S.L.L.

I'm trying to puzzle out the circumstances that one could seriously believe this to be true without just being a disenchanted fan/ex-fan who uses Cena as a scapegoat for their problems with the company these days. I'm coming up with these: 1. Post-Attitude Era WWF/E is the only wrestling you know, and you don't have any real point of reference for an actual protected main event star 2. You really believe that wins and losses alone determine how protected a wrestler is 3. You JUST DON'T CARE to the same extent as WWE Beyond that, I've got nothing. I'm not trying to be nasty here. Honestly, I'm not. But understand, I've seen greatness in professional wrestling. I'm a guy who has said over and over again that wrestling is an incredibly simplistic and incredibly limited form of entertainment, and yet, with the narrowest of margins to work in and the barest of elements to work with, it is capable of so much. So to see people looking at WWE's treatment of Cena and - whether they like him or not - honestly saying to themselves, "yeah, they're doing the best they can do with him"...it's honestly kind of disheartening.

Your argument's getting a bit muddled. If you want to argue that they tried to make Cena a bigger star but did it in an incompetent and counterproductive manner, I'd certainly agree with that. But if you're arguing that they deliberately sought to avoid making him a bigger star while putting him in every main event, putting him over everyone on the roster, and cross-promoting him to an unprecedented degree, that's a different story. I'm definitely not arguing the former, because they're definitely not trying to make him a bigger star. I'm strongly considering the latter, but calling it "deliberate" requires a degree of wrestling promoter mind-reading that I can't quite muster. I'm cynical enough about McMahon and his underlings to think it's possible, maybe even likely. But I wouldn't bet my life on it. What I am arguing is this: 1. THEY JUST DON'T CARE 2. WHEN EVERYONE'S A SUPERSTAR, NOBODY IS 3. IT DOESN'T MATTER! It's hard for me to pinpoint exactly when WWE's current booking malaise really kicked in, but it seems believable enough that Cena's initial push into a main event spot was a deliberate one. He may have been intended to be a star at first. But if it hadn't kicked in yet, it kicked in not long after, because when he didn't immediately catch fire as a top babyface (and not without justification, I admit), they started going through the motions with his booking, and haven't stopped to this day. They don't care enough to try and get people more invested in his character, nor do they care enough to throw him aside and try someone new. Where you see a guy omnipresent in the main event scene because they're desperate to make him a star, I see a guy omnipresent in the main event scene because he's been established as the default choice, and choosing anything else - or choosing to do anything else with him - would require a level of effort they don't care about exerting. This is reinforced by the internal memo that "it's the brand that draws", so there's no incentive to try anything else anyway. And as a result, nothing that happens matters. But if you drive away the latter in an attempt to pick up the former, you risk losing both. Sometimes a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Or in other words.... What was it that I said in my first post in this thread? This response, more than anything, points to why this might be the case. Maybe the reason we look for quick fixes that address surface-level issues rather than attacking real problems is because attacking real problems means WWE making major changes on a level we're not all comfortable with. Maybe we'd rather have a WWE that will never be wildly successful, important, or even good again, but will at least be stable, rather than one that changes drastically, but - whether that change pans out for them or not - leaves a large chunk of us behind.

I don't think anyone's arguing he's a mainstream star to that level, or even close. In my case, I'm arguing just the opposite - he had the potential to be that kind of star, and they blew it. If I thought he already was, I probably wouldn't be in this thread.

I always felt the same way. I think I have said this before, but Michael Cole is good at two things as an announcer - getting over the ethical ramifactions of an angle, and setting up JBL for jokes (and playing off of JBL's jokes...three things...almost fanatical devotion to the pope....). Pairing him with JBL really alleviates a lot of the problems I usually have with him.

It's not really a matter of wins and losses, though. I mean, on paper, Cena is no less protected than any of the big Attitude Era stars. He's portrayed as an extraordinarily successful wrestler. What he's not portrayed as is a respectable wrestler, certainly not relative to his position. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that Cena is the least protected top star in the recorded history of professional wrestling, and second place is so far away from him that I can't even see who it is. Let me put it to you this way: Think back to Mania 23 and the events building to it. Michaels cut a lot of promos about how Cena was a tool, and how much better he was, and how he was gonna beat him. Then comes Mania 23, and Cena taps Michaels cleanly in the center of the ring. After the match, Cena extends a hand to Michaels, but Michaels gives him a dirty look and walks away, and the next night on Raw, Michaels cuts a promo about Cena didn't really win, wasn't the better man, etc. Replace Cena's name with that of any other top face in wrestling history, and the fallout of this is obvious: Michaels is shown to be a whiner and a sore loser, and ultimately turns heel as a result. With Cena as the top face, not only is Shawn not presented as a whiner or a sore loser, not only does he not turn heel, he's not even really presented as being wrong. Cena is presented as someone who merits so little respect from the crowd, that he can beat one of the biggest stars in the company clean as a sheet in the main event of the biggest money show ever in wrestling to that point, and they can turn around the very next night and tell you "he didn't really beat him", and you would be expected to take that claim seriously. All the PPV main event wins in the world are meaningless in the face of that kind of booking apathy. That Cena has become the degree of star that he has in spite of that only serves as a testament to the fact that he probably could have been much, much bigger.

Phony, soulless, corporate poseur Cena is exactly the kind of guy Attitude Era fans were taught to hate. And remaking WWE in the image of this phony, soulless, corporate poseur would have ushered in a new boom period? Illustrating how he was more than that may have ushered in a new boom period. THEY JUST DON'T CARE, so they didn't do that. Other than Cena and Michaels in the main event, No Way Out was Smackdown-exclusive. And Bad Blood 2003 did a good byrate pretty much exclusively on the basis of being the first brand-exclusive PPV, so Backlash's anemic numbers represented a huge step backwards. So doing the opposite of the thing that gave them a good buyrate gave them a bad buyrate? Gee, clearly that is Cena's fault. No Way Out had some more interpromotional matches than you remember, but was more SmackDown-centric than I remembered, so I'll give you that. It's well-established that WWE has remained profitable largely by developing revenue streams that are independent of its ability to put asses in seats. And I posted a graph in the HOF candidates thread showing that PPV buys declined every year from 2005 to 2010 before a Rock-assisted rebound in 2011. Explain to me how they were making record money in 2007 without Cena having a hand in it. I'm not seeing it. My recollection is the exact opposite. When crowds first started turning on Cena in 2005, WWE went to absurd lengths to try to turn the tide. First, they tried to recreate Austin/McMahon with Cena/Bischoff. Running the most obvious, hack-tastic angle in the 21st century wrestling playbook was "going to absurd lengths"? My recollections of 2005 WWE have faded a lot, I admit. One thing I remember very clearly about it, though, was that Angle was the classic example of a guy who was "too cool" to meaningfully work heel opposite Cena, a theme that would recur a lot over the next few years. I'll reserve my comments on booking apathy at that point, though. There's probably someone better equipped to discuss it than me. John Cena is the most prominent member of the regular roster. Changing that would require effort, so he will remain in that spot until acted upon by an outside force. There's no more evidence now that they're actually invested in making him a star than they were then. This is just booking entropy, and if anything, it makes it all the more clear that Tom was right - the goal is to maintain status quo, not to create a big money star. The brand, not the wrestlers. And you'd have to be out of your mind to watch them the past few years and see otherwise. If only they could do more to show that they're invested in making Cena a bigger star. Like having him in the main event of every PPV where he's physically able to perform despite holding the world title (or any title, for that matter) for exactly zero days during that span. Or having him go over Brock Lesnar when booking logic and common sense pointed in the opposite direction. Yes, if only they could do more than that, like BOOKING HIM COMPETENTLY. Did you quote what I wrote up there without actually reading it? A sustained main event push =/= investing in making a guy a bigger star. If that sounds bizarre, well, that's because it is. In fact, it's the whole point I've been trying to make in this thread: current WWE is so fundamentally broken, that I can point to a guy who's as established in the main event firmament as Cena is, and say, with 100% seriousness, that they're under-utilizing him. That's how fucked they are. Are you really arguing that is still such a thing as "WWE's best efforts"? What difference does that make in whether the older fans you've turned your back on will come back? Who the fuck cares? My point here was that if you're forced to choose between a growing young fanbase and a dwindling old fanbase, and you can't get both, you choose the growing young fanbase. If your long-term goal is "reclaim the old guys", you're doing it wrong.

Hey, I finally got my internet connection back! Stupid hurricane. Always trying to mess with my good time. Alright, where were we.... Isn't that exactly what I said? Phony, soulless, corporate poseur Cena is exactly the kind of guy Attitude Era fans were taught to hate. It was the first minor PPV to be tri-branded. Actually, no...No Way Out was tri-branded that year, too. But that's besides the point. It is true that PPV buyrates dipped slightly from the year before on average. No getting around that. They still made more money than they had the year before, or any year before. So clearly they had something going for them that they maybe could've utilized better. You know, I haven't brought it up yet, because I didn't intend to make this thread all about Cena, but it's worth noting that, in addition to not caring about giving us The Cena Show, they also didn't care about giving skeptics a reason to want to see The Cena Show. Before blood was banned from the shows outright, Phil and Tom always used to make this point about how he suffered from never getting to blade in his matches, as that's the traditional way to get a guy who appeals to kids and women to appeal to adult men, too. Blood helped make adult males see Dusty as more than a jive-talking clown and the R'n'R's as more than ugly pretty boys that drove the teenyboppers wild. But WWE usually only allowed for one bladejob per show, and that was always going to go to HHH, because HHH basically spent his entire main event run like he was at pro wrestler fantasy camp. Now, that's just one small detail, and it's one that wouldn't be available to them forever, obviously, but it is endemic of their treatment of Cena in general. It's not just that there's a large portion of the crowd who isn't interested in Cena, it's that WWE isn't interested in making you interested in Cena. I swear, I have never seen a promotion just throw their hands in the air and give up the way they did with Cena. They met the slightest bit of resistance, and they just said "well, that's as big as he'll ever get...maybe we can make it a thing that some of the fans cheer him and some of the fans boo him". And yeah, they can talk all they want to about how "unique" Cena's crowd reaction is or whatever. At the end of the day, it's a monument to WWE's staunch refusal to do anything ever in the 21st century. And, of course they couldn't just not put him in main events anymore, because they had already gotten that far with him, and recharting the course of his career would have also required work. So it just sits there. A half-way built bridge to a future that might have been. I reiterate: John Cena is the most prominent member of the regular roster. Changing that would require effort, so he will remain in that spot until acted upon by an outside force. There's no more evidence now that they're actually invested in making him a star than they were then. This is just booking entropy, and if anything, it makes it all the more clear that Tom was right - the goal is to maintain status quo, not to create a big money star. The brand, not the wrestlers. And you'd have to be out of your mind to watch them the past few years and see otherwise. Counterpoint: the Austin heel turn. Sometimes the fans you've driven away never come back even after you reverse course. Explain to me how the Austin heel turn was playing towards a growing young fanbase. Well, you got me there. Working heel in a deliberately shitty way in order to expose the flaws of your opponent and get yourself over at their expense is still working heel, but it was easier to write "refused to play heel". Ummm...no. It was Backlund. That's not even up to debate. But even if we artificially inflated Sammartino's numbers so he went over the top, it doesn't change the fact that Backlund's were damn impressive, and if you're going to talk about how a guy can't lead a company into a big money period, comparing him to Bob Backlund undercuts your point pretty badly.

I thought the show was really good top to bottom. Show vs. Sheamus was the obvious highlight. Will nailed it when it comes to Show. I am not a guy who normally likes matches where that many finishers get kicked out of, but goddamn, did they earn the right to do it tonight. Rey/Cara vs. PTP not only reinforced to me that the Players didn't need AW in their act, I think it kinda proved they do their schtick better without him. I mean, I had kinda warmed up to AW by the end, but he always felt like a distraction from what they do well as an act rather than an addition, and just didn't fit in with their chemistry. Without him, they've really got their act down pat. Sin Cara is weird. Every now and then, I think he's about to turn a corner, and then he goes and shits all over it in his next match. I haven't seen his Cesaro match, but he had a really good match earlier in the year on Superstars against Drew McIntyre, and it wasn't all D-Mac (though it was mostly D-Mac). He might get it right someday, but I'm not holding my breath. I actually was digging Punk/Ryback. I said to my buddy that I didn't like Ryback as much as Goldberg in '98, but I like Punk more than DDP in '98, so I thought they could pull it out, and they did. Watching this, I think Ryback has what it takes to work longer upper-card matches, and Punk was awesome cowering, bumping, and intermittently channeling Flair and Savage. The finish was absolute shit, though. That totally killed the crowd I was watching with. Let me get this straight - you're an evil referee for hire. You've been payed to help C.M. Punk beat Ryback, a man known to beat opponents, sometimes two at the same time, in mere minutes. And you wait eleven fucking minutes* to do something?! Especially when that something was as simple as low-blowing Ryback and helping Punk hold him down while you made the count!? No, that's bullshit. That is a finish that screams "we couldn't think of a real ending, so here's this thing we pulled out of our asses at the last moment. Thanks for your money, fuckers!" But yeah, good show, shame it went out on such a sour note. *One of my friends timed it. We were curious how long the "long" Ryback match was going to be.

Yes that's why in reality. Cena wasn't cleared in enough time for them to feel comfortable advertising the match, even though I think he IS cleared now. In storyline, it was pretty much just Punk had to choose between Cena or Ryback and then Punk didn't choose so somehow Cena decided to give the match to Ryback. Admittedly, I forgot about this. Still, going with Ryback rather than, say, Randy Orton, or even rushing Cena back from injury too soon is an uncharacteristically bold move for them these days. I actually went on to describe that in that post: I then wrote a very long list of wrestlers I thought could play into this and the aftermath. Basically, I concluded that "The Cena Show" would feature Cena as something between Backlund and Dusty - not the heppest cat around, but someone who gets respect because he's a genuinely good guy who gives it all in the ring and proves himself time and again. To that end, characters are judged by the strength and content of their character and their actions rather than mere surface-level sheen. The other babyfaces are a diverse bunch, but they're all honest and hard-working, and worth your respect as a fan for that - Rey, the Hardys, Punk, etc. The heels are all guys trying to pass themselves off as the coolest things on two feet while actually being assholes who want you to feel like shit for not being as awesome as they are - Orton, MVP, Miz, Elijah Burke, Kennedy, and especially Edge, who I saw as being Cena's ideal long-term arch-rival even if I'm not a huge fan of the guy, just because his character at the time was so diametrically opposed to Cena's. Basically, it's the natural follow-up to the Attitude Era. That was all about non-conformist Austin taking on the old broken system, but they all chose to not conform in more-or-less the same way, leaving behind a new conformity that Cena has to deal with. And this new conformity has none of it's old righteous indignation but all of it's base ugliness. They became as bad as the things that they rebelled against (again, best embodied by Edge), and now Cena and his ragtag band of misfits must restore - and keep - order. I also thought that they could use the brand split to play up different themes on different shows and give them their own distinct flavor. Like, they all share the big, over-arching "Cena Show" ideas, but Smackdown is really more "The Rey Mysterio Show", and plays up more cartoonish gimmickry than Raw does, and ECW probably eventually becomes "The C.M. Punk Power Hour" or something like that, and is more prone to gritty violence than the other shows. This was a point I always struggled to be sympathetic towards. I mean, fan turnover happens. You can't please everybody. As a promoter, I'd be more interested in playing towards a growing young fanbase than a dwindling aging one. I mean, if the new fanbase doesn't actually come, fine. We can abort the plan in the early goings if that's the case. But in 2007, the lights were all green. There was no reason to not at least try. If I thought really hard about it, I could probably link John Cena and Judd Apatow, but it would be really forced and not very convincing. But really, I don't get the sense that you need a larger cultural phenomenon to ride the coattails of to be a star. What cultural phenomenon was Sammartino riding? Being Italian? Bob Backlund main evented more sold out shows at MSG than any other wrestler ever, so apparently that's exactly what starts boom periods. And Cena is way better on the mic than face Backlund. Even with Benoit, 2007 was the biggest money year in WWE's history to that point, and Mania 23 was their biggest money event. Cena was making them money that they had never made before, and they consciously chose not to capitalize on it. That is pretty much modern WWE's problems in a nutshell.

Yeah, I do need to give them this much: I only have one really close friend who's still a die hard wrestling fan, but when we get a PPV, we usually invite a bunch of other guys who are at least open to the idea of watching wrestling to join us. Some of them have started to get into it themselves, but not to any serious degree. But now...well, we were thinking of buying Hell in a Cell anyway since we hadn't bought a show in a while, but my friend's cousin actually called him without prompting saying that we had to get this one because RYBACK IS CHALLENGING FOR THE BELT! "Guy challenges for a belt because he's won a lot of matches convincingly" may not be the deepest storyline in the world, but it can work, and it's better than the "guy challenges for the belt because he's repeatedly lost to the challenger, and we won't let this goddamn feud end until we put the belt on the challenger after making him look as weak as we possibly can" storyline that they've run constantly with every belt for years now. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Point is, I like a lot of the immediate post-Gerwitz direction. I like that they're giving the fresh, over, but untested guy a title shot instead of playing it safe with another Cena match (and I'm saying that as someone who really likes the Cena/Punk match-up). I like the job they've done of putting him over as a serious contender, especially Cena's promo this week where did a great job putting him over as someone you should care about in a way no one ever did for Cena himself. I don't know where the Cena/AJ thing is going, but the set-up was surprisingly smart. I like that they have a tag division again, even if it is a hastily thrown together one. The matches themselves seem to be better than they've been since they went to a three-hour show, with Bryan/Ziggler being the obvious highlight. But will it stick. Well, my experience is that it never sticks, so I'm not optimistic. I knew I was forgetting something. OK, I'm gonna try and keep this simple. I'll probably fail, but I'll try. Here are three very real problems that face WWE: 1. THEY JUST DON'T CARE I touched on this a bit already, but it bears repeating. It's stunning just how little thought and effort seems to go into these shows. Time was that giving a guy like Ryback a title shot would've been seen as a very simple and straightforward booking move, but nowadays, it feels like a master stroke of creative genius, because we've sunk to a level where finding a new challenger for a champion after he's disposed of him - even when other guys have been logically positioned as potential contenders - is actually considered too much effort for creative to handle. Let me put this into perspective: I've read people complaining about the Sheamus/Big Show feud. Now, I admit the build has been nothing to write home about, but I'm still excited about it for two reasons. One is that it looks like a really good match on paper. The other is that, before it was announced, I was pretty much just taking it for granted that they were going to run Sheamus/Del Rio again. I mean, I shouldn't have been expecting that, what with the fact that they've already had a million matches against each other, Del Rio lost them all, and there's no logical reason for him to still be challenging at this point. But on the other hand, that's exactly how they book title programs nowadays, so that's exactly what I expected. At least Sheamus/Show is a new match-up. We're lucky we got that much out of them. It almost makes me long for Vince Russo, who may not have good ideas, but at least had ideas. I'm not saying they need to be wildly experimentative. I'm usually the first to defend the use of very commonplace wrestling tropes because the whole reason they became commonplace was because they worked. But they've somehow sunk below even that. That doesn't work at all, and it never will. And when you look at the rest of the problems I list, you'll probably find this is behind most of them. 2. WHEN EVERYONE'S A SUPERSTAR, NOBODY IS There's this whole talking point now that says "the wrestlers aren't what draws, the brand is", and what's really frustrating about it is that it's so obviously false, and yet WWE themselves clearly believe it. What's worse is that it probably didn't happen accidentally, either. A while back, TomK wrote this: Later in same issue he pointed out that in recent PPV when they had Cena work a match on the lower part of the card, you could see people leave after the Cena match. Mcmahon has decided that no one should make a difference and yet Cena is the guy who makes a difference. I think the conclusion is that at this point (for better or worse) that Mcmahon has decided that it is a better business move to coast on the brand name and not put all the eggs in one basket, not have one person anchor his promotion. But that said Cena is the one guy on the roster who they could build around. Loss’ statement about Cena’s period being short is accurate. He’s the one guy who they could anchor the promotion around, but the promotion would rather sail without an anchor. Perhaps more importantly, he also wrote this: I might argue that he probably wasn't consciously working towards it, because Vince is too much of an unstable coke fiend to be much of a long-term planner. But his more likely conscious plan of "how can I most easily gain constant access to cocaine and loose women?" dovetails very nicely into "how can I make my wrestling promotion be all about me?" And by God, he found a way. And now, I'm going to roll out one of my most quoted pieces, which I wrote in the immediate aftermath of Mania 23, when I thought - and try not to laugh at this one - that wrestling was about to enter another boom period. Most of what I wrote in that post blew up in my face spectacularly, but this remains as true today as the day I wrote it: Yet, five years later, it still hasn't happened, and at this point, I think I can safely say it never will. You can understand why I got everything else in that post wrong. WWE was handed a new boom period on a silver platter. I did not consider the possibility that they would turn it down. It's too bad. I probably would've really liked The Cena Show. I realize, of course, that not everyone feels that way, but whether you like Cena or not, the one thing everyone seems to agree on is that throughout his run on top, he has been booked terribly, and personally, I read that as a desire by the company to not have a big star wrestler on their regular roster by any means possible. Part of me wants to take a conspiratorial bent with it. Part of me feels like when Triple H failed to become a Hogan/Austin/Rock-level star, he decided that "well, I'm clearly the best, so if I can't be a huge star, I guess nobody else should be, either". That's a childishly simplistic way of looking at things, obviously, but again, it dovetails nicely into the whole "it's the brand, not the wrestlers" thing, especially as he shifts towards a primarily backstage role. But like I said, the idea is obvious bullshit. There is no brand without the wrestlers. The fact that they've yet to run a wrestling-free PPV despite it being all about the brand should tell you something. The fact that they dig retirees and part-timers out of the mothballs to headline WrestleMania because they spent the rest of the year not caring about their roster should tell you even more. They've trained viewers to not care about the current crop of superstars, and people respond to that by tuning out. 3. IT DOESN'T MATTER! I love The Rock. Honestly, I do. But when he announced that he would challenge for the WWE Title at the Rumble, it really did hammer home how little anything in this company matters right now. I said my piece on that particular incident a while ago, but it really is emblematic of how WWE presents their shows nowadays. I'm reminded of a No DQ match between Rey Mysterio and Jack Swagger in 2010. That was my WWE MOTY that year, but if any of you have forgotten about it - or didn't realize it had happened in the first place - I wouldn't be surprised. As Phil Schneider noted: Nothing is presented as important. Nothing that happens is worth remembering, even when it is. Don't invest emotionally in this wrestler. We'll forget about him in a few weeks. Don't get excited about this match or this angle. They won't lead anywhere. Don't think of titles as something important. The important thing is that The Rock is challenging for it, and he's important, because he was a big star when we were important. But we're not important anymore. Pay us no mind.

I think things would be better if they fully did away with the brand extension. That would mean merging the belts* and ending all pretenses of separate brands. Right now is the worst of both worlds. *You could keep the United States and Intercontinental titles. Since at this point the U.S belt is basically occupying space, the European belt occupied. I agree with that. But even after that, the shows are still gonna suffer from the same general malaise they were suffering from before.

What's weird is that for all the posts I've seen on this subject over the years, very few people actually seem to want to talk about it. A lot of people want to talk about pet peeves they have with the WWE, and feel the need to ascribe greater significance to them than they actually have. Others want to talk about symptoms of the problems like they're the problem themselves, and getting rid of the symptoms will make the actual problem go away. Still others want to talk about surface level things happening concurrently to actual problems like they are the problem, and if you change it, everything will be better. But almost no one wants to address the actual problems. Just chew on this for a second....for years, people swore up and down that the brand extension was an awful idea, that it was bad for business, and that WWE would be a lot better off if they got rid of it. This was an extremely common talking point among people complaining about modern WWE. You could throw a penny at a message board and hit a good ten or twenty guys who seriously believed this. I can pull quotes if you need it, but I'm sure pretty much everyone here has either heard someone make this claim, or has made it themselves. I, on the other hand, argued rather stridently that the brand extension was a scapegoat, and that the real problems were deeper than that, but a lot of folks didn't want to hear it. Well, it's October 2012, and while the brand split is still here, it's pretty much on paper only. Everyone fights on every show, everyone competes for every title...if there's any real difference between Raw and Smackdown besides one generally being more important than the other, it disappeared a long time ago. And that's why everything's better now!....Right? I don't like to say "I told you so", but as long as we're on the subject, I told you so. What I'm getting at is that there's something about this topic that makes people squeamish. I can't put my finger on it, but for some reason, people don't want to look too hard at what's wrong with WWE in the past 5-10 years. They don't want to talk about real problems. So if you want to know what I think, the first thing you need to know is that if I'm going to talk about this at all, I am going to talk about real problems, and as we go over what you wrote, I think we should ask ourselves, "Is this a real problem?" Is this a real problem? Now, don't get me wrong. I love me some blood in my professional wrestling matches, and I don't like that they've taken it away from me. That being side, a friend of mine said something that sums up the issue rather nicely - "I'm less bothered by the fact that they don't have blood than the fact the they do have their writing staff". It's something I dislike, but I have a hard time seeing it as a make-or-break element for them. Even if Punk bleeds buckets at the PPV, I don't see how it's going to "shake up" the company in a long-term, meaningful way. So if we're looking at things on that level, it's not a real problem, though I personally wish it would change. Austin, Rock, McMahon, and Foley got them attention and big ratings. And yes, I realize that they were able to do that in part by having looser content restrictions, but lots of wrestlers the world over swear and bleed. Most of them don't draw Austin/Rock/McMahon/Foley-level money. And all of the attempts to recreate that era by recreating it's content have been dismal failures, which should tell you something. As far as incredible TV goes...well, I agree that it was not credible. It definitely had it's moments, but most of it was awful, and I'll take the WWE of recent years where there was at least good wrestling to go along with the bland booking. I think this is pretty safely not a real problem. I have never heard this to be a thing that actually happens in current WWE until just now. In fact, I'm disinclined to believe it's actually the case, if only because, if it were, there would be a ton more people bitching about it online than there currently are. It also suggests creative cares about the matches enough to micromanage it on that level, which seems unbelievable to me. I'm gonna have to ask for some supporting evidence on this claim. Otherwise, it's not real, and by extension, not a real problem. I'm tempted to call this a real problem, and obviously, TNA finally getting their shit together would do nothing but good for wrestling. But the more I think about it, the less I'm sure. True, the WWF was once spurred to get their act together due to the competition of WCW, but that was after WCW was a major competitor to them for a few years, and they almost went bankrupt during that period as well, so even if that was a part of it, it wasn't the whole thing. Moreover, as good as WCW's competition was for the WWF, the WWF's competition clearly did not have the same effect for WCW. Honestly, I don't think competition alone is going to be enough to inspire. Not a real problem, but it was at least worth thinking about. Austin spent about a year going between two towns run by the same promotion before getting signed by WCW. I don't know offhand what he did between USWA's Dallas office folding and the WCW signing, but he really wasn't some grizzled vet of the territorial scene, and he still became a huge money star. The Rock was trained by his extended family, spent less than a year in the USWA when it was a feeder promotion for the WWF, and then got called up there. Yeah, he was clearly unready when he first arrived, but he learned on the job and became a huge star. I know literally nothing about what HHH did between getting trained by Killer Kowalski and getting signed by WCW. Wikipedia says he debuted '92, which was basically the last year the territories existed in any real form. Unless he had some Portland run I don't know about, he wasn't a territory guy. Foley and Taker would qualify, but even then, amongst your five biggest stars, three of them were not really territory vets. Two of those three were amongst the biggest stars in wrestling history. The territorial system has basically been replaced by the indies today, and while it's not a perfect replacement, it's a functional one, and the fact WWE seems more open to looking there for talent these days is clearly a good thing. As for the guys who have come up through WWE-regimented channels, some have been good, some have been bad, and some of the bad ones may have benefited from the territorial system, or even the indies. But WWE having an in-house developmental system hardly seems like a bad idea in and of itself. Indeed, with the death of the territories, that seems like one of the most rational things to do. Either way, the territories are dead, so even if this was a real problem, it's not like there's really a solution. The fact that a wrestling company is being run by people who want nothing to do with wrestling is a very, very real problem, and I probably shouldn't have to explain why. The TV writers are bad, but thre reason why they're there is even worse. If that was all it took, things would've changed a long time ago. And that's a real problem - they just don't care. Every now and then, something will happen to make them care a little - like they just did - and it'll make things change a little - like it just did - and then they'll give up go back to doing whatever requires the least amount of effort. And then people will complain about it, but they'll get it wrong because they were complaining about it in whatever way required the least amount of effort. So I guess the moral of the story is that we and WWE deserve each other.

During the brief time I did Smackdown Workrate Reports on Segunda Caida in 2007, I got to cover some very choice incidences of Edge's great acting ability, though obviously I didn't fully appreciate them at the time:

No. Not at all, really. I can't think of a single instance of praise for Jim Ross shitting on a guy who fucked up, no matter how closely doing so would mirror real sports announcing. Do I have to do the whole "realism vs. reality" thing again? In this case, it's not so much a matter of "Realistic Sports Commentary Is Unrealistic". It's "Realistic Sports Commentary - At It's Most Realistic - Is Not Necessarily Advisable". Aren't the complaints against Gorilla here re: hooking the leg and improper application of the abdominal stretch things that only cynical smarks would point out? Loss is not an announcer. I am not an announcer. No one on this board complaining about Gorilla is an announcer. Most of us are, in fact, cynical smarks. Gorilla was an announcer. He shouldn't be calling wrestling matches like a cynical smark like us.

Which just brings me back to.... I guess that, in kayfabe terms, the comparable example would be if passing to receiver X instead of receiver Y unless you were actually going to score a game-winning touchdown was heavily frowned upon within football - if not necessarily illegal - but said protocol was hushed up to the public for...I dunno...mob reasons. If the announcer knew what was really going on, is drawing attention to it a good idea? Again, I realize that this is very nitpicky stuff. There are many worse announcers in wrestling history than Gorilla, and having grown up with the guy, it's very hard for me to hate on him completely, even if my adult viewing of him shows less and less positive traits. I do maintain a certain fondness for him despite that. I just don't get why we're trying to spin very obvious negatives as positives.

That's true. I shouldn't harp on this too much, because I don't think it was something that caused any meaningful damage to anyone. I just don't see it as a positive. Why did Gorilla need to deliberately bury guys to establish that kind of gravitas when Lance Russell didn't? Was the QB told by his coach that he absolutely, positively must always pass to receiver Y even if receiver X is clearly the better option? If so, does the announcer know this is the case? If so, does the announcer continue to criticize the QB anyway instead of directing blame at the coach who actually made the stupid rule in the first place? No? Then it's not a parallel example.

He wasn't getting the show over, though. I guess he was getting hooking the leg over. I suppose that's true. But he was getting it over at the expense of the wrestlers by pointing out how dumb they were for not hooking the leg. When you're putting the show over, probably more important to put the wrestlers over than to put hooking the leg over. To be fair, I think the real guys to blame here are whoever in WWF upper management decided that only hooking the leg at the finish should be part of the house style. That seems like a really bad decision in hindsight, and it must have been a hard one to navigate around on commentary. That said, Gorilla probably would've been better off not bringing it up at all.

It was part of the house style at the time to only hook the leg on the pin that ended the match. Gorilla was criticizing guys for making a mistake that he knew they weren't allowed to correct. It only served to make him look good at the wrestlers' expense.

No, that's exactly what it would be if wrestling was real, otherwise you wouldn't waste your time pinning the guy in the first place. You'd just stay on the offensive. If this were real, that isn't how you'd be supposed to present things. Also, if it were real, you wouldn't be concerned with how you were "supposed to present things". You'd be concerned about winning. And no, a lateral press "just to see how strongly or how quickly your opponent kicks out" wouldn't even make sense for that reason - wouldn't hooking the leg on a pinfall accomplish the exact same thing while simultaneously making victory more likely? Goddamit, Lance Storm, no wonder you sucked so much.

That's kinda what I meant by the Psycho metaphor. In hindsight, that probably wasn't clear enough. I'm saying that to you and me and all rational people, kayfabe is dead, but to people in the business, a boy's best friend is still his mother, so to speak.

It's better because it was more effective. And as far as the Memphis stuff goes, it wasn't "next week", but it wasn't spaced out any further than this show was from the episode the Muppets hosted. I don't think you can blame any of it on the death of kayfabe, actually. I think you can blame some of it on wrestling's failure to cope appropriately with the death of kayfabe. I think the fact that they treat kayfabe like Norman Bates treated his mother - obviously dead and secreted away, but still there and disturbingly often still treated like it was alive - is a big problem. But the death of kayfabe hasn't hurt any other medium of fiction. There's no real reason it should hurt wrestling. I actually think you and Matt are both right in a respect. Wrestling has always been a three-ring circus, yes, but it's still three rings under one tent. When you go to the circus, you'll get a lot of different stuff that will generate a wide variety of emotions in you, but it will all be stuff you expect to see at the circus. It will fit within the basic circus "theme". Vince McMahon has been called a modern day P.T. Barnum by some, but Barnum wouldn't be caught dead running a circus as boring as modern WWE, and I say that in spite of the fact that I have had and (to a lesser degree) continue to have a lot of good things to say about the acts being run in that circus. But while what's going in the individual rings can be interesting, the unifying whole is not. I'm not even sure it's fair to say it's bad, because that would imply some kind of emotional connection. It's more like it doesn't exist, and the only reason the whole thing continues to function is the laws of inertia. And who can get excited about that? As far as the crowd reaction to the Punk/Lawler angle, I do want to say this. If you listened to my appearance on Victator's podcast after Punk first turned heel, you might remember that I tried to support my claims that it wouldn't work by pointing to responses to an article about it on WWE's website. I figured if I really wanted to know what the WWE Universe thought, looking at the elaborate social networking project they've set up might be a better indicator than talking to people on this board. Not sure if it would be a 100% accurate one, but I figured a place where people were non-ironically referring to The Big Show as "The Big Sellout" probably was a better representation of the average fan than any of us were. Now, with six exceptions out of 150-something, the reactions to Punk's turn all ranged from ambivalence and uncertainty to out-and-out support of Punk. And the weeks that followed have definitely reflected that attitude from the fans - they've either continued cheering him, or felt that they shouldn't cheer him but didn't want to boo him and thus responded with nothing. So since we have another question about fan response, I've gone back to WWE.com to see how the WWE Universe feels about this. And their reaction - almost universally - is that Punk went too far, and that they'll be booing him from here on out, even against Cena. What do I make of this? I don't know yet. This is an experiment for me, and it's far from over. I've hazarded a few guesses as to why the live crowd reacted the way they did, and none of them really make sense to me. I mean, the tone thing doesn't help, but.... ....so it can't just be that. I'd say I'm interested in how the crowd will react a week from now, but.... ....so the crowd's reaction to Punk is going to be completely different than it would be otherwise, and things might change drastically. Wait, what am I saying? It's current WWE. Nothing changes drastically. I guess my point, if I even have one anymore, is that it's probably too soon to chalk last night's angle up as a failure, and that it may still help solidify Punk as a heel in the long run, though that's not a lock because, in the long run, WWE will probably stop caring again.

This is the exact same sequence which I described in some thread a couple of years ago, which occurred in damn near every indy tag match that I ever called. Back then, I got yelled at and lectured about how this was an effective formula and thus shouldn't be changed. What's different now, to get everyone to agree that this sucks when it's run into the ground? Does everyone really agree now? Formula still rules, still gets over like clockwork, it's just being done by shittier wrestlers. Maybe Kofi would suck less if he was plugged into a different formula, but I honestly can't think of what that would be. Dude is all kinds of terrible.

RE wouldn't swear as much or advocate drug use. But on the bright(?) side, that just means there's more than one of them out there.

I'll grant you that one, but if this doesn't catch fire immediately, then the less Rockcentric the shows become, the less important they're going to be. I think you're missing my point. Nobody hates Rocky right now. The potential for Rocky hatred is always there, and has been since he stopped being a full-time wrestler. But over the last few years, they've been very smart about avoiding the things that cause it to flare up. Now they're about to be very stupid about it. The mere presence of The Rock on TV is usually an unqualified good. They're about to fuck it up. Since they started planting seeds for things that were really bad ideas. The problem isn't that they're slow-building a program. It's how and why and what all that implies for the program. Except Jericho made himself genuinely unlikable. If we see anything approaching that level of gimmick transformation for Punk, I will be very surprised, even more so if said transformation actually makes sense. Well, were any mainstream fans necessarily happy that Punk's title defenses were all semi-main events? I mean, it was probably a non-issue to them, but if Punk says he didn't like it, are any of them going to be really mad that he wasn't happy being a semi-main event WWE Champion? How are fans supposed to relate to this? You don't RC. I defended the idea of running a tournament on Raw the night after MITB as something the Mr. McMahon character would do, and in general, I didn't immediately abandon ship on the angle after things started to go south. I held out hope - for a little while, anyway - that they might right themselves. I never said any of the other obvious fuck-ups were not obvious fuck-ups. He called them idiots a year ago. They cheered him so much he became the second biggest face in the company. You act as if no wrestling fan has ever reacted to an angle differently than the promoters wanted them to before. You act as if no wrestling fan has ever booed The Rock when the promoters wanted them to cheer him before. And you know it to be true that that wasn't the case before his comeback a few years ago. Like I said, they've been very smart about how they've used him the last few years, and a big part of that is that they've realized that the old wounds fans had about him leaving had all healed, and they haven't done anything stupid to try and rip them open again. The only guy who's brought the issue up on TV is Cena, and he's a guy a large chunk of the audience hates anyway. But Punk does not come pre-hated. And really, Loss, simply telling them to boo Punk is gonna make them boo Punk? C'mon, man. You're way too smart for this. If that was all it took, Punk wouldn't even be a face in the first place, because they were telling the fans to boo him last summer, and the fans told WWE to stuff it and cheered him. If that's true, it's not a good idea, but it's a better bad idea than just turning him heel, if only because that treatment of him would feel less forced.

True enough, but that's not really my point. My point is.... Certainly, you're not going to boo him, you heel fan, you. Everyone who counts loves Ned Flanders C.M. Punk! Admittedly, I had forgotten about this, but... 1. Hogan never intentionally gave wins to Mr. Perfect when he was feuding with the Warrior. If 99% of faces did that, it would be the setup for a heel turn. The Rock only got away with it because he's that charismatic and iconic. 2. What did Cena do to deserve getting beaten up by The Rock after their tag match at Survivor Series where Cena effectively saved the match for their team? Yeah, but the problem with his terrible face promos isn't that he was a face, it's that they were terrible. The fact that they think turning him heel is the solution is disheartening in part because it shows they don't understand the problem. Punk being a face wasn't a problem at all. There were no complaints about Punk as a face, at least not at first. Then they cut his balls off. That was the problem, and even then, he maintains a fanbase the vast majority of wrestlers would be envious of. But the fact that he's still underachieving in that regard clearly has nothing to do with his moral alignment and everything to do with his lack of balls. And to be fair, sicking him on The Rock is a pretty damn good way to get him his balls back...which is just going to make everyone fall in love with him all over again. Plus, as you mentioned, he's probably going to be programmed against Cena while he's doing this. This plan is actually getting dumber the more I think about it. They are going to try to turn him heel by precisely recreating the conditions under which the crowd turned him face in the first place. Seriously, this is like if they had tried to turn Austin heel at Mania X-7 by having him pass out in a pool of his own blood while The Rock had him in the Sharpshooter. This is like if they set up DiBiase's run as the Million Dollar Man by having him get jumped right before a WWF Title match by Randy Savage but still insist on fighting Hogan anyway. This is like if they set up the formation of the Ministry of Darkness by having Undertaker stop Marc Mero from hitting Sable with a chair. OK, that last one might've worked, but my point still stands. * Nothing that happens between now and the Royal Rumble is important. Go back to sleep. Which is basically what I was thinking applied to a larger scale, but more importantly, he's still right. Consider this - you yourself have made the exact complaint that Punk is probably going to make next week on Raw multiple times in a number of posts, and now that he's acting to solve the problem, you are celebrating. In other words, you are already cheering for heel-turned Punk. I can't read that as anything other than a sign that this will fall apart. And the hero of a horror movie bumping into a cat in a dark, quiet room makes people jump in their seat. It doesn't mean cats are scary, it means the filmmaker caught you off-guard with a cheap surprise. You can't build a whole horror film around a guy bumping into cats. Once the shock value of Punk attacking Rock wears off - and I'll tell you right now, that's not gonna last long - will they still boo him? "Remember when Rock showed up after filming another shitty movie and got a title shot on a silver platter because nobody in the company actually gives a shit about the belt anymore, so Punk beat the fuck out of him? That was awesome." Honestly, if you ran Punk vs. Rock for the title at Extreme Rules, I would have seen no problem with it. At least if he's on back-to-back PPVs, you can pretend that he's taking wrestling seriously again, and that if he wins, he'll be around to defend the title once every 30 days for however long he's champ. But when the entire structure of the build to his match blatantly exposes the fact that he couldn't possibly fulfill his duties as champion, there's no way I can take him seriously as a challenger. Fuck, if he wants the belt so bad, why doesn't he challenge at SummerSlam? It's just as high profile of a show. He's not gonna be any more qualified for a shot in January than he is now. They don't already have a title match announced for the show. If he cares about it so damn much about the belt and can apparently get a shot on a whim, why wait? C.M. Punk will have the answer, and nobody will be able to say that he's wrong, and nobody will be able to say that The Rock is right. And yet, we will be expected to boo C.M. Punk and cheer The Rock. That's why this is stupid.