Commonly used words and phrases that annoy you

[jdw]

All I'll say is in this past couple of weeks I've watched the Freebirds-DiBiase piledriver angle from Georgia, the Flair-DiBiase-Murdoch brainbuster angle from Mid-South, and Sgt. Slaughter vs. Pedro Morales from MSG in 1981, and the Savage vs. DiBiase match from MSG in 1988 when the fan jumps the cage and attacked Virgil. I don't believe that those crowds all knew for sure that wrestling was fake. And if they did, they did a pretty great job of acting as if they thought it was real.

 

So you're not going to admit when you knew it was fake? The age you were, the year, and whether it was because of the Interwebs?

 

Okay...

 

It's a question of degree. There'd have been sceptics back in the day, there'd have been people who didn't buy it, etc., but there's a marked contrast in crowd reactions from those angles and shows and what you see at your average show today.

 

 

I think crowd reactions evolve over time. I've seen reactions in the Internet Era that are pretty much the same as ones I saw in the pre-Net days.

 

 

What the internet did was compound the exposure and make it much more definite, so that things like -- for example -- that piledriver angle where you have a guy kayfabing it in the hospital for the week couldn't get over anymore.

 

 

It's easy to do the same thing today. Work and injury angle, send the guy home for two weeks off television.

 

Which is essentially what they did back in the day. Ric Flair wasn't really in the hospital after the Bounty Hunters took him out. They just worked an angle.

 

 

Don't pretend that fans who were hitting those news sites and Keith reviews were the same as those fans going crazy at MSG or smoky arenas in Mid-South or crying at someone being laid out on the concrete in the Atlanta studio. Don't pretend for the sake of trying to win an argument or whatever the fuck you're trying to do.

 

 

So what about the fans who were stunned at Mania when Taker lost? They knew it was fake. It's the Internet Era. There were people doing the equiv of crying. So...

 

Yeah, that's what I thought.

 

Wrestling fandom is constantly moving along. The tech changes as well. When you look at it in an extended way, it's largely incremental changes building off what came before, rather than sharp revolutionary changes. People want to see the sharp changes, and tend to lose sight of the elements shared with what came before.

 

Which is why we have discussions like Hulk & Vince vs The World when people try to raise what Steve Austin did above Hogan. They see a revolution with Austin, while missing that pretty much every element in Austin's "revolution" existed before him, and the vast majority of them had been laid down in the Hogan Era.

 

This Internet Revolution?

 

The vast majority of it is just a continuation of what had been changing over the prior decade or two. Which to a degree built off some of the things that came before it.

 

It's a wheel rolling, not an on/off switch.

[jdw]

I think deep down I knew the truth, but I was able to convince myself as a kid that wrestling was every bit as real as my attraction to girls.

 

[JerryvonKramer]

Right, I'm going to have to engage directly Darth, I've been trying to avoid it but you leave me no choice.

 

 

 

So you're not going to admit when you knew it was fake? The age you were, the year, and whether it was because of the Interwebs?

I think everyone knew deep-deep-down, but like Loss I'd try to find ways of proving it was real as a kid. My dad was always highly critical, always tried to demonstrate the ways it was fake and to this day will say "you don't still watch that shit do you?" However, I do remember a time when there were hot playground discussions about whether it was real or fake. But it was more like a wild rumour or something.

 

So there was an inclination there that this was all fake. But coming online was revelatory. I remember being absolutely fascinated in the late 90s reading about the insider terminology, and it was genuinely quite thrilling to piece together things that you'd vaguely figured out as a kid; having it all broken down and explained was something of a shift in the way I thought about wrestling.

 

And this is what I'm talking about ultimately, it's shifting to a more analytical mindset where you're thinking about booking decisions, and work and so on. That just didn't happen in, say, 1995 -- when admittedly most kids I knew had just stopped watching period. I reckon in 95 I was still pretty much a mark kid with my own "theories" on how it worked. By 97-8, after reading online my perspective was completely different.

 

I'll say though, I still even to this day, try to retain an element of being a mark kid watching wrestling. You can never fully get back there, but occasionally something can move you.

 

 

 

I think crowd reactions evolve over time. I've seen reactions in the Internet Era that are pretty much the same as ones I saw in the pre-Net days.

Week in-week out?

 

 

 

So what about the fans who were stunned at Mania when Taker lost? They knew it was fake. It's the Internet Era. There were people doing the equiv of crying. So...

The reaction was because they all thought they knew how it would be booked, not because they thought Taker was invincible.

 

Rather different, I think, to a 70s fan cheering for Bruno or a kid in the 80s cheering for Hogan.

 

 

 

Wrestling fandom is constantly moving along. The tech changes as well. When you look at it in an extended way, it's largely incremental changes building off what came before, rather than sharp revolutionary changes. People want to see the sharp changes, and tend to lose sight of the elements shared with what came before.

I still don't see how the impact of LOTS of fans being exposed to insider terminology and the inner workings of the business can compare with your old man saying "you know it's fake son right?" It's not the same thing.

 

The internet completely changed the way fans ENGAGE with the product. Now everyone and their uncle has an opinion on HHH's booking. Did the average fan from the 70s or 80s even know who the booker was?

[Bix]

 

 

Parv is absolutely right that there is a much greater quantity of people reading smarky stuff online now. People who will read stuff and comment on places that aren't WWE.com but have no desire to pay for the Network or anything like that.

There are more people online all the time. There are always going to be more people wrestling that stuff.

 

More people read about sabermetrics now than in 1999 or 1989. Hell, more read online now then read Moneyball. It doesn't mean that the revolution started today, or with Moneyball, or with Rob Neyer getting hired by ESPN (which some people point to).

 

That's the general point.

But it's not an "internet explosion" thing. It's something that's developed in last 3-5 years. Mainstream sports and pop culture sites (BR, SBN, Uproxx, Grantland, etc) doing wrestling coverage is probably part of it, but I'm not sure that explains all of it.

[jdw]

 

 

So you're not going to admit when you knew it was fake? The age you were, the year, and whether it was because of the Interwebs?

 

I think everyone knew deep-deep-down, but like Loss I'd try to find ways of proving it was real as a kid. My dad was always highly critical, always tried to demonstrate the ways it was fake and to this day will say "you don't still watch that shit do you?" However, I do remember a time when there were hot playground discussions about whether it was real or fake. But it was more like a wild rumour or something.

 

So there was an inclination there that this was all fake. But coming online was revelatory. I remember being absolutely fascinated in the late 90s reading about the insider terminology, and it was genuinely quite thrilling to piece together things that you'd vaguely figured out as a kid; having it all broken down and explained was something of a shift in the way I thought about wrestling.

 

And this is what I'm talking about ultimately, it's shifting to a more analytical mindset where you're thinking about booking decisions, and work and so on. That just didn't happen in, say, 1995 -- when admittedly most kids I knew had just stopped watching period. I reckon in 95 I was still pretty much a mark kid with my own "theories" on how it worked. By 97-8, after reading online my perspective was completely different.

 

 

I have no idea how old you were in 1995. If you were 12+ years old and still didn't know it was Fake, color me surprised. If you were 18+, color me stunned.

 

I never worried about "theories". The punches were fake. I'd watched enough boxing and fights in school and the neighborhood to know pro wrestling punches were laughably fake. One could move onto other stuff that was clearly acting like you'd see in the movies, but it really wasn't something I needed to roll over in my mind to determine if it was fake: crappy play acting punches were enough.

 

 

I'll say though, I still even to this day, try to retain an element of being a mark kid watching wrestling. You can never fully get back there, but occasionally something can move you.

 

Never had it, so I don't bother trying. In fact, quite the opposite: accepting it as Fake Entertainment allowed me to look at it as Entertainment when I hit 20. At which point it struck me as wildly funny Entertainment when watching half baked. Then when I sobered up in a few years, it still struck me as entertaining Entrainment.

 

 

I think crowd reactions evolve over time. I've seen reactions in the Internet Era that are pretty much the same as ones I saw in the pre-Net days.

 

 

Week in-week out?

 

I never thought pre-internet crowd reactions were always mind numbing week-in, week out. In turn, in the internet days they're up and down. Not wildly different.

 

Go to an indy show with a host of much more Smart Fans in the building and get an idea of what a real mass of them are like. The last time I went to a WWE house show, they weren't lose to the same of what a PWG show was like.

 

 

So what about the fans who were stunned at Mania when Taker lost? They knew it was fake. It's the Internet Era. There were people doing the equiv of crying. So...

 

 

The reaction was because they all thought they knew how it would be booked, not because they thought Taker was invincible.

 

I think the fans didn't think Taker would Lose, not that he wouldn't be Booked To Lose. Despite knowing it's worked, most fans in the stadium don't really think in terms of Booking. They're going to a show to be entertained, think about who they like and want to root for, who they don't and want to root against, and who they think will Win and Lose.

 

Rather different, I think, to a 70s fan cheering for Bruno or a kid in the 80s cheering for Hogan.

 

A kid cheering Taker today really isn't any different than a kid cheering Hogan in the 80s. It's not like PWO is full of 8 year old posters.

 

 

Wrestling fandom is constantly moving along. The tech changes as well. When you look at it in an extended way, it's largely incremental changes building off what came before, rather than sharp revolutionary changes. People want to see the sharp changes, and tend to lose sight of the elements shared with what came before.

 

 

I still don't see how the impact of LOTS of fans being exposed to insider terminology and the inner workings of the business can compare with your old man saying "you know it's fake son right?" It's not the same thing.

 

 

I really don't think it's lots and lots of fans. In a build of 10K, how many do you think really know or care about terms like Work, Workrate, Shine, Heat, Bumping, Blading, etc?

 

Has it impacted a number of fans? Sure. But so did reading PWI and knowing that the WWF ran the same card with the same results night after night after night. Or the TV shows exposing wrestling as fake, or Vince himself admitting it.

 

 

The internet completely changed the way fans ENGAGE with the product.

 

 

It's changed the way that *some* fans engage the product, and different fans in different ways.

 

Now everyone and their uncle has an opinion on HHH's booking. Did the average fan from the 70s or 80s even know who the booker was?

 

 

Seriously? If we'd gone to a WWE card say four years ago before the WWE made Trips' behind the scenes power a *storyline* (i.e. via CM Punk), do you really think if we polled those 10K fans in the building that many of them would be talking about Triple H's "booking"?

 

As far as kids talking about the concept of Booking without knowing the word Booking, I gave you an example of people in the 90s thinking that way without the internet feeding it them: a 12 year old explaining to us why Vince was booking Nash to the WWF Title.

[JerryvonKramer]

Yeah, I think jdw and I have wildly different takes on the make-up and attitude of modern audiences. I think the crowd thinks of itself as being much smarter than he's giving it credit for and that the MAJORITY of fans would think in terms of booking etc.; him the opposite. Maybe some others can chime in here with their own views: guys who have been to Wrestlemania or major PPVs recently, etc.

[dawho5]

I came pretty late to the game to pro wrestling. I was already old enough to know it was fake, but didn't care. Entertainment is entertainment, I know that movies are fake but I like those. As for the internet stuff, I was one of those "elitists" who liked watching Japanese wrestling from the mid-90s right around 1998-2000. And I did have that "you won't see this stuff on Monday night" attitude about it, so maybe in truth I was a bit of an elitist. But I think that's a stage that you go through on the way to being aware that all wrestling has it's merits, you just have to find the stuff that works for you. That's one thing I think a lot of people fail to recognize, both in relation to themselves and others, that as you watch more wrestling and see different things, your views on it end up changing over time. You could apply that to these so-called "smarks" or any group of wrestling fans that you may have a particular dislike for. Or any one of the people that post here. I can guarantee you that their opinions on a match they haven't watched in ten years will have been changed, however slightly, by matches they have seen and things they have read, be it on here or anywhere else in between.

[jdw]

 

 

Parv is absolutely right that there is a much greater quantity of people reading smarky stuff online now. People who will read stuff and comment on places that aren't WWE.com but have no desire to pay for the Network or anything like that.

There are more people online all the time. There are always going to be more people wrestling that stuff.

 

More people read about sabermetrics now than in 1999 or 1989. Hell, more read online now then read Moneyball. It doesn't mean that the revolution started today, or with Moneyball, or with Rob Neyer getting hired by ESPN (which some people point to).

 

That's the general point.

But it's not an "internet explosion" thing. It's something that's developed in last 3-5 years. Mainstream sports and pop culture sites (BR, SBN, Uproxx, Grantland, etc) doing wrestling coverage is probably part of it, but I'm not sure that explains all of it.

 

 

Which was my point: more people were reading smarky stuff in 1999 than in 1995, and again in 2005 than 1999, and again in 2014 than 2005.

 

Grantland reaches a wider audience than SKeith did, who reached a wider audience than Dave did in the WON, who reached a wider level in the National Sports Daily than he did in 1989, and in turn he reacher more people in 1989 than in 1982 before he started the WON and was just exchanging letters or phone calls.

 

BR, SBN, Uproxx, Grantland and an extension of a process that had Mayhem doing something local in the Carolinas, or Canoe up in Canada integrated into a large website, etc.

 

That's the reason I tossed out Neyer and Moneyball. In sports you can get more info and quicker contact than you could earlier in the revolution. I can get United info fast over on blogs, and tactical analysis, and scouting reports on kids and transfer targets. But part of something that has evolved over time rather than just waking up one day and the world had complete changed.

 

File sharing changed and destroyed the music business. But... it didn't invent music sharing. The music business had thought cassette tapes would do it, and CD's and burning CD's. File sharing on some level is the revolution, but we can't really ignore that it's an extension of prior copying and sharing. Nor ignore that it really wasn't the concept of file sharing (such as Napster) that killed it, but the eventual technology change (massive increases in Download Speed / ISP Connenction along with massive improvements in Cheap Large File Storage especially on Portable Devices) that really took what had been a "less dangerous" concept into the truly deadly concept.

 

Pretty similar to pro wrestling content. It wasn't the traders of the 80s and 90s who were dangerous, or really even the early 00s. It was Fast Internet and Mass Storage that took the earlier infringing concepts and made them cheap, easy, fast and relatively *not* very dangerous.

 

John

[jdw]

Yeah, I think jdw and I have wildly different takes on the make-up and attitude of modern audiences. I think the crowd thinks of itself as being much smarter than he's giving it credit for and that the MAJORITY of fans would think in terms of booking etc.; him the opposite. Maybe some others can chime in here with their own views: guys who have been to Wrestlemania or major PPVs recently, etc.

 

I actually think fans are smarter than you're giving them credit for:

 

They don't need the Internet to tell them it's Fake and that Matches Are Made (i.e. booked).

 

And that they didn't need the Internet to tell them that back in the 90s, or really even the 80s.

[jdw]

In turn, I don't think the majority of fans think in these terms:

 

"I really wish that Cesario was booked in the mid-card rather than booked in the prelims. If he's stuck in the prelims, he's never going to get to the main events. Fucking Triple H!"

 

Instead it's more likely to be:

 

"I like Cesario. I really wish they did more with him and he was in the title hunt. I'd love to see him take the belt from Orton."

 

I don't think the majority of fans talk about booking like the do on places like PWO.

[El-P]

It's not terribly different from the Six Faces of Darsow. A number of fans in the 80s got that Krusher Khruschev went to the WWF and became Demolition Smash, even if the WWF didn't acknowledge it (and I don't recall JCP ever taking an explicit shot at it in the other direction). Did the Apter Mags say something about it? Maybe... I don't recall. But there were times when things were kind of obvious, and Khruschev-Smash would have jumped out at me regardless.

 

When I started to watch pro-wrestling I was like 13 in 90, and I only had WWF Superstars and no PPV until 92. KNew it was worked from the very beginning, still loved the hell out of it. And when Repo Man showed up on TV, it didn't take me long to recognize Smash, although I had no idea who Barry Darsow was of course. Hell, I had recognized jobber Bob Bradley under the masked Kat gimmick they were doing after Braddy Boone dropped it. It wasn't hard to see Papa Shango's tatoos on Kama, and although I only saw Dustin Rhodes for a few weeks during his first stint, as soon as Goldust opened his outfit to show his flabby white-ass body, everything clicked. Could see the lack of pushes, the shitty workers and the fucked up storylines although I had no notion of what these terms were. I was still what you'd call a total "mark" before I was exposed to any other product than WWF, yet I knew about all those things, without knowing the proper way to express it.

[dexstar]

When I was a kid in the 90s, the Detroit News had a sportswriter who had a column on Fridays and basically did a small summary of the Observer news on WWF/WCW. I didn't know it was from the WON at the time but it was definitely a smart column that talked about things in hardcore terms, just really generally. I'm sure that wasn't the only paper in the country that did that. By the time we got AOL in 1996 I was already one of these "casual smart fans" or whatever. And I was 12, growing up in suburban southern Michigan. I'm sure that I wasn't that big of an outlier.

[KrisZ]

I think that is ML Curly who you are talking about and he went to prison for molesting kids.

[dexstar]

I think that is ML Curly who you are talking about and he went to prison for molesting kids.

 

That is correct. What a messed up story that was.

[evilclown]

I'd be more interested to know if evilclown, as a serious wrestling historian, would deny the truth of what I laid out in my last post (i.e. About the birth of casual smart fans). And, if he would deny it, explain exactly where I've gone wrong.

 

I won't deny there are probably lots of fans who followed that path. It's unique in its form, but I'm not sure it's entirely different than a similar journey fans have been on for decades.

 

When you go back and read the newspaper reports and the occasional expose of wrestling, back to the turn of the 20th century, you'll see there's always been "insiders." Fans got smart quickly and, with money on the line with side bets and the like, figuring out the politics and the booking was paramount. As long as wrestlers have had things to hide, there have been fans trying to pry the truth loose.

[Johnny Sorrow]

Very few back then. I'm doubting there were lots of people giving a shit about the inner workings of Pro Wrestling during the Depression, World War Two, and Happy Days.

[Johnny Sorrow]

I was just at a house show last week and I met ONE dude who was a fan like me. I complimented his Steen and Generico shirt and started up a convo. He looks at his friend and explains that he was trying to explain the idea of "smart fan" to him and the friend was all, " What?" He showed me to him saying " See, this is what I was trying to explain to you ". Everyone else I saw were either kids who thought it was real, fans who know it's fake but had NO IDEA about booking or anything of the sort , and parents of the kids booing and cheering to have a good time and enjoy the show. Shit I almost got in a fight with two twenty something's because I was cheering Del Rio.

[evilclown]

Very few back then. I'm doubting there were lots of people giving a shit about the inner workings of Pro Wrestling during the Depression, World War Two, and Happy Days.

 

You can doubt all you want. It was of general interest even during the Frank Gotch era.

[JerryvonKramer]

 

"Hey Mick, you never guess what I heard"

 

"What's that Bill?"

 

"Londos is gonna put O'Mahony over in Boston"

 

"They are booking that all wrong Bill, I tell ya. Dick Shikat is a really underrated worker and them there promoters are just wasting him at the moment"

 

"I heard Shikat has got legit heat with a lot of the bookers ..."

 

"Yeah that whole deal with Toots Mondt and Miller"

[artDDP]

I don't remember exactly when but my parents smartened me up pretty early on. My uncle had recorded a ton of WWF cards beginning in 1984 and gave me the tapes and I would see Lanny Poffo, Mike Rotunda, and Jacques Rougeau and my parents pointed out that those guys were now The Genius, IRS, and The Mountie. My mom told me what a "gimmick" was and that they were all just performers. I think I enjoyed it even more as a result.

[Steenalized]

 

I'd be more interested to know if evilclown, as a serious wrestling historian, would deny the truth of what I laid out in my last post (i.e. About the birth of casual smart fans). And, if he would deny it, explain exactly where I've gone wrong.

 

I won't deny there are probably lots of fans who followed that path. It's unique in its form, but I'm not sure it's entirely different than a similar journey fans have been on for decades.

 

When you go back and read the newspaper reports and the occasional expose of wrestling, back to the turn of the 20th century, you'll see there's always been "insiders." Fans got smart quickly and, with money on the line with side bets and the like, figuring out the politics and the booking was paramount. As long as wrestlers have had things to hide, there have been fans trying to pry the truth loose.

 

Bear in mind that the World Series itself was rigged in 1918. Boxing and wrestling have long histories of being rigged and clearly gambling could sway the finals of a team sport at the time. "Insiders" and big money rigging certain matches, even every match, doesn't mean fans watching Londos had much in common with wrestling fans of today, fandom aside.

[Johnny Sorrow]

 

Very few back then. I'm doubting there were lots of people giving a shit about the inner workings of Pro Wrestling during the Depression, World War Two, and Happy Days.

 

You can doubt all you want. It was of general interest even during the Frank Gotch era.

 

Really? People were concerned with the backstage booking back then? Really?

 

No one cared about it ever as soon as everyone knew it was fake. Not one person was watching the Dumont Network and thinking "I wonder why Rikki Star isn't being pushed more, and that Antonina Rocca must have friends in the office".

[PeteF3]

Uncle Burt Ray in his Mat Mania newsletters constantly bitched and moaned about the big, slow, boring slugs in WWWF main events. This was during the First Bruno Era.

[evilclown]

 

 

Very few back then. I'm doubting there were lots of people giving a shit about the inner workings of Pro Wrestling during the Depression, World War Two, and Happy Days.

 

You can doubt all you want. It was of general interest even during the Frank Gotch era.

 

Really? People were concerned with the backstage booking back then? Really?

 

No one cared about it ever as soon as everyone knew it was fake. Not one person was watching the Dumont Network and thinking "I wonder why Rikki Star isn't being pushed more, and that Antonina Rocca must have friends in the office".

 

 

How do you jump from the Frank Gotch era to the Dumont Network? Forgive me if I'm not going to indulge you here and pretend this is an actual conversation.

 

 

Pretty funny that some of you think you're the first people to ever think about wrestling beyond winners and losers.

[jdw]

What Snowden is saying.