk of death in the ring like boxing or a marital arts event – instead, we are like a soap opera, giving you athleticism and the elements of human drama you can only get in scripted TV”. But in doing so, McMahon and the WWF created an interest in how they did what they did, which give birth to the “Secret’s of pro wrestling” series that we all know. And then came what we have now, a situation in which wrestling’s second soap opera, created by the lifting of the veil in the late eighties, is more interesting and important to people than the equivalent that we get to see on our TV screens.

Take Matt Hardy and Edge, for example; An attempt to play on real life heat by the WWE. But in reality, when this story broke, all across the net for weeks it was hard to get people to talk about anything else. As a Matt Hardy fan, I was interested in what was going to come next for him; but every columnist, whether looking to Hardy’s future or taking a more “tabloid” style of reporting the affair between Amy Dumas and Adam Copeland had something to say about it. And not a great deal of the in ring product of any company got mentioned. I looked through a list of reported news, and found a page that featured articles on Edge/Lita, then looked at what else was being reported around it.

And aside from other mentions of Matt Hardy, Edge and Lita, there was a wrestler’s death that went relatively unnoticed, rumours about Kevin Nash’s retirement and a move into movies, rumours about a TNA television deal, and a lot of speculation as to who would be wrestling on the ECW ppv.

So despite a wrestler dieing in a relatively routine manoeuvre, a potentially devastating media weapon for another attack on sponsors of wrestling, all that really got reported was things behind the scene: This guy might be hanging it up, this company might be getting on TV, and these guys might wrestle again one day; doesn’t exactly read like storyline spoilers for the next six months, does it? There was a time when that would be exactly what we would have wanted. That would have been news; Ultimate Warrior and Hulk Hogan’s personal feelings about each other would have been a moot point, and the net could keep them to itself, since we would really only be interested in knowing who would be leaving the Toronto Skydome with the world title.

But now we do know too much for the process to be reversed, and since if we sit down and think it through we can work out the outcome of most matches (with a few notable exceptions) we instead turn our attention to the things that we don’t know for definite, what occurs behind the drama; the things we can’t predict because life isn’t scripted, and much like the concept of television show “Big Brother” where people forced together will provide their own drama, wrestling is a world in which people are forced into spending incredible amounts of time together, out on the road and preparing to perform. By allowing us to get even the first glimpse behind that curtain, we have been given far too much for the WWE to ever try to take it away from us and have any success. Because much like Adam and Eve in the bible, once we have been given knowledge, they can never take it away. They can try to hide it from us, and hope we don’t pass on this virus of comprehension to the next generation, but we are a lost cause; Once we know that Shawn Michaels and HHH are friends, it becomes much harder to believe when they are screaming at each other about how they want to kill each other and end each others careers. With all the history between the two men, I’m not sure any amount of great storytelling can make us forget.

And we know. We know that if a guy has a rivalry with someone and they are in the ring with them on a recurring basis that they are probably great friends, and we don’t care. It’s all part of the show, and we’ve known for ages. We’re fine with it. But it still doesn’t fit in with putting wrestling back to somewhere closer to where it once was.

I’m not sure what my point is in all this. It was just on my mind. A little tighter secrecy on storylines etc. is never a bad thing, and I hope the WWE manage it. I really do, because although I manage it, I know a lot of people who wouldn’t look but don’t have the willpower to look away from spoilers. So less of them out there is definitely a good thing. But please don’t think that the internet is only the enemy or that removal of spoilers will fix everything and make you see Randy Savage as gravel tongued god again, because it won’t – unless you do already. It won’t make us a more naïve audience again, more willing to accept everything thrown at us by the TV and swallow it without questioning; we will see beefed up muscle heads with no mic skills and ask “what do you think these guys offer us?” even without people on the internet telling us that next week they are going to crush a little guy with 4 times the talent, because we are the audience that the WWE created. We’re a bit like a vampire that the company tried to satisfy by giving us a little drop of blood, only to learn of the voracity of our hunger as we sink our teeth into the jugular of information.

Well, this is a pretty abstract column from me. I’m not sure how it came off, I’m not used to writing in this fashion, but I enjoyed writing it; and I hope you enjoyed reading it too. If you’d like to get in touch and give some feedback then you are welcome to, by e-mailing me at takeupthywrestlingboots@gmail.com, and I will make every effort to reply to any mail received.

Coming soon, Random Guy 5 will return to defend his YBTB championship against one of our Readers, who will try and square up to the 2 time champion who has an almost perfect record. Join us to see how they do!

It’s voting time over at www.wrestlingfanshof.co.uk as well, and Hulk Hogan and Harley Race both look like strong candidates for entry. There are many other popular wrestling figures nominated, so to get your favourites in, visit the site and vote! Unlike the WWE hall of fame and the Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame, this is a Hall of Fame that you can make a difference!

Until next time,

Take care

Pt2









*NEW GALLERY* Amazing! RAW's Melina Taking a Shower Backstage!

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