[SPLIT TOPIC] Today's wrestling vs wrestling from the past (From Lawler GWE thread)

[goodhelmet]

Interesting. Just because today's product is inferior to past wrestling doesn't mean we are dismissing it. It means we enjoy one time frame more than the other. We can still enjoy both.

[W2BTD]

If that's not true, why were the best wrestlers far better at evoking emotion from an audience back then? You see genuine emotion occasionally now, but rarely do you see a fan jumping the railing or stuff being thrown in the ring anymore because people are so angry. Where are the great working heels? For that matter, until very recently when guys like Drew Gulak and Timothy Thatcher started getting play, no one could point me to a wrestling company anywhere in the world that had great matwork as a key part of their style when I posed the question on Twitter, other than CMLL as sort of the de facto choice.

 

The answer to most of your questions is kayfabe being dead, not anything to do with wrestling being smarter.

 

If anything, wrestling was dumbed down in that era, because they could get away with it. What is so "smart" about heel Lawler playing hide & seek with a foreign object for an entire match? Or the babyface Lawler formula of selling & selling & selling until pulling down the strap and hitting the piledriver? Just because they could get away with simpler, more basic psychology, doesn't make it "smarter". That is complete & total Pollyanna "back in my day" bullshit. The word you guys are looking for is "simpler", not smarter.

[soup23]

 

 

I saw enough Curt Hennig in the 80s. Dolph Ziggler doesn't exactly remind me of somebody who would light the world on fire. He may have had better matches though because wrestling was smarter back then and he would have had better opponents to teach him how to wrestle properly.

"Wrestling was smarter back then" is just shit people say. Mostly here & DVDVR.

 

Today is tomorrow's good old days.

Everything used to better than it is now. Everything was better when we were kids. When it was pure, before it all changed.

 

As much as I love old wrestling, and enjoy some aspects of it more, I find it hard to take people who completely dismiss modern wrestling on the basis that it was better then, whenever then is. I often think those people don't actually lie wrestling, but rather their memories of wrestling. Which is totally cool, but it really makes it hard to take people seriously when the dismiss comments like joe's offhand.

 

I hate the generalization of the kids argument. If that was the case, Hogan would be my #1 and Jake the Snake my #2. No one in this thread to my knowledge grew up as a kid idolizing Lawler. I thought of Lawler as the preverted announcer on Raw that had a feud with Bret Hart when I was seven. Looking at the last SC poll, Lawler did pretty poorly all things considered and had #1 overall vote.

 

Wrestling has great stuff consisting of it now. WrestleMania 30 was the greatest live show I have been with. August 2013 was NOT the best month in wrestling history IMO and I watched in current time with other months I would have above it but it was a great month.

 

You have said Daniel Bryan may be your #1. I applaud that. I just don't want someone to be labeled as a curmudgeon for picking Flair, Misawa, Lawler, etc.

[BillThompson]

I think the quality of wrestling was better a couple of decades ago. It may be a simple case of quantity over quality, both in terms of the amount we see on tape now and the amount of wrestlers now versus a couple of decades ago. There's plenty of great modern wrestling, I would never say otherwise. However, I think there were more great wrestlers and more great wrestling a couple of decades ago because they were more people who were great at the art of wrestling and less people who were athletic and nothing more.

 

Two isolated spots kind of illustrate my point, both require some degree of athleticism but in the end both spots illustrate why psychology always trumps athleticism for me.

 

Edge and Christian had a spot where Christian would execute a Drop Toehold on Edge so that Edge landed headfirst into the stomach/groin of an opponent. It's a simple spot, that requires some athleticism but in general relies on the smartness of the application of the move and how it works towards a logical conclusion of inflicting damage without causing yourself much harm in the process.

 

The Young Bucks have the Meltzer Driver, where one of them holds the opponent for a Tombstone Piledriver and the other Buck comes off the top rope with a 450 Splash to turn it into a Spike Tombstone Piledriver. It's a very athletic move, and it certainly popped the crowd, but it's also incredibly stupid, useless athleticism, and an example of everything I don't want in my professional wrestling.

 

Now, I don't have any issue with people who love the Meltzer Driver, or the Bucks for that matter, but it's simply not the type of wrestling I care for. It's athleticism in lieu of psychology, common sense, selling, true earned emotion, etc. I'll take the E & C Drop Toehold spot every time because it appeals to the sort of smart, logically based, psychologically sound wrestling I enjoy.

 

None of this means that there isn't great modern pro wrestling, but there has been a movement towards athleticism first in the past ten years or so, and the matches/wrestlers that rely heavily on athleticism don't appeal to me as quality pro wrestling, and don't hold a candle to quality pro wrestling from a couple of decades ago (or even the quality modern pro wrestling that is taking place where there isn't a heavy focus on athleticism).

[Loss]

 

If that's not true, why were the best wrestlers far better at evoking emotion from an audience back then? You see genuine emotion occasionally now, but rarely do you see a fan jumping the railing or stuff being thrown in the ring anymore because people are so angry. Where are the great working heels? For that matter, until very recently when guys like Drew Gulak and Timothy Thatcher started getting play, no one could point me to a wrestling company anywhere in the world that had great matwork as a key part of their style when I posed the question on Twitter, other than CMLL as sort of the de facto choice.

 

The answer to most of your questions is kayfabe being dead, not anything to do with wrestling being smarter.

 

If anything, wrestling was dumbed down in that era, because they could get away with it. What is so "smart" about heel Lawler playing hide & seek with a foreign object for an entire match? Or the babyface Lawler formula of selling & selling & selling until pulling down the strap and hitting the piledriver? Just because they could get away with simpler, more basic psychology, doesn't make it "smarter". That is complete & total Pollyanna "back in my day" bullshit. The word you guys are looking for is "simpler", not smarter.

 

 

Kayfabe has been dead for a quarter century, if not longer.

 

I'm not a fan of Lawler's hide-and-seek tactics, so you're not going to see me defending it. I am a fan of Shawn Michaels nearly inciting a riot at a European pay-per-view because he was willing to go for the jugular. Who's doing that now?

[Shining Wiz]

It wasn't "acceptable" at any point. People did it anyway because there were heels who cared enough about raising their ire and were good enough to do it right. Most WWE matches don't have any heat until the finisher teases start because for whatever reason, they haven't found a way to make people care about the other stuff enough.

 

The point of the mat wrestling comment was actually to evoke guys like Tamura and Han, who I think it would be foolish to not consider great athletes. Tamura probably had better cardio than any worker in the world in the late 90s. Who's out there pulling off anything similar now?

WWE's problem isn't that people don't care about the wrestlers so much that we all know 90% of matches won't end without someone hitting a finisher, so it's hard to get people invested in the early part of a match.

 

And are you really saying jumping a railing in the 70's or 80's has the same connotations it does now? Wrestling wise, we all know it's a work, so the edge is off the emotional blade, and society wise it's become increasingly less acceptable since the Monica Seles incident.

 

And I'm not sure Han is on the same plane of athleticism as someone like Ziggler or Rollins or Styles. No reason for him to be considering his style.

[dawho5]

Once again, I might point out that this is hardly applicable *only* to Jerry Lawler. Is there a better spot to have this so people can read this argument if they have no interest at all in Lawler?

[NintendoLogic]

Being able to generate emotion has nothing to do with knowledge of wrestling's worked nature. Everyone knew that wrestling was fake in 1996, but that didn't stop that one guy from rushing the ring at Bash at the Beach.

[W2BTD]

Being able to generate emotion has nothing to do with knowledge of wrestling's worked nature. Everyone knew that wrestling was fake in 1996, but that didn't stop that one guy from rushing the ring at Bash at the Beach.

 

I think this is nonsense. It is infinitely more difficult to generate passionate emotion today than it was in 1977 in front of the slack jawed rubes at the MSC or in 1985 at Techwood Drive Studio.

 

The more people believe, the easier it is to make them care.

 

And a lot of it has to do with the angles. The angles were more effective back then because they were rare. Verne ran one or two per year on TV. Some RAW's have an angle in every segment. There are angles today that would be the hottest thing ever in 1981, that are forgotten by the next quarter hour in 2014. The standards are higher, it's harder to make an impact now. Wrestling created that monster themselves to some extent, but it is what it is.

[Shining Wiz]

It's like movies. We all know everyone is playing a role, and most of the time, even when we really like it and were into it, we still know it's just actors playing a role. Once in a while, someone is so good they get past that, and if we're really lucky more than one thing that takes us past that line is going on at the same time.

 

Before you knew it was just a movie though, that line didn't exist.

[Steenalized]

Memphis was running angles constantly. Memphis also had through-the-roof levels of heat. As far as dismissing modern wrestling, I'd agree with Will in that for one, no one is dismissing modern wrestling. Myself, for example: I was born in 1989. This Lawler and Memphis wrestling that I'm going through right now and loving happened 8-10 years before I was born. I haven't seen it until now. I'd rate guys like Lawler well above almost anyone active today, but I'd also put guys like Misawa and Kobashi significantly lower than a lot of people here. Time isn't the issue. Lawler's plenty athletic and had excellent psychology. Unlike Loss, I love his hide-the-chain heel work. He doesn't need to hit a springboard kick when a diving fistdrop off the top rope looks plenty hard.

[Sean Liska]

I think Lawler is right there in the discussion for best ever, but you do have to acknowledge the multitude of reasons why it's harder to get responses now than before. Crowds have seen everything by now. WWE has produced so much product over the past 15 years. Hours upon hours of competitive matches during that whole time. Fans are smarter. People didn't surround the ring and make it difficult for Flair to leave the cage after he turned on Dusty because Flair was such a smarter performer - they also did it because they were dumber people to respond to fiction that way. You can also see how much harder it is to get a response in Japan or Mexico due to how much those audiences have seen too.

 

The point about fans knowing to wait for the finishng sequence has merit too. In the old days you could do a hiptoss and a backdrop and get people popping big in an opener, and it's not because those guys were so smart and sometimes won matches on arm drags two minutes in to keep fans honest,

 

But Lawler is right there with Flair and Funk for me as greatest ever. The stuff about his athleticism makes no sense if you saw him in the 70s and early 80s.

[ohtani's jacket]

I don't get the emotion thing. Last night I watched the most emotional mask match in 14 years, and people went on a complete emotional roller coaster over Daniel Bryan.

[NintendoLogic]

Nobody but the dumbest of the dumb thought that wrestling was real even back in the 70s and 80s. Back when Ole Anderson was booking the Carolinas, the Charlotte Observer did a poll of wrestling fans in the city asking if they thought wrestling was real. Ole predicted that 95 to 98 percent would say yes. The actual number was 1 percent. I suppose you could argue that the fans in Charlotte were worldly sophisticates as opposed to the slack-jawed rubes in Memphis and Atlanta, but that doesn't strike me as a very tenable position.

[Shining Wiz]

I don't get the emotion thing. Last night I watched the most emotional mask match in 14 years, and people went on a complete emotional roller coaster over Daniel Bryan.

 

Yeah, but no one tried to jump the rail to help him any time got beat down, so they're obviously not that into it.

 

 

Sorry for the snark......long night watching an embarrassing election.

[Loss]

Those moments still happen for sure. But they are more rare than ever. And it's usually not generated by a heel doing something awful. "Indy respect" has gone national.

[W2BTD]

I don't get the emotion thing. Last night I watched the most emotional mask match in 14 years, and people went on a complete emotional roller coaster over Daniel Bryan.

 

Nobody said you can't draw emotion today. At least I didn't. I said it was harder.

[Shining Wiz]

Export the hottest heel angle you can think of in history, export it entirely to today's crowd.......different reaction because different crowd.

 

This conversation has wandered way off from my original comment that Lawler would be one of, if not the, least athletic guy in my top 100.

[Sean Liska]

Nobody but the dumbest of the dumb thought that wrestling was real even back in the 70s and 80s. Back when Ole Anderson was booking the Carolinas, the Charlotte Observer did a poll of wrestling fans in the city asking if they thought wrestling was real. Ole predicted that 95 to 98 percent would say yes. The actual number was 1 percent. I suppose you could argue that the fans in Charlotte were worldly sophisticates as opposed to the slack-jawed rubes in Memphis and Atlanta, but that doesn't strike me as a very tenable position.

I always hear that no one actually believed wrestling was real in the old days, but why did Ox Baker start a riot in Cleveland beating up a babyface? Did people riot at plays in the 70s? We scoff at the old-timers talking about fighting off fans, but we have proof here. Clearly the emotional dynamic was different.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hG-FO6UnaeQ

[ohtani's jacket]

Those moments still happen for sure. But they are more rare than ever. And it's usually not generated by a heel doing something awful. "Indy respect" has gone national.

 

No promotion wants blood on TV, no promotion wants a fan anywhere near the ring, and no promotions wants the threat of a riot. That doesn't mean the heels today couldn't incite those things. Wrestling has been sanitized. Didn't Finlay get fired as a road agent for some flag burning angle or something?

[Chess Knight]

 

Is Dolph Ziggler the equal of Ric Flair in psychology? No. But if you put just about any decent Ziggler match on TBS in 1985 and fandom's collective head explodes at the level of athleticism he shows.

 

 

Should that really matter, even if it was true? I mean the Dynamite Kid/Tiger Mask matches were some of the most popular matches of all time largely due to athleticism, and people watching the NJPW 80s comp a few years back (myself included) came out thinking they sucked. How many of us sitting there bored were thinking "man the crowd and wrestling reporters really liked this, standards have been risen?" None, I bet. We were thinking "I can't wait for another Fujinami match like the one I saw from two years before this". My point is that I don't think somebody should judge a wrestler based on other people's standards and opinions. I'm not trying to say anybody does that literally, but I don't see why anybody would ever say "wrestlers were better during this period because if you cut and paste them into this other period, people would have lost their shit".

 

(semi-separate point) - It kind of almost seems like some of this argument toward athleticism is based off of how other people are perceiving it. I don't care if an NWA studio crowd would have gone nuts for Kofi Kingston working the way he does. I'd still think he's rubbish, and would even more-so if Jerry Lawler is working the next night using only a punch to create a classic.Lack of athleticism only matters if you actively try to work athletically. A guy like Lawler knew his limitations and stuck to what he knew he was completely capable of. Dolph Ziggler can bump a lot but when I see him bump with the same velocity for Cody Rhodes that he does for the Big Show, I'm not going to be very impressed that he can bounce off of the floor. Sometimes I can't take him seriously because I think with his bumping he's trying to get himself over more than he is the guy attacking him. http://i.imgur.com/XUL7y.gif

 

 

 

why do my fucking posts on every fucking forum always mean to be two lines and wind up being this long

[Loss]

I understand that, but the point made was that wrestling is "better than ever" in 2013-2014. Those exact reasons you cited, among others, are reasons why it's not and it can't be. I don't even blame the wrestlers so much, but the end result is no hot heels and matches with far less heat. There are more wrestlers capable of dazzling than in years past, but I don't see how that translates to wrestling being better now.

[shoe]

Dazzle really is the right term.

[Loss]

Anyway, I'll split off all this stuff as dawho requested so this thread can be more about Lawler again.

[NintendoLogic]

 

Nobody but the dumbest of the dumb thought that wrestling was real even back in the 70s and 80s. Back when Ole Anderson was booking the Carolinas, the Charlotte Observer did a poll of wrestling fans in the city asking if they thought wrestling was real. Ole predicted that 95 to 98 percent would say yes. The actual number was 1 percent. I suppose you could argue that the fans in Charlotte were worldly sophisticates as opposed to the slack-jawed rubes in Memphis and Atlanta, but that doesn't strike me as a very tenable position.

I always hear that no one actually believed wrestling was real in the old days, but why did Ox Baker start a riot in Cleveland beating up a babyface? Did people riot at plays in the 70s? We scoff at the old-timers talking about fighting off fans, but we have proof here. Clearly the emotional dynamic was different.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hG-FO6UnaeQ

 

 

Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring caused a riot when it premiered. Moving back to wrestling, Japanese fans rioted when Vader beat Antonio Inoki in his debut. It wasn't because they thought it was real, it was because they hated the angle. People do dumb shit when they're pissed off.