Hardtime #84: Trend Breakers, Part Two
    Submitted by RIPbossman on Monday, July 31, 2006 at 3:56 AM EST



    Hardtime #84: Trend Breakers, Part Two

    Hello everyone, RIPbossman here with the sequal to Trend Breakers Part One. I got some mixed feedback on Trend Breakers Part One. In my feedback thread in the columns forum, the majority of other columnists who commented on my column said it kind of dragged on a little bit. Everyone else said that this column was great and very thought provoking. I think I can satisfy both sides of the fence by trimming down this column without depleting the depth I usually bring to the table. I decided I’m going to drop the jokes. I got some feedback from one of my readers saying that if I’m a serious writer, I’m a serious writer, and that’s all there is to it. I’m going to stick with what brought me to the dance, and that certainly wasn’t humor.

    And by the way, I think I’ll share a little bit of news with you. A radio station in my county (Y102) had contests all this week in which they were giving away tickets to see Smackdown! when it comes to Reading, Pennsylvania. They asked a trivia question in “What is Cruiserweight Champion Gregory Helms’ finishing move?” I ended up being the first caller, and answered “Shining Wizard” and I won tickets to see Smackdown! in the THIRD ROW. The edition of Smackdown! is set to air on September 1. Look for the fat, ugly guy in the audience. Come to think of it, considering it’s a wrestling show, that would be like picking a needle out of hay stack. I kid, I kid. The truth is the large majority of wrestling fans don’t fit the stereotypes that society has of us.

    If you have any feedback for this column, you may send it to david12345575@yahoo.com I enjoy interacting with my readers, and I promise to respond to each and every piece of feedback that I get.

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    When I let you guys go at the end of Trend Breakers Part One, I had discussed a few ideas as to why WWE’s popularity has fallen off considerably over the years. One reason I outlined was because there are no longer any mega stars in the industry to make wrestling popular. Another reason I outlined was because WWE jumped the shark creatively, and has not given wrestling fans any reason to want to come back. I also outlined that it all may be because of the fact that wrestlers started giving scripted promos instead of promos that come from the heart. Maybe these are all factors as to why wrestling’s popularity has gone downhill, or maybe they are not factors at all. Could it be possible that that the reason that the ratings have gone down is because of how WWE has a virtual monopoly on the wrestling market, and has no real competition? (Sorry TNA fans, but TNA just isn’t a threat to WWE…yet.)

    In order to explain this theory, let me first explain a real life scenario going on in my county. In my county, one FM radio station (Y102) had been the only FM radio station in my county for 25 years. We got other stations, don’t get me wrong, but this was the only home grown FM station in the county. People have a sense of loyalty and “hometownness” (that isn’t a word, but roll with me here) towards Y102. They play mostly classic rock and modern rock, but that’s not the point. People will listen to them because they are the only game in town. The DJ’s have always been interesting, and they’ve always had a moderate amount of giveaways to keep viewers tuning in. But the truth is they had no competition, so as long as they kept a respectable product, they were going to keep most of the listeners that they had. They weren’t overwhelmingly popular, but they were respectable. Basically put, they had a sense of complacency about their product, because without competition, it didn’t need to get any better in order to attract listeners.

    Then after 25 years of Y102 being the only game in town, FRANK FM. came along. Finally, there was another FM radio station in the country. And to top it off, they played the same genre of music that Y102 played. Because of the new kid on the block, Y102 decided to step up their game. DJ’s got more interesting, they did more listener request shows, more giveaways (which is how I won those Smackdown! tickets), and over all the station became better to listen to. FRANK FM tried hard to compete with Y102 as well, and as a result the overall listener ship in our county has gone up tremendously. People who never usually listened to the radio started listening to both stations, and both stations try hard to make them listen to their station more. Right now, more people in our county have been listening to FM radio then ever before.

    This is what has happened with the wrestling industry, only in a reverse order. When WCW started to air Monday Nitro, it was official that they were direct competition for WWE, then more then ever. In order to compete with each other, both sides tried their hardest to win the ratings war every week. We saw the N.W.O. and Hogan’s heel turn, we saw the rise of the star known as Goldberg, and we saw possibly the greatest storyline in wrestling history in Austin vs. McMahon. We saw the birth of The Rock, the invasion of The Radicals, and so on. Basically put, both sides brought out the best in each other. But now that WWE officially put WCW out of business, they have the same sense of complacency that Y102 had before FRANK FM came into town. There is no need for WWE to push themselves to a high level, because quite frankly, who’s going to push them to that next level?

    Perhaps this is the reason why WWE and wrestling in general has lost so much popularity over the years. Or perhaps there is one more reason, that may be a sole reason, or another additional factor that might be part of the solution were looking for. Maybe it all has to do with a little something I like to call a peak of gratification theory. That is, there reached a point where WWE gave it’s viewers all they could reasonably want in a WWE show, and that from there the fans knew it was all down hill, so they split from the wrestling scene. Could this really be the reason that we’re looking for? Let’s take a closer look at the matter, shall we?

    To explain this theory, let me first talk about a favorite time of year for a lot of people: the holiday season. It starts off in November with all the talk of Thanksgiving coming your way. Buying and making food, making arrangements to go somewhere or have friends and family come over… it’s all part of a good time. However, Thanksgiving is merely the Royal Rumble to Christmas’ Wrestlemania in the holiday season. In December, there’s probably three times the amount of build up towards Christmas as there is build up towards Thanksgiving in November. And then when Christmas comes, the event is so big that there is spill over into the next week. People still like to have friends and family over, and still hang their Christmas trees up during that time period. But after Christmas, it all goes downhill, not uphill in terms of “the holiday spirit”.

    This is what happened during wrestling’s “golden ages”. In the first golden age in the eighties and late nineties, wrestling peaked around Wrestlemania 8. At that time, they had a roster loaded with great stars. Bret Hart, Roddy Piper, Jake “The Snake” Roberts, The Undertaker, Macho Man Randy Savage, Ric Flair, Hulk Hogan, Sid Justice, and even the returning Ultimate Warrior. This was the epitome of everything you could reasonably want in a wrestling product. After Wrestlemania 8, things started to go down hill, but not by a lot. However, it was clear to the fans that it wasn’t going to get as good as it was before. Fans were given a sense of incredible gratification with the WWE product, and they became to expect that same level of entertainment in the product from then on. However, it just isn’t reasonable to keep any wrestling product incredibly exciting on a consistent basis. Even the hardcore ECW fans will tell you that ECW had it’s down periods.

    Now lets fast forward to 2001. At this point the Attitude Era had been running strong, and at Wrestlemania 17 WWE gave it’s fans one of the greatest pay per views of all time. Look at how loaded their roster was at this point. They had Chris Jericho, Kurt Angle, Chris Benoit, Eddie Guerrero, Kane, Big Show, The Undertaker, Triple H, Shane McMahon, Vince McMahon, The Rock, and Stone Cold Steve Austin. After Wrestlemania 17, their was virtually no way that WWE could have quenched the thirst that wrestling fans developed for the WWE product. With Wrestlemania 17, they developed unreasonable expectations from the WWE product. There wa some spill over of excitement after Wrestlemania 17, but the fans knew that it wasn’t getting better: it was only getting worse. Eventually many of them decided to stop watching the WWE product because of this.

    Now, between Part One and Part Two of Trend Breakers, I have analyzed and outlined 5 different possible theories as to why WWE’s popularity has gone down hill over the last few years. I’ll let you, the readers, decide for yourselves as to why WWE lost so many viewers. You might decide that it is one or a combination of the ideas I’ve outlined, or maybe you’ve got your own different ideas as to why this has happened to WWE. I know many of my feed backers have developed their own theories as to why WWE’s viewer ship has gone down hill, and now I’m going to give you my opinion on the matter.

    I personally think it is a combination of all five ideas that I have outlined, but the two ideas that I feel are most prominent are the ones about how wrestling simply has no mega stars in the industry right now, and how there is no real competition for WWE right now. I’ll start with the ‘no mega stars theory” Triple H simply isn’t nearly good enough as a face to be a mega star, and as a heel it is very hard to become a mega star. Ric Flair, as good as he was, could not make NWA a nation wide phenomenon like WWE was during it’s golden ages. John Cena is drawing in negative heat right now, so he’s practically a heel in the eyes of the fans. Batista is a good face, and is very popular, but when compared with Austin, the bottom line (no pun intended) is that he just doesn’t cut it as a mega star. Basically put, a mega star is someone who you would pay full admission to see based solely on the fact that they are on the card. There’s no one that fits that bill in the WWE right now.

    As far as WWE not having much competition, that’s pretty much true. TNA is the closest thing that WWE has to competition right now, and I seriously doubt WWE considers them to be a serious threat like WCW was. Like I said in the radio station analogy, competition will bring out the best in any business, and there simply isn’t anything there to push WWE to go to the next level. I feel they have a sense of complacency with their monopoly on the wrestling industry, and when a business is complacent, the best they usually can be is respectable. I’m not saying WWE made a bad decision to buy out WCW, because WCW was the one who declared war on WWE first, and it eventually was going to come down to one company left standing. But indirectly, WWE may have killed off any and all motivation they once had to become a phenomenal company like they once were.

    I honestly don’t feel the brand split is what caused many people to turn away from the WWE product. Ratings were on the fall before the brand split occurred, but it definitely didn’t do WWE any favors in bringing back viewers, either. Most people I’ve talked to who stopped watching wrestling say that they hate the idea of a roster split, and don’t even want to give it a chance. At first I hated the roster split, but now I have grown accustomed to it. I can realize there are more benefits to it than meets the eye, but I, along with many other people, want to have WWE merge the rosters to have one full product again instead of two watered down products. Most people aren’t willing to even give the roster split a chance, and thus it further leads to WWE not regaining the viewers that they lost.

    So that wraps it up for the Trend Breakers mini series of Hardtime. What could the reason be that WWE’s popularity has dropped off over the years? Why is it that you no longer see people wearing wrestling t-shirts everywhere and you don’t hear people spouting off popular wrestling catch phrases any more? It could be because wrestling has no one huge mega star for fans to look up to. It could also be because WWE jumped the shark creatively, and has not given fans a good enough reason to come back. Maybe it ‘s because WWE does not allow for most of it’s wrestlers to give ad libbed promos and instead forces them to give scripted promos. Or maybe it’s because the Monday Night War is over, and WWE now has a sense of complacency due to the lack of competition. Or perhaps the reason behind it all is because WWE gave it’s fans an overwhelming sense of gratification in their product, and WWE just couldn’t appease the fans after that because their expectations became unreasonably too high. I personally think it is most prominently a combination of how there is no one big mega star for fans to look up to and how WWE has no real competition to push them to be their best. But whatever the reason may be, there’s no denying that WWE’s popularity is no where close to where it was in years past.

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    I hope you all enjoyed that. If you didn’t notice, I wrote another column on Thursday of last week entitled “The Ego”. It’s a take off of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”, only with Vince McMahon as the main character, and a few other characters changed. I personally feel it’s a pretty creative column, and will probably only take a short time to read. I kind of used it as a way to hype the second edition of Trend Breakers, considering it they both have the same theme. If you enjoy this theme I used for Trend Breakers, you’ll probably enjoy “The Ego”.

    Once again, if you have any feedback for this column you may send it to david12345575@yahoo.com Remember, I promise to respond to everyone who sends me feedback.




    *NEW GALLERY* Very HOT Photos of Alicia Webb aka X-Pac's Sexy Girlfriend!

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