How Your Views on Wrestling Have Changed

[Matt D]

Imagine having Dylan as an influence during your formative years. It's a wonder he's not posting from a jail cell. That said, Devon will be running this place in ten years.

[goodhelmet]

Loss isn't that old. I'll probably be dead in ten years but don't think Loss is going to give it up that easily.

[Johnny Sorrow]

Loss isn't that old. I'll probably be dead in ten years but don't think Loss is going to give it up that easily.

I'm gonna outlive all you fuckers, then I'm blowing myself up.

[JerryvonKramer]

I'm much younger than Johnny.

This made me chuckle. As if you're like 25 and Johnny's 50! lol

[Exposer]

Imagine having Dylan as an influence during your formative years. It's a wonder he's not posting from a jail cell. That said, Devon will be running this place in ten years.

It's funny, because as much an influence as Dylan was and still is to a degree on my wrestling viewing and opinions, we've slowly separated when it comes to wrestling in recent years. Dylan will praise a match and I won't agree at all. I'll say something was great and Dylan will say it's innately bad or something. The day we get in a fist fight over structural issues in a match will be something to behold. Then, we'll both be in a jail cell.

[Johnny Sorrow]

 

 

Imagine having Dylan as an influence during your formative years. It's a wonder he's not posting from a jail cell. That said, Devon will be running this place in ten years.

It's funny, because as much an influence as Dylan was and still is to a degree on my wrestling viewing and opinions, we've slowly separated when it comes to wrestling in recent years. Dylan will praise a match and I won't agree at all. I'll say something was great and Dylan will say it's innately bad or something. The day we get in a fist fight over structural issues in a match will be something to behold. Then, we'll both be in a jail cell.

I'm picturing "Stir Crazy" the holding cell scene.

[concrete1992]

You're turning 22 in December? I'm turning 22 in December! What a world?

[Exposer]

I'm more surprised there's someone on this board that's my age, let alone the same birthday month.

[khawk20]

God, I'm older than the two of you combined.....**sigh**

[goodhelmet]

You are reaching Johnny Sorrow territory.

[Kronos]

God, I'm older than the two of you combined.....**sigh**

Right there with ya, buddy. I'll be 41 in December!

[pol]

I've noticed lately, and it's to some degree thanks to a conscious effort on my part, that I've become less concerned with the execution of individual moves, stiffness etc. and more interested in the effectiveness of a match's overall structure. Having started to get into lucha this year, it was initially a struggle for me because of how light much of the striking is and how even some very good workers can sometimes be sloppy in their execution of moves compared to WWE and Japanese guys. I'm starting to come around more and more to the Matt D side of things (although I do think his emphasis on the primacy of how a move is sold in measuring its symbolic value is flawed - looking real, whether by stiffness or not, also has a symbolic value).

 

Borrowing from funkdoc's habit of making weird analogies that few people can relate to, I've always been irritated by the dance music neophyte's habit of praising a DJ's ability to smoothly transition from one track to the next over more important skills like track selection, reading the crowd and structuring a set. Similarly the mainline smark community places a ton of emphasis on the ability to smoothly execute spots (and the complexity of those spots), to the extent that any wrestler who can occasionally be awkward or sloppy is considered terrible. In both cases I think the attitude springs from a facile understanding of the art form, leading to the belief that the most self-evident example of skill is the only one that matters.

[Zoo Enthusiast]

I'm living this right this minute as I watch Adam Cole vs Kyle O'Reilly from PWG a few months ago... I loved their "MMA rules" (or whatever they called it) match in ROH two years ago, and I pretty much hated this one. I think now that I probably just loved it for the blood and the crowd.

 

I do still enjoy Cole's schtick, if not always his wrestling, but I detest the fake MMA bullshit of O'Reilly soooo much. They do a big no-sell exchange in the middle of the match with a Frye/Takayama spot (probably my least favorite thing right now) that even the PWG crowd didn't give a shit about. It wasn't even "registering instead of selling." The punches were basically just ignored.

 

Not doing something as basic/common sense as selling getting hit in the face is something that I pretty much can't look past now, unless it's part of a finish.

[kewf1988]

I'm 26 and my views on wrestling have changed a bit as well but mostly because of my breaks from wrestling. Add me into the category of people who saw things different after the Benoit murders and the Misawa death. Benoit was favorite wrestler and it didn't help that the murders occurred close to my birthday. I won't say that I stopped watching altogether but I stopped watching WWE and focused on Japan because it still fed my hunger for state of the art wrestling and wrestling that is considered a "go go" style. Once the Misawa death happened, I stopped watching altogether because I felt guilty being a fan of style that could result in people dying.

And that is a big factor because I cringe now at head dropping spots, headbutts and kicks to the face. I've said it before that I'm not a fan of Ishii because of the headbutt spots and him being dropped on his head. I watched the G-1 this year and his physical state concerned me. Honma is another guy cause I wanted to yell at him and say "Don't do that diving headbutt from the top to floor!"

However, I still tend to like a more athletic style of wrestling but it needs to be paced out more and everybody should not kick out of someone's finisher (which is starting to be my gripe with everything I see from modern wrestling). With me, I try to find a happy medium for what is good cause this board has pointed to people that I would never watch such as Titus O Neil and Mark Henry. I always dismissed those guys cause they were big and the image of the WWE being a big man promotion but the thing is that there is not enough legit big men in the business for me to look at and say "That's how a big man should work". I watched a bunch of Titus O Neil matches from Superstars and I like the guy now. I wouldn't have said it back then.

The barnstorming trio of Thatcher, Busick and Gulak are another example of guys I wouldn't watch before 2009 and now I've got my eye on them. On the other side, I watch guys like Kyle O Reilly and Cedric Alexander cause they naturally catch my eye and I see what they can become down the road and not what they currently are. If a guy is spectacular at first glance, I will always notice them.

But, now I look for guys who actually sell and pace out stuff in order to a good match. An example of this was a match I watched with Chris Hero vs Kyle O Reilly for the PWG Title. I was never a big fan of Hero but I was interested in O Reilly. I watched the match and it made me like Hero a lot more and made me lose faith O Reilly in his development. It seemed like Hero was trying to get control of the match and slow it down but O Reilly was trying to get his stuff in. And don't blame indy guys for that mentality cause if the promoter wants you to tear it up, you got to do it. I think that's why I see not talking about the indies because it's a Wild West show and guys have to go over the top in order to please the crowd. A lot of the modern stuff I see kinda gets lost with me because I see them doing too much. I want to see guys like ACH, Rich Swann and AR Fox do better but their matches get lost cause they are doing too much.

When I came back to wrestling and saw Davey Richards vs Michael Elgin for the first time, my initial reaction was that they did too much. Younger me would not have said that but that's the beauty of getting older. Granted, I'm pretty sure that I'm never gonna be in the fan club of Lawler, Dundee and Rose but I understand what they do and it doesn't bother me.

I don't know if there's really a "safe" style of wrestling anymore... Joe ended Tyson Kidd's career and Rey killed somebody in the ring, but Khali also killed somebody in the ring, Heidenreich injured Stevie Richards twice in a month, and Goldberg ended Bret's career. And the majority of the early deaths came from wrestlers who were working an even more brutal schedule than today's (and WWF and WCW didn't have "moves" matches in those days) and had to keep the "look", so they had to resort to painkillers and steroids to handle a schedule like that. I think the schedules they work has more to do with it than the moves they do, as TNA and Indy wrestlers don't get injured nearly as often as WWE wrestlers do. Wear and tear...

 

Keeping that in mind, I am still more of a workrate guy than most here, though unlike a few years ago, I can understand the arguments here about how Angle is overrated (the overuse of finishers is a good argument, though he didn't really get that way until his later WWE years and his TNA run, which is when he had the "wrestling machine" gimmick rather than the Olympic gold medalist gimmick) and how Mark Henry is good (in the lists of his best matches I noticed that they're nearly all against really good workers like Bryan, Punk, Cena, Sheamus, and Orton, while his style hasn't changed all that much, so it may mean that he became more carryable in the later part of his career and that he found his character and charisma). The best X Division and WCW Cruiserweight matches still hold up very well to me, as does a lot of older WWF and WCW (War Games 92, the whole Sting/Vader series, Vader/Cactus, Sting/Flair GAB 90, both Warrior/Savage and Bret/Perfect matches, Savage/Steamboat, Flair/Perfect, Savage/Flair WM 8, Bret/Bulldog, etc.), so I do enjoy both action-based matches and psychology-based matches equally.