Are current matches just not as memorable or up to par as previous decades?

[Matt D]

Would it be safe to say that there's a lot more noise to filter through out there now? Just because there's so much more in general?

 

I will say, and this is anecdotal, that there seems to be a lot more of C+Ping in general. You'll get the same article slightly rephrased on a number of sites or even when you look at, let's say the Brockton Enterprise and the Boston Globe in MA. I remember about ten years ago my family subscribed to both and the overlap was jarring.

[Childs]

Definitely more noise to filter through.

 

And yes, you're probably seeing more content overlap as individual publications try to manage costs in ways they didn't when we were all rolling fat. The Baltimore Sun now owns the Annapolis paper and the Carroll County paper, which means they're using our stuff instead of producing their own. We don't have a national staff anymore; instead, we pull content from the LA Times and Chicago Tribune, which are in the same chain. That's not great for the industry, because there are fewer decent-paying jobs and fewer well-trained people covering stories. But there are a lot of factors pushing in the other direction, including the aforementioned research tools and the explosion of web-based publications, some of which are quite good.

[anarchistxx]

 

Older pieces are often a joy to read, with skilled writers producing fluid, insightful and beautiful prose and delivering longform pieces that inform and engross.

 

 

I read work that fits this description almost daily. You're talking about an idealized past that never existed.

 

 

I'm not. Don't be patronizing. Go and read journals and broadsheets from 1830 - 1960. The standard of writing in my experience is much higher. There are good pieces today and there were bad pieces then. You still get good writers like Barney Ronay who would have been right at home in that era.

 

I'm talking in general. Much more content is produced today and a good proportion of it is vacuous, uninformative, shoddily produced click bait. They are catering to an audience with lower attention span and who expects a lot of content to be produced daily if not hourly. Not an audience with fewer distractions who are buying a publication weekly and devote time and attention to reading it. As such, the overall quality has dipped.

 

People used to cut clippings out of music publications and save them because they enjoyed reading them so much. When was the last time Rolling Stone or NME or Pitchfork produced a great piece of journalism?

[Grimmas]

 

 

Older pieces are often a joy to read, with skilled writers producing fluid, insightful and beautiful prose and delivering longform pieces that inform and engross.

 

 

I read work that fits this description almost daily. You're talking about an idealized past that never existed.

 

 

I'm not. Don't be patronizing. Go and read journals and broadsheets from 1830 - 1960. The standard of writing in my experience is much higher. There are good pieces today and there were bad pieces then. You still get good writers like Barney Ronay who would have been right at home in that era.

 

I'm talking in general. Much more content is produced today and a good proportion of it is vacuous, uninformative, shoddily produced click bait. They are catering to an audience with lower attention span and who expects a lot of content to be produced daily if not hourly. Not an audience with fewer distractions who are buying a publication weekly and devote time and attention to reading it. As such, the overall quality has dipped.

 

People used to cut clippings out of music publications and save them because they enjoyed reading them so much. When was the last time Rolling Stone or NME or Pitchfork produced a great piece of journalism?

 

The problem with that is the best stuff is preserved and saved, while everything from today is available.

[Loss]

If people bookmark good articles, that's really what they are doing.

[tim]

 

 

Older pieces are often a joy to read, with skilled writers producing fluid, insightful and beautiful prose and delivering longform pieces that inform and engross.

 

 

I read work that fits this description almost daily. You're talking about an idealized past that never existed.

 

 

I'm not. Don't be patronizing. Go and read journals and broadsheets from 1830 - 1960. The standard of writing in my experience is much higher. There are good pieces today and there were bad pieces then. You still get good writers like Barney Ronay who would have been right at home in that era.

 

I'm talking in general. Much more content is produced today and a good proportion of it is vacuous, uninformative, shoddily produced click bait. They are catering to an audience with lower attention span and who expects a lot of content to be produced daily if not hourly. Not an audience with fewer distractions who are buying a publication weekly and devote time and attention to reading it. As such, the overall quality has dipped.

 

People used to cut clippings out of music publications and save them because they enjoyed reading them so much. When was the last time Rolling Stone or NME or Pitchfork produced a great piece of journalism?

 

 

Isn't it an issue of quantity expanding massively in both directions? And the average person being more likely to spend their time on clickbait nonsense than on good, deeply written accounts of complex subjects? There are a couple sites and blogs I check every day for both their own content and links to other content and there is more good journalism than you could possibly read in a day. You could say a lot of it you won't find in newspapers or on the front pages of million-hits-a-day top websites but I guess I don't consider that very relevant. You wouldn't find the best journalism in 1960 in TV Guide either.

[NintendoLogic]

Because HHH was going to be the babyface contender to Austin over the summer, so he'd have beaten him before to add interest to the feud.

 

Not exactly. HHH was going to be Austin's post-Mania challenger, but an Austin heel turn wasn't the original plan. Austin heard some boos at No Way Out, so he decided that the Stone Cold character had run its course and it was time to turn. But then HHH decided he didn't want to turn face, which is how we ended up with the Two-Man Power Trip.

[funkdoc]

there was no way i would have ever heard of ali abunimah back in the 60s so i'm going to side with childs on this one

[anarchistxx]

 

 

You wouldn't find the best journalism in 1960 in TV Guide either.

 

No. But you might in say The Guardian, whereas now the majority of content in that paper is click-bait nonsense.

[funkdoc]

 

You wouldn't find the best journalism in 1960 in TV Guide either.

 

No. But you might in say The Guardian, whereas now the majority of content in that paper is click-bait nonsense.

 

 

see i feel like the guardian would've been exposed as dull if we had the access back then that we do now

 

i'm just rarely interested in the thoughts of white people with money no matter how good the writing is, and that was almost all you ever got from the "classic" journalistic outlets. i don't care one bit if the guardian or rolling stone sinks into total irrelevance, as they've been dead to me for a long time now.

[anarchistxx]

i'm just rarely interested in the thoughts of white people with money no matter how good the writing is

 

Ignoring how reductionist and ridiculous this statement is, pretty much all publications are still owned by white people with money who control their content. Nothing has changed in that regard. Websites are exactly the same. Modern journalistic outlets haven't become some egalitarian utopia, it is almost the exact same strata of people controlling them. And of course, good journalism shouldn't really be about the 'thoughts' of the writer, and that is another problem today. Many articles and think pieces are just a writer talking about their opinion. In older publications you rarely even knew who the writer was.

 

If anything a paper like The Guardian makes a concerted effort to concentrate on minority issues, or at least to appear so. About half their content contains reference to sexism, racism, homophobia, feminist theory etc, and not a huge percentage of their writers could be classified as 'white people with money'. Doesn't make them a good content, because the quality of writing and the meaningfulness of the pieces is so shoddy. The pressure to monetize the website in the face of falling print sales mean the production of clickbait churnalism with very little attention given to investigative, longform, beautifully written writing.

 

Wrestling is the same. They don't have the patience or ability to properly build a feud towards a match that will seem unique and memorable, because they have to produce a ridiculous amount of content.

[Loss]

Pro Wrestling Only

[Strummer]

 

Because HHH was going to be the babyface contender to Austin over the summer, so he'd have beaten him before to add interest to the feud.

 

Not exactly. HHH was going to be Austin's post-Mania challenger, but an Austin heel turn wasn't the original plan. Austin heard some boos at No Way Out, so he decided that the Stone Cold character had run its course and it was time to turn. But then HHH decided he didn't want to turn face, which is how we ended up with the Two-Man Power Trip.

 

 

 

pretty sure that was No Way Out 2002 where Austin was freaked out that his match with Jericho had a dead crowd and he basically took over the whole match and afterwards told Vince that it was a sign he needed to be pushed even harder as a babyface. That's at least part of the reason why he squashed the NWO at every turn in the build to Mania and was basically not letting any heel get any heat on him. He was squashing the Flair/Arn/Benoit/Eddy faction every week that Spring before he walked out. This paranoia doesn't really get talked about much when talking about his departure.

 

never heard anything about that 01 run except he was reluctant to turn and briefly thought about ad libbing a stunner to Vince at the end of WM 17

[Matt D]

You can hear Austin's paranoia sometimes in his podcast actually. He has really strong feelings about booking that come through sometimes.

[iamthedoctor]

 

 

Because HHH was going to be the babyface contender to Austin over the summer, so he'd have beaten him before to add interest to the feud.

 

Not exactly. HHH was going to be Austin's post-Mania challenger, but an Austin heel turn wasn't the original plan. Austin heard some boos at No Way Out, so he decided that the Stone Cold character had run its course and it was time to turn. But then HHH decided he didn't want to turn face, which is how we ended up with the Two-Man Power Trip.

 

 

 

pretty sure that was No Way Out 2002 where Austin was freaked out that his match with Jericho had a dead crowd and he basically took over the whole match and afterwards told Vince that it was a sign he needed to be pushed even harder as a babyface. That's at least part of the reason why he squashed the NWO at every turn in the build to Mania and was basically not letting any heel get any heat on him. He was squashing the Flair/Arn/Benoit/Eddy faction every week that Spring before he walked out. This paranoia doesn't really get talked about much when talking about his departure.

 

never heard anything about that 01 run except he was reluctant to turn and briefly thought about ad libbing a stunner to Vince at the end of WM 17

 

 

What was ratings like for the Jericho run? I remember feeling so unimpressed with his run and that his World title match with Hunter at mania just bombed big time. I wasent keen on Jericho going over Rock & Austin on the same PPV as would have liked Austin to win one WCW World title. For me I would have preferred Austin vs Rock at the Dec PPV in 2001 as thats what the fans wanted. Austin pretty much destroyed Jericho on Raw and the build up was great but the match just plain sucked. I know they had to make the NWO strong but id have liked to be not in Austin's match.

 

2 big names in Rock & Austin doing 2 jobs back to back on PPVs twice in a row to try and solidify Jericho as the real deal in the Main Event. For me the NWO didnt get the push they deserved though they should have wiped everyone out how the original ones did in WCW and Austin complaining didnt help. I think the original plan was for Hall to go over at Mania with interference by Vince but they probably would have been better off having Hall/Nash go for the tag belts instead.

 

Not sure who Austin should have wrestled at mania but id probably have chosen Taker.

[Parties]

Memorability, as OJ noted, is a matter of time. But even Shield-Wyatts and Shield-Bryan suffered in a company with 7 hours a week of free TV, monthly PPVs, and NXT. WWE now produces in a month what a territory did in a year. The bookers are less savvy, creating too much content with too little diversity. The McMahons are victims of their own success, surrounding themselves with sycophants and hacks. Austin's podcast with Vince (while largely a work) was telling in Vince's tone deaf message: I'm 70 years old, but I'm still hip. The minor changes needed to produce 40-50 hours of memorable programming each month are actually pretty easy. They would cost nothing and in many cases save/make money. It's the needlessly stubborn, cynical philosophy that would need to change.

 

I have mixed feelings about the whole “match quality is higher than its ever been” trope that gets thrown around a lot. Rosters are as good as they've ever been, but they've also never been used worse. Great talent – perhaps more than ever - all wasted in such poor presentation. I watched the 1988 Survivor Series for the first time recently. Tons of great talent, but tons of mediocre/bad/over-the-hill workers in there too. The booking was effective, but it was far from rocket science, with some baffling choices at times. But the show was unbelievably fun to watch, because they presented it as fun. It looked like everyone on the card was having a great time and put over this show (a largely irrelevant collection of multi-man matches) as being of great value. The teams had real camaraderie. The announcers were enthusiastic. Most WWE today is a chore to watch, because all of the performers from the top to the bottom look tired/bored/hurt/unhappy/uninspired. Especially with the McMahons pushing themselves as the top act, the entire creative ethos of the company seems like an out-of-touch, pessimistic, dreary product in which the corporate executive heels always win and the babyfaces are all cowards and rubes. In other words: it feels like a show written by a jaded 70 year old millionaire who dislikes his employees and customers. The WWE TV of '88 was far inferior in terms of matches, but the booking was so much more enthused that it made what should have been cocaine-addled dreck into something great, while the opposite happens today.

 

And while I do think it's fair to take declinist attitudes with a grain of salt – and appreciate that there is some cherry-picking of the past going on – isn't national/global interest in wrestling kinda plummeting right now? Has wrestling ever been less cool? There's more at fault than foggy memories and shortened attention spans.

[Sean Liska]

 

And while I do think it's fair to take declinist attitudes with a grain of salt – and appreciate that there is some cherry-picking of the past going on – isn't national/global interest in wrestling kinda plummeting right now? Has wrestling ever been less cool? There's more at fault than foggy memories and shortened attention spans.

This is something I want to write more about, but everything in entertainment is more niche than ever. There is no musician as famous as Michael Jackson, no athlete as big as Jordan, no actor as mainstream as Arnold, no talk show host comparable to Carson, no TV show with water cooler buzz like Seinfeld, etc. But the good thing is that because it's so difficult to get eyeballs today, you can get paid a ton of money to produce content that generates decent viewership.

[Graham Crackers]

Reading this thread reminded me of something Phil Schneider said to me at an indie wrestling show back in 2011 that never really occurred to me before. That is that the majority of independent wrestlers are hobbyists and that is evident in the way they work. I know that many indie wrestlers have gimmicks and attempt to fit into roles within matches but the goal of almost every match is to have a great match and make each other look good. These great matches are frequently based upon idealized visions of of a wrestling utopia and typically fetishize athleticism and/or insider knowledge. Unfortunately not everyone's vision is what we might consider great wrestling and not every indie wrestler is up to the challenge of having a great match.

 

In the territorial days wrestlers were called upon to fill a number of roles on a roster and many of them did not call for those mythological "great" matches. That's not to say that you couldn't have a great match when filling those roles. I have seen New Japan Young Lion matches I'd consider great, squashes with great performances, and filler matches on old cards that I might even call great but usually because of the way those wrestlers filled their roles. Some wrestlers were great at portraying their lack of experience or that they were going to get killed by some big fat monster.

 

Back to the point, I think that some of that "hobbyist" attitude has spread to the "professional" levels of the sport and the lack of managerial guidance that Parties is talking about plays into that. Look at the way that the classic hierarchical structures of Japanese wrestling have broken down. Look at the way that WWE throws wrestlers out on TV to fill time with little care as to what happens in their match and how it relates to long term plans. The dreaded "even steven" booking makes that even worse. I don't mean to place the blame entirely on wrestlers. It's promoters, wrestlers, and fan expectations.

 

I don't think modern wrestling has completely left me behind even if I don't follow it that closely. I think the best matches of the last few years are classics, some of my favorite matches. I think that the talent level today is high though it depends on the setting. The unfortunate result for my current enjoyment of pro wrestling is just that there are fewer of those great matches happening in a given year and fewer special moments.

[GOTNW]

I I was looking for a thread comparing current wrestling to older wrestling or something similar so I guess this will do. Keep my stylistic biases in mind.


A lot of people argue there is now more good wrestling than ever. I would agree with this. There is just so much footage it doesn't even make for a fair comparison. Where people mostly disagree is how great the best stuff of today is compared to the classics of yesterday.


Personally I don't think 2016 is churning out all time classics one after another. The only one I would argue for is Styles/Reigns from Payback-which is a serious best WWE match ever candidate for me. But I am also not the biggest fan of the styles that are "in" and supposedly producing all this greatness.


Looking at my favourite stuff historically a lot of it managed to exist because of how insanely popular wrestling was at the time-particularly in Japan. A lot of experimentation and innovation came naturally. UWF, FMW, Michinoku Pro, Battlarts, BJW, etc., the business was strong enough that if there was someone with a different vision of pro wrestling someone would show up to watch it (and this produced some of the greatest matches of all time, some in front of 500 people). With the business going down for so long there isn't so much room for that. But-regardless what you think of them-if you look at the most successful non-New Japan promotions-what do they all have in common? Dragon Gate, DDT, Big Japan. They all started out as part of that experimentation wave and managed to cultivate a fanbase. They've changed things along the way but they have managed to grow a healthy audience. Doing what they did would be much harder for a promotion starting right now than it was for them. Because Japan is weird and brilliant-you are still going to find plenty of attempts of being different-whether it be Gatoh move holding shows in.......a room?, a wresling federation in a sex dungeon, HASEGAWA and stuff like that. Not a lot of it (well almost nothing) amounts to "great" wrestling but I'm glad it exists. Most indies are more interested in resurrecting styles or just booking older guys from those styles in "regular" pro wrestling matches because nostalgia is the draw (RJPW, Hard Hit, neo-FMW, my favourite-Tokyo Gurentai, etc.). NOAH, which used to be my favourite promotion, has turned into a parody of japanese pro wrestling. AJPW is slowly rebuilding but I have my doubts about them ever reaching their peak. I mean in work and not popularity-Akiyama has moved away from a lot of what made the All Japan matches crucial and doesn't seem to be teaching his youngsters the old ways. This isn't a big problem with Akiyama because he is a genius performer who can work through that whenever he even slightly cares but obviously not everyone is going to be a performer of that caliber. All Japan's old formulas allowed them to maximize a lot of wrestler's skills. You take a guy like Suwama, I'm more than certain he could do everything Yoshiaki Yatsu did, if not better. Yet when I look at him or Go Shiozaki all I can think of is wasted potential. Wrestlers who showed a lot of promise from their early days squandered by modern puro going in a direction that made them think the wrong things mattered. New Japan was never a fairy land where everything ruled but currently the product is at an all time low. It's a long sleep from one G1 to another. As far as the best japanese stuff goes.......yeah it tends to be disappointing these days, but there aren't many places to look for it either. The best match this year was a WAR-esque tag where Hideki Suzuki and Nakanoue killed each other. I am curious what peaks the All Japan/Big Japan partnership will reach as they currently provide the best alternative for those longing for more traditional japanese heavyweight wrestling.

CMLL is what it is. When they give a shit you get all time great promotional runs. Most of the time they don't. But we've definitely seen sparks of that in the previous year or so. Maybe it's uncertainty whether someone is going to jump to WWE that is preventing them from booking long-term storylines. But they still have a lot of great wrestlers. AAA is shit but they've always been. More cool lucha indy stuff makes tape than ever.

I'm sure someone would say US Indy wrestling is long removed from its Golden Age but I'm sure whether the golden age was really that great. It's a different world out there these days. WWE will snatch up anyone that's any good and the indies are getting an influx of largely mediocre WWE talent that fans may or may not have sentimental value for but will almost assuredly get booked regardless. As a result WWE also now has a pretty insane roster, one that has already produced an all time great in ring year if not the best in 2013. Booking aside, they coould (and often do) kill it when provided opportunities.

One thing to also consider re: the aforementioned experimentation is that wrestling has been around for a while now. We have the established classics. We're reaching a point where it's questionable how many more things can we truly see in the medium. And with that in mind it's worth noting that once genres pass their prime the geniuses of the time tend to be regarded better than those who try to imitate them. Name the first classical composer that comes to your mind. Do the same for a jazz artist, a rock band, a painter and a writer. Now, provided in the two seconds after you read my sentence you didn't turn into a gigantic dick and consciously tried to name some obscure names (or have already conditioned yourself to do so) you'll see the point. That doesn't mean it's impossible to create great wrestling now-but it might be harder now that wrestling is dealing with the question of how to create greatness in a world where previous greatness exists, a wall every art hits.

As you might have guessed by already, I think wrestling is just fine where it is right now. I remember thinking back in 2012 how little how end stuff there was. Interestingly enough that was also the year New Japan's resurgence started and it's been better since then-not necessarily in New Japan but in wrestling in general. To me this is a question that will be worth asking a lot more twenty years from now, with the legend of yesterday continuing to die off, the popularity of pro wrestling likely decreasing and a post-Vince WWE.

 

tldr: wrestling would be better than ever if Ikeda just published those damn Futen DVDs.

[Loss]

The matches are good. What I feel is missing is the style diversity, the sense of importance around the outcome, the booking, the cultural relevance, the crowd reactions and the sense that I'm watching something that will be remembered. It's hard to call this the best period ever for wrestling when there is no wrestling company in the U.S. that can sell out a big arena other than WWE. I don't say that to bring up the business value of that as much as I do to bring up the aesthetic value of that.

[Matt D]

Wouldn't you say that often times, when wrestling is most mainstream, the actual matches are sacrificed and diluted since they're not aimed at a more narrow, hardcore audience? All of those short Raw matches, for instance.

[Loss]

Yes. I think that's consistently true. For me, it's not about wrestling being mainstream. It's about the ability to have matches that are presented in a way more in line with traditional pro wrestling that happen in semi-big buildings. I'd take a company that was as big as early 90s WCW even.

[dawho5]

I think now more than ever in American wrestling athletic ability is at a premium. If you can't do something that will wow a crowd physically, you're not going to get anywhere. I see two major factors here.

 

1. The death of kayfabe. Before, we had the idea presented to us that this was a competition. These guys were really interested in winning these matches because they wanted to either a. get involved in a title picture or b. show up their bitter rival. So when that element of "why someone is fighting" goes away and it's just two guys out there for an athletic exhibition, the story becomes less important than how much you can wow the crowd.

 

2. The way the WWE books. No one person matters. Wins and losses are unimportant. Titles are marginally important. The one thing everybody wants is that Wrestlemania Moment^tm. Not so they can say they won the title, but so they can say they won at mania. Because it's Wrestlemania. It doesn't help that no coherent story has developed for anyone that lasts more than a month or two.

 

With those two things in mind, where is a worker going to find the underlying story to put into their matches that gives them the added oomph? What they have to do to get noticed is have spots the crowd pops for each and every time and that's about the best they can hope for is to get a reaction. Seems like a formula for technically sound, physically spectacular, but at the end of the day meaningless matches.

 

As far as Japan goes, my watching of post-2000 wrestling in Japan led me to the conclusion that the big name 90s heroes were the driving force behind all of it. The tropes seem like a mishmash of AJPW and NJPW styles of that era to pop crowds likely raised on those styles of wrestling. It's one thing to pay homage to the heroes of the past. It's quite another to base a style mostly on the easily picked up aspects of a few others without any of the small details or connecting parts or knowledge of why these things are being done. To me it comes off as an uninspired attempt at resurrecting the past.

[GOTNW]

There is definitely a lack of a strong weekly show right now. Lucha Underground midcard matches are often bad lazy spotfests and are probably the biggest reason why I took a break from watching it. Nothing ever happens at NXT and matches often feature unpolished workers that haven't figured it out yet whose flaws aren't as hidden as they could be. Japan and Mexico don't really operate like that. TNA actually sounds like a great trainwreck these days and I should probably start watching it. But it's much different when you're cherry picking stuff instead of constantly following the journey.

[El-P]

Wouldn't you say that often times, when wrestling is most mainstream, the actual matches are sacrificed and diluted since they're not aimed at a more narrow, hardcore audience? All of those short Raw matches, for instance.

 

Pro-wrestling isn't mainstream at all today. Nobody cares about it.