Take up thy wrestling boots and walk #155 - By any other name
Submitted by Pt2 on Thursday, December 6, 2007 at 1:23 AM EST





Welcome to the column that asks how much money did they spend on the plastic surgery, Take up thy wrestling boots and walk. I’m the columnist who has the hundred dollar bills falling out of his pocket, Pt2, back once again to talk about the intricate hairs that make up the camel of professional wrestling.

Think, for a second, about the names of these three wrestling companies.

World Wrestling Entertainment.

Total Non-stop Action.

Ring of Honor.

I think I can say without fear of contradiction that these are the three biggest wrestling promotions in North America right now. It is also fair to say that the fans of each are fairly homosocial – that is, they have a decided preference towards one of the three companies and they operate as wrestling fans primarily from a position of loyalty to one of those companies. In my experience, it is a minority that claims equal levels of fandom to two of the three, and the number of people who claim equal fandom to all three seem to be virtually non-existent.

This is almost certainly down to the distinction in style between the three shows. RoH is the pure wrestling show and attracts an audience based upon that. WWE, on the other hand, is much more sports-entertainment based, heavily reliant on interviews and angles to complement a less intensive wrestling product. TNA would seem to fall somewhere in-between, and at times resembles the old WCW – just on a lower budget and some cynics would say, without the star-power.

However, there is one thing that these three companies all have in common. Their names.

Look at the way all three are named. Now, compare them with the old name for the WWE, which for those people with incredibly short memories was the World Wrestling Federation. Compare the three names with Verne Gagne’s old promotion, the American Wrestling Association.

These names convey within them a sense of organisation, a sense of sporting credibility. They sound like licensing bodies that might put on an athletic contest. More to the point, the initials and the full name are interchangeable, without losing any kayfabe effects – something that is missing in any of the three larger American promotions now. If you are uncertain, try putting them into a sentence and you will see what I mean.

The World Wrestling Federation championship and the WWF Championship carry an equal weighting. They both sound like sanctioned, athletic championships, and if you are attempting to suspend disbelief while watching the show this authentic sound is helpful. However, it doesn’t work with WWE. While the initials still carry the right kind of sound (the WWE Championship), the notion of a World Wrestling Entertainment Championship just doesn’t hold up. It doesn’t allow you to fall into the fallacy that the company is a legitimate sporting enterprise offering up athletic competition. The word entertainment (and when you hear WWE, the word is always inescapable) is a constant reminder at the very moment that we are trying to forget that the product is entertainment, that it is scripted, that it is not the very thing we want to pretend it is.

The WWE is probably the most extreme example. The other two companies don’t have such a self defeating word as ‘entertainment’ in their titles, but they still don’t sound like wrestling companies. ‘World Championship Wrestling’ sounds like a company that would sanction a Championship Wrestling match, ‘Total Non-stop Action’ does not. Total Non-Stop Action sounds like a guarantee, and when I hear it I find it locates me closer to thinking of TNA as a TV show, rather than as an athletic body. The name implies it has more in common with ‘When good girls go bad’ than with the NWA Championship, and it is this self fracturing split between the NWA and a name that is a moronic sexualised acronym only legitimised by having the word ‘wrestling’ tacked onto the end of it that lies at the bottom of the problems TNA have always had – with tradition on one side and the inane MTV friendly name (and occasionally attitude) on the other, exactly what is TNA’s identity? What does TNA want to be? It wasn’t straightforward to tell in the early days when the NWA feuded with Sports Entertainment Xtreme, and it has just gotten harder to tell as time has gone on. In truth, I don’t think even the people at the top really know.

RoH is the most ‘straight wrestling’ show of the three, but what exactly IS a Ring of Honor? ‘The Ring of Honor Championship’ doesn’t sound anymore legitimate than the other two, and legitimacy is something you’d think RoH would strive for. In reality, it is all about distance – and that is what RoH, TNA and WWE all have in common within their names.

In using the name Entertainment, the WWE is trying to distance itself a) from the notion that is wrestling is real and the lawsuits that they have always been hit with, and b) from any association with the WWF name and the World Wildlife Fund. After legal wrangles for years, they finally saw the opportunity to change the name of the company and move toward something that emphasised the company’s sports entertainment profile in its very name.

TNA Wrestling, or TNA, used the acronym as part of the name NWA-TNA, suggesting a link between the traditional and the post-millennial attitudes to wrestling, but when it became time to expand, they dropped the NWA. This is all about distance from WCW and the WWE, and the desire to set them up as an ‘alternative’. I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily been entirely unpopular, but I’ve talked to more people who preferred the National Wrestling Alliance label to the TNA one.

As for Ring of Honor, the key word is honour (sic), and it’s again designed to distance them from the sports entertainment world in which the wrestlers, even the baby-faces, predominantly have no honour. The question is though, is all this distancing really necessary, or even beneficial?

Obviously, the WWE had to change their name to something, if they wanted to avoid the constant wrangling in the courts. But people will always blame Pro-wrestling for any injuries suffered by people ignoring the warnings, or will even try to attach the blame to wrestling for any misdoings performed by wrestling fans. Changing the name to Entertainment would not, and indeed has not, saved the WWE from this. So they have this self defeating word in their name which chips away at the suspension of disbelief every time they say it, and they don’t really get all the benefits from it that they wanted in the first place. Would they not have been better off adopting an ‘alliance’, ‘association’, ‘company’ or ‘organisation’ moniker? Hey, why not even revert to ‘WWWF’?

As for TNA and RoH, the main reason is to distance both companies and help establish the individual identities of the two. But how necessary is it? Surely the differences from both each other and the ‘major’ players of the past would be obvious, especially in the case of Ring of Honor, to anyone who happened to turn on the TV? I can’t help thinking myself, that RoH image might be better suited by having a traditional name to complement their traditional style – anyone who sees that show will know what it is all about within thirty seconds, they don’t NEED a catchy hook in the title.

As for TNA – they should pick a name that will last. In ten years time, TNA wrestling will sound very dated, almost as if we were looking back at a mid-nineties promotion called ‘Fresh Prince Wrestling’ – TNA wrestling, aside from being a crap play on words, situates them very much as a small time company with a small TV show playing to an audience at a very distinct historical moment. If TNA survive for 10-20 years, they will eventually change their name, because from an image standpoint they will eventually have no choice.

So in my opinion, the company’s names aren’t doing them any favours. If you want so suspend disbelief, best have your finger ready on the mute button to silence any time a commentator begins to pronounce it – and for the love of god, don’t look at any logo’s in the corner of the screen!

That’ll do it for this one. Relatively short, I know, but I plan on being back a few more times before Christmas so I hope that will make up for it. I can be reached at takeupthywrestlingboots@gmail.com if you have any comments.

Until next time,

Take care

Pt2









***DIRECT LINK*** Amazing Pix of Former WWE Diva Terri Runnels! WHOA!!

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