dawho5 Posted November 22, 2015 Report Share Posted November 22, 2015 I recently started my WCCW watchings and some criticisms of the Von Erichs jumped out at me right away as not way off. They do have a tendency to not be truly "in peril" very often. Sure, Kerry will make it look like Flair has him in real danger. But it seems like even against the Freebirds there is a distinct lack of true danger to Kevin, Kerry or David. They just don't give the impression that all three Freebirds beating up on one Von Erich is anything more than a temporary setback. I will also say that the family was over enough that they had no real need to do that. The whole point is to build sympathy and make the crowd desperately want to see the faces come back. I would venture to guess that you give the Freebirds (or anyone else) about a minute of mostly sustained offense and the crowd is going to explode when whatever Von Erich is in the ring starts brawling back. So in a lot of ways, to me at least, this is something that forgives the often long shine/short heat structure of the matches in WCCW. It's what the fans seem to want to see and keeps them showing up. Even if it doesn't seem like the optimal way of putting a match together to some of us as wrestling fans now I think that we have to look at it through the lens of the 1980s WCCW fan. Did those fans really want to see Hayes, Gordy and Roberts beating up on one Von Erich for seven or eight minutes straight? Or did they want to see their beloved Von Erichs kicking ass and taking names? I know Loss has talked about trying to judge matches and wrestlers based on the conditions of the time and I think this territory is a prime example of that. Thoughts? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thebrainfollower Posted November 22, 2015 Report Share Posted November 22, 2015 I look at Kevin at least and I am reminded of a kid I used to play wrestling with when I was about 7 or 8. He was a baseball player and thought he was really tough. As a result he never really let me do any moves because "I'm an athlete so I'm better". I stopped playing with him in general. Kevin seems to work the same way. He doesn't WANT to ever look bad and get beat up so he doesn't. And has the political pull to make that happen. He barely sells anything usually. I watch him and I am not sure if I am watching a guy too dumb to know wrestling is a work or too selfish to accept it, but either way, it takes me out of wrestling. And it's not like Backlund or the Steiners. They are guilty of the same thing at times but the reasons are different as they legit COULD destroy virtually any opponent without breaking a sweat. Kevin could not say that outside of his fantasies and therein lies the key, because daddy owned the company they could and did turn them into reality. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
goc Posted November 22, 2015 Report Share Posted November 22, 2015 Would more selling from the Von Erichs have made us internet geeks look back more fondly on their matches 15-20 years later? Most likely. Would it have made the fans at the time enjoy them more? I'm not sure that's really the case. The fans wanted to see the Von Erichs kick ass. With the territory doing as good as it was during the peak and as insanely hot as those crowds were, who can say that they weren't doing the right thing? It's not like it kept people from buying tickets to see Von Erichs vs. Freebirds matches because that feud went on well over a year and still sold tickets. There are a lot of reasons you can point to for why World Class fell apart but I don't really think "Kevin didn't like selling" is one of them. And I say that as a guy who thinks Kevin is easily the worst of the bunch and I've never seen another wrestler who seemed to be so adverse to showing any kind of vulnerability. But I'm also a firm believer in the saying "if it ain't broke don't fix it" and it clearly worked for him, at least for a time. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JerryvonKramer Posted November 22, 2015 Report Share Posted November 22, 2015 For what it is worth, I did not notice this tendency at all in their matches vs. Harley Race in 1982. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dawho5 Posted November 22, 2015 Author Report Share Posted November 22, 2015 I didn't notice it against Flair either. They seemed to make sure that the champ looked good when he came through. They got their licks in for sure, but when the time came to make Flair look like he truly was the man they did just that. I just don't think it applied to people within the territory that they were feuding with. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
funkdoc Posted November 22, 2015 Report Share Posted November 22, 2015 yea this thread reminds me a lot of the recurring backlund debate on titans of wrestling and i feel the same way about both - i think the "anti" side slightly misreads the reason fans came to these shows. i think this came up before and i used a sports analogy but didn't quite explain it well enough, so i'll try again. so one of the major draws of sports is expressing pride in your city/country/school, and usually the best result for fans is their home team completely destroying the opposition. by and large, people don't watch sports for the same reasons they watch movies or TV - with sports, the heroes are more personally connected to you through geography/shared history. just think of how often people refer to their sports teams as "we"! i think people viewed territories with strong local heroes, like WWWF and world class, in the same kind of way they viewed sports. it also helped that new york and texas have some of the richest sports traditions in the country, and are states that generally see themselves as the best (in different ways, of course). thus, i would argue that fans saw the top faces in these promotions as an extension of themselves and their state, and these wrestlers' dominant nature played to the populace's regional exceptionalism. this connection is especially powerful when the athlete in question is from the fans' home state, as the von erichs were, but it still happens with cases like backlund because if you succeed in a region and stay around long enough, you become an adopted son of theirs. i wonder if this isn't the sort of thing meltzer means when he's critical of rewatching - yea, it's silly in a lot of ways, but here i think there's real merit to the idea that watching wrestling solely as "entertainment" leads us to miss the forest for the trees. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KrisZ Posted November 22, 2015 Report Share Posted November 22, 2015 World Class babyface work was different than every other territory at the time.....their matches were built like real fights especially Von Erich matches....there wasn't a whole lot of your standardized structure it was just guys scrapping with each other. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matt D Posted November 22, 2015 Report Share Posted November 22, 2015 We'd be better off without Texas and Japan, obviously. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thebrainfollower Posted November 22, 2015 Report Share Posted November 22, 2015 I'd hand Texas back to Mexico tomorrow if I could lol. I never said in my post that the Von Erichs selling hurt WCCW. The original poster did and I don't agree with that BUT it does make me like watching the stuff a whole lot less now. And I think it MIGHT have hurt Kevin's career in that he didn't have a lot of options of where to go, but then he didn't want to, so the worst you can say about this then is that it COULD have hurt his career. I guess a see a huge difference between the average Japanese worker than a Von Erich. Thought that point was kind of an irrelevant cheap shot Matt of little value at all to this discussion. And there's scrapping then there is dominating. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Childs Posted November 22, 2015 Report Share Posted November 22, 2015 He was making a little joke based on his own struggles to get into Japanese wrestling. Lighten up. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dawho5 Posted November 22, 2015 Author Report Share Posted November 22, 2015 I don't recall saying that it hurt WCCW. My point was that it may hurt our viewing of the matches in later years rather than help it. I think it helped WCCW because it was what the fans wanted to see. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
goodhelmet Posted November 22, 2015 Report Share Posted November 22, 2015 We'd be better off without Texas and Japan, obviously. The Funks, Stan Hansen, Dusty Rhodes, etc. wouldn't exist. Wrestling needs Texas. The World needs Texas! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matt D Posted November 22, 2015 Report Share Posted November 22, 2015 Just Dallas then? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Loss Posted November 22, 2015 Report Share Posted November 22, 2015 Would more selling from the Von Erichs have made us internet geeks look back more fondly on their matches 15-20 years later? Most likely. Would it have made the fans at the time enjoy them more? I'm not sure that's really the case. The fans wanted to see the Von Erichs kick ass. With the territory doing as good as it was during the peak and as insanely hot as those crowds were, who can say that they weren't doing the right thing? It's not like it kept people from buying tickets to see Von Erichs vs. Freebirds matches because that feud went on well over a year and still sold tickets. There are a lot of reasons you can point to for why World Class fell apart but I don't really think "Kevin didn't like selling" is one of them. And I say that as a guy who thinks Kevin is easily the worst of the bunch and I've never seen another wrestler who seemed to be so adverse to showing any kind of vulnerability. But I'm also a firm believer in the saying "if it ain't broke don't fix it" and it clearly worked for him, at least for a time. The benefit of the matches featuring a little more heel offense wouldn't have been that Internet geeks would have enjoyed it more in hindsight, but rather that maybe they would have had more heels strong and able to convincingly work with the Von Erichs when the Freebirds and Dynamic Duo feuds ran their course. Setting aside the deaths, the WCCW downfall was in part because of a failure to build up a rivalry for the Von Erichs that clicked the same way those two did. The other problem of course was that the Von Erichs weren't as relevant in the local culture in their late 20s as they were in their early 20s, but that part was probably an unavoidable end in some ways. The whole story of World Class really is stranger than fiction. A sober telling of the history even feels too over the top. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
goc Posted November 22, 2015 Report Share Posted November 22, 2015 Just Dallas then? I have still not forgiven you for me telling me that you don't like World Class BECAUSE of it's fans. I mean that's really the best part of watching World Class, the fans are hotter than pretty much any wrestling I've ever seen which helps to supplement the fact that, imo, the matches in World Class don't measure up to Mid-South, JCP, Memphis, etc where we also have a lot of footage. I think we need a GO HOME MATT D chant to the tune of "go home freebirds" Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Log Posted November 23, 2015 Report Share Posted November 23, 2015 Really, though, haven't all of the most popular times in pro wrestling been when a fed has a dominant babyface? Hogan, Austin, Von Erichs, etc? NWA/WCW fell on hard times twice by never letting their faces really get one over on the heels. I know that, as a kid, I was drawn to the WWF initially because their champ beat all comers. Later, I came to love Crockett more. I just feel like kids, especially, are drawn to a dominant face. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Loss Posted November 23, 2015 Report Share Posted November 23, 2015 That's true of post-1984, Hogan-era wrestling, but I'm not sure it rings true before that. That was the first time wrestling really made a specific effort to market to children. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
goc Posted November 23, 2015 Report Share Posted November 23, 2015 There is no question that they really ramped up the efforts to market towards kids during & after the Hogan era but I think it was always there. Wrestling was always kind of a "bring the whole family!" thing except, oddly enough, in New York where kids were banned for a long time. JYD was a dominant babyface because Watts believed in having super strong babyfaces in general but it definitely helped his appeal with kids. In the 1981-82 academic year, the New Orleans school system asked students which local sports star they’d most like to meet. It was the heyday of Archie Manning’s reign as the Saints’ quarterback. Basketball legend “Pistol” Pete Maravich had just retired from a hall-of-fame career centered on a still-unbroken division scoring record at LSU and five years leading the New Orleans Jazz. Both these giants received many votes, but New Orleans’ schoolkids overwhelmingly wanted to meet the Junkyard Dog. http://www.antigravitymagazine.com/2012/07/junkyard-dog/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.