Breaking The Walls Down - What Doesn't He Understand? Submitted by Chris Dailey on Tuesday, January 16, 2007 at 8:29 AM EST
Breaking The Walls Down
Hello all and welcome back to another edition of Breaking The Walls Down. I hope this column finds you all well. The weather we are having is so unusual for this time of year. But, I do not like the winter at all, so I’m not complaining. I’m going to move onto the column this week and skil Bits and Pieces.
What Doesn’t He Understand?
He is hailed by many as the creative wrestling genius. By some he is looked at as a mad man. And by the rest, he is viewed as somewhere in-between. However, there is no denying his marketing and staying power. Vincent McMahon is the face that personifies professional wrestling as we know it. Ever since he took over control of the company from his father, many believed he was going to run it into the ground. While he certainly has had his pitfalls, he has done anything but run his company into the ground. Yet one thing Vince seems to do, that completely astonishes me each and every time, he will put together a storyline so horrible, it makes every single viewer want to turn to another channel. Moreover, for those that are in attendance at the event and unfortunately can’t turn the channel, boo with such ferocity that there is not hope of censoring it out. Enter The Donald Trump vs. Rosie O’Donnell segment on RAW.
From the very beginning, it was doomed to failure. Seeing the imposter Trump and O’Donnell segments in the back were neither funny nor entertaining. It was a struggle to see Vince have his sit-down with Rossie in the back. Then, seeing the imposter Trump in the chair getting his hair done was simply boring. Vince prides himself on entertaining TV and claims that’s what his product was about, yet we get something like this and it sets professional wrestling back? Doubt me? Think about what people who are not professional wrestling fans think of the product.
Yeah, that’s what I thought. It’s a joke. I hear it all the time and I refute their claims with points of my own, but when Vince does things like this, it makes it all too easy. You may say that the incident on RAW last week was an isolated one, but I would argue otherwise.
Things that we’ve seen before that show Vince simply doesn’t get it are:
1.) The Fake Diesel and Fake Razor Ramon. 2.) Mark Henry and Mae Young having their love child, which is a hand. 3.) Hawk’s drunk angle. 4.) Droz’s puking angle. 5.) Huckster vs. Nacho Man 6.) And the list goes on.
While I certainly will admit that McMahon has had some hits with his off-the-wall skits, more often than not they are misses. And, when they miss, they miss bad. Look at what happened on RAW last week. Did you hear how loudly the crowd was booing? Did you see how bored the crowd looked? Did you hear how the announcers tried to cover it up, but fail miserably? All of this happened while Vince McMahon sat at ringside. I really hope it hit him this time, sadly, I don’t think it did. I believe that he thinks he simply either missed the mark by a little or slightly went overboard, nothing more, nothing less.
And now is not the time for this kind of experimentation on McMahon’s part. A serious blow was dealt to his company with the loss of Triple H for 4 – 6 months. His rosters are already low in talent and he needs to put forth quality programming that keeps everyone entertained. Smackdown and ECW are barely if at all, keeping people entertained. RAW is the staple show for the WWE and now is the time for McMahon to put forth his best effort. And, showing a look-alike Rosie O’Donnell eating ice cream cake is not it.
It is my hope that Vince moves on from these atrocious skits that he puts on and learns from them – learns from them by the people who pay for his product. His product hurts when his fans say it’s time for it to hurt. Cramming things down fans’ throats is not the way to appease them. Forcing the issue in such a way that it makes everyone ill is not the way to make the fans happy. Maybe it’s time to let the talent shine on the roster. Maybe it’s time to see what the young wrestlers have and don’t have. Having an open tryout of sorts may be a good idea. The fans don’t have to be told it’s happening, but maybe by having more matches it could become more evident to those behind the scenes and the fans who is and who isn’t cut out to make it in the business. Only by showing off their talents can we know who is willing to step up and help fill the gap that is painfully obvious on the shows.
That is what is missing right now, talent, not skits. Good, solid matches are becoming less and less on these shows. Sure, we see O.K. matches for the most part, and sometimes we see a spectacular match, but those are becoming so few in number it is making us all forget what it used to be like. Remember the Monday Night Wars? I hate to dig up the past like this, but it’s something that bares recognition. We were so entertained in those years that we had no idea how lucky we truly were. We had wrestling! Good, solid wrestling. Gone now are those days. Do you honestly think for one minute that Vince McMahon really believes that The NWA-TNA is stiff competition? I am sure he monitors the situation, but not to the point that it affects his programming or his product.
That’s the difference. Vince McMahon doesn’t have the competition necessary to make him stop from giving us bogus skits like what we saw last week on RAW. Rosters be damned, he’s still the top dog in the business by a long shot. No competition breeds complacency and whether or not Vince sees it, complacency is where the WWE is heading. The loss of Triple H hurts his product for sure, but not to the point where competition would. Vince McMahon needs competition to bring out the best he has to offer. Every single time some form of competition pushes him, he raises the bar to a new level and the fans receive a better product because of it. Until then, Vince McMahon will never get that his skits aren’t popular. He never pulled those kind of skits during the Monday Night Wars when they were in their prime (notice I said prime, as the Fake Razor Ramon and Fake Diesel angles happened when the Monday Night Wars were just beginning). Vince was in the middle of a business war, he didn’t have time for such pointless skits. The problem is he doesn’t realize his paying customers don’t have the time either.
