Speaking Out and Ranking Wrestlers

[Ed.]

While it's not particularly fair, recency and rawness play a factor for me.  I used to be a big cheerleader of Will Ospreay, but ever since Speaking Out and a spotlight went back on the Pollyanna stuff, I don't enjoy his matches as much as I used to and I have less enthusiasm to talk up his case as a great wrestler because it's still too raw and in the moment.  The emotional investment I had in him has gone, and it sits uneasy that he's getting the biggest push of his career months after this stuff resurfaced again.  That'll obviously hurt his next 4 years probably in this project for me.  However, I have a much easier time separating art from artist with the older generation and I can easily watch and enjoy Steve Austin without any negative feelings on him being a domestic abuser.  Benoit is a very specific case, I can watch him, but it's a cold experience and he'll be lower on my list than his output deserves but I'm not making a black and white rule to not include him.  

Like others have said, it's a business with a high % of scumbags and it's a slippery slope to be looking out for good role models and perfect human beings for a project such as this, especially when Speaking Out proved that even the wrestlers you think are 'good guys' might have some skeletons in the closest.

[Grimmas]

10 minutes ago, ohtani's jacket said:

I'm kind of curious how far people go with this.

Let's pretend your favorite Japanese wrestler doesn't like foreigners, says disparaging things about them, and would likely treat you the same way if you met them, would you still rank them? If you found our your favorite Japanese wrestler made chauvinistic remarks towards women, would you still support them? Bullying? Hazing? Where do you draw the line?

I'm not sure yet. Murder is a clear line I am not passing.

The rest I am not sure and I have a lot of uncomfort for the thing you listed. Will I vote for a racist? I'm glad I have 5 years to think about it.

[Kadaveri]

2 hours ago, Ed. said:

However, I have a much easier time separating art from artist with the older generation and I can easily watch and enjoy Steve Austin without any negative feelings on him being a domestic abuser.

I think with Austin it's easier because he was punished by the justice system for what he did, has shown contrition when talking about it and (afaik) hasn't done anything bad for almost twenty years now. There's a sense of closure to it; whereas the main purpose of Speaking Out etc is to deliver consequences for unrepentent abusers where official channels have failed.

[Grimmas]

5 minutes ago, Kadaveri said:

I think with Austin it's easier because he was punished by the justice system for what he did, has shown contrition when talking about it and (afaik) hasn't done anything bad for almost twenty years now. There's a sense of closure to it; whereas the main purpose of Speaking Out etc is to deliver consequences for unrepentent abusers where official channels have failed.

Austin is a good case, because, like you said, he has receipts showing he is a new person.

[Shrike02]

Another consideration. Let's say you want to examine well-known workers from long ago such as Lou Thesz or Jim Londos or whomever. By 2021 standards they (very) probably hold views you'd find objectionable today. Where does one draw the line?

[Grimmas]

Just now, Shrike02 said:

Another consideration. Let's say you want to examine well-known workers from long ago such as Lou Thesz or Jim Londos or whomever. By 2021 standards they (very) probably hold views you'd find objectionable today. Where does one draw the line?

Okay, I am seeing this kind of comment a lot and I am baffled.

It's a personal line, some people are comfortable with some things, some people are not.

It's also getting too close to people defending slave owners, because it was common at the time. No, you owned a slave you were garbage, regardless of when.

[Shrike02]

28 minutes ago, Grimmas said:

Okay, I am seeing this kind of comment a lot and I am baffled.

It's a personal line, some people are comfortable with some things, some people are not.

It's also getting too close to people defending slave owners, because it was common at the time. No, you owned a slave you were garbage, regardless of when.

Why is this baffling. I'm asking the question because I find the logical underpinnings about criteria for this project a bit murky with regards to this underlying issue. I thought the stated goals of this project was to present individual rankings of the best 100 wrestlers we've seen as wrestling fans - let's leave aside any other potential controversies for now.

I haven't listened to the whole launch podcast yet but I would just like to have clarity on what the criteria are. Is there a character clause, or not?

[Grimmas]

9 minutes ago, Shrike02 said:

Is there a character clause, or not?

If you are comfortable watching and properly evaluating someone you find disgusting as a human you can. We are humans, that can be difficult for some of us to do.

EDIT: To clarify it is the greatest wrestlers you have watched and want to rank based on what you think makes a great wrestler. It's more akin to ranking movies, where it's about the actual movie, not how it did financially. But, no, no set critiera.

[Shrike02]

1 minute ago, Grimmas said:

If you are comfortable watching and properly evaluating someone you find disgusting as a human you can. We are humans, that can be difficult for some of us to do.

Let me ask another way. Are there any written criteria for this project? I think that would be a very good thing.

[Grimmas]

1 minute ago, Shrike02 said:

Let me ask another way. Are there any written criteria for this project? I think that would be a very good thing.

See my above edit.

There is no set criteria, one person's selling is another person's punch is another's person's moonsault.

[Matt D]

There's one word: "Footage"

Going a slightly different direction, I found Kristen's argument re: Speaking Out that wrestling is a team sport and you can't consider someone who's predatory to other members of the team as great sort of interesting. It could be extrapolated out to things like ribs, both in negative ways (shitting in a crown or Dynamite injecting the wrong stuff into Davey Boy's butt cheek) or positive (Owen cracking guys up in the ring to keep the long travel bearable). But that seems to lean against footage, you know? It's hard enough figuring out how to deal with Lance Storm's terrible chair shots.

[El Dragon]

For me personally, while I do wish wrestling had a cleaner past, it simply doesn’t and there isn’t a great way to differentiate and draw a line past what makes me uncomfortable to watch. And it’s not always as straight forward as “these are awful people” for me. For me personally when you decide you are going to deep dive into old wrestling footage you are signing a big of a social agreement that you are going to be watching people who were probably awful entertain you, no matter what style or company you are watching. I was able to watch Buck Zumhofe matches and outside of some off hand comments about how much I’d like to see someone stiff the shit out of him, I got through the match fine.

 

There are only 2 wrestlers I think I’m completely eliminating due to person shit: Benoit (because every time I watch him I feel like I’m watching a new concussion that helped led to what happened happening) and Quackenbush (Which is personal as one of the people vocal about Quack during speaking out happened to be my best friend of 15 years)

[Cap]

I feel like the general consensus here is the ideal: we compartmentalize to the best of our ability and stick to the in ring work. It is the cleanest and easiest way to deal with a concern that starts messy and gets downright disastrous if we dig too deep (as many have pointed out in various ways). However, I do think it is a legit question because and ideal is... well, an IDEAL. It is easier said than done.  We will all be able to draw some line in the sand.  The discussion of Benoit in this thread is enough to prove that there is a line to be drawn. Some will vote for him; some will maybe watch and maybe vote; some are out. There isn't even consensus on him, but enough people are conflicted in one way or another that  thepresence of this dynamic and conflict is unquestioned.  The fact that there is the possibility of a slippery slope and that the issue could be blown up doesn't negate that there is an issue. 

To me, the more interesting question is of unconscious bias more than conscious demarcations and this conversation helps me sort of reflect on that. As I said earlier, I don't like Lawler as a human being and it is really tough for me to tell if that effects the way I see his in ring work. I mentioned the reasons I think it might be affecting me before.  I would like to remove that element of bias if I can and if it is there, but it is a process. I generally try to avoid digging into the scummy part of wrestling for just this reason. I won't turn a blind eye to thinks like speaking out, but I'm also not going around looking for stuff.

It will always come back to "its a personal thing" and I'm with the general consensus that we should do our best to demarcate the in ring work from everything else, but for some of us there is a line to be drawn and then there is maybe even some unconscious bias to try to process if we are going to - in good faith - strive for that above-mentioned ideal. Maybe some folks here are capable of such radical objectivity, but I just don't believe in it personally. I think projects like this are self-explorations of fandom as much as they are evaluations of wrestling (regardless of our intent or best efforts) and in turn, I think questions like this should be asked and revisited over time.

[NintendoLogic]

As others have noted, pro wrestling for much of its history has been a wretched hive of scum and villainy. I decided some time ago that if I wanted to institute a morals clause in my viewing, it would serve me better to simply stop watching altogether. I'd rather not do that because I believe wrestling has enough intrinsic merit to be worth trying to clean up. I also believe that the enjoyable aspects can be decoupled from the problematic ones. In the meantime, I cope by maintaining complete emotional detachment so that it hardly fazes me when a wrestler dies prematurely or is revealed to be a garbage human being. I will say that it took me years before I could bring myself to watch Benoit's matches again. In fact, I stopped watching wrestling entirely for two and a half years following the murders. I don't particularly enjoy watching him these days, but that's because my tastes have shifted significantly over the past decade and a half. It's an aesthetic judgment, not a moral one. I should note that Benoit was my favorite wrestler in the world, possibly of all time, in the mid-2000s. As such, he's still catalogued in my brain primarily as a wrestler I loved to watch rather than a family annihilator. There's a good chance I'd have a different perspective if I'd never seen any of his matches prior to June 2007.

The idea of separating art from the artist goes back to the New Criticism school of literary studies, which tried to cast literary criticism as a scientific endeavor. For them, a work of art was self-contained and independent of the world as a whole. Just as a scientist's personal life and views have no bearing on the validity of a scientific theory, neither do a poet's have any impact on the literary merit of a poem. That approach might be questionable for art and literature, but I think it works pretty well for wrestling. For one thing, wrestling matches really are self-contained and outside of everything other than other matches and match builds. More importantly, matches are devoid of any real content, so there's no issue with the creator's worldview seeping into the creation. It's not as if there's a pro-child rape subtext in Lawler's matches or a pro-child murder subtext in Benoit's. In that respect, it's a lot closer to sport than art. Like, the fact that so many of Woody Allen's films are about middle-aged men lusting after much younger women surely has to weigh on the viewer, but OJ Simpson's crimes are irrelevant to how good of a running back he was. In the end, though, where to draw the line and whether the line should be drawn in the first place are emotional decisions rather than intellectual ones.

[Shrike02]

Great post. Mirrors my own views down to the "Benoit was once my favourite wrestler, then I stopped watching wrestling for a while" experience.

[funkdoc]

One part of all this that requires deeper examination outside of wrestling: where do you draw the line?

For most people things like murder, rape & pederasty cross a line that even, say, "faking a heart attack to draw money" doesn't.  Racism as well though this gets trickier to work out...i find it feels different when people are self-avowed white nationalists or members of such organizations (cf. Dick Murdoch, Harris Bros., Ludvig Borga).  i also think that the amount of power someone wields within the business matters for things like that - Hogan's racism hits folks a lot harder than any number of equivalent examples you could point to throughout wrestling history.  But then even someone like Andre doesn't get nearly the same effect despite the stories out there...probably because you have to dig into shoot interviews to hear about it whereas Hogan was a national news story.

At the end of the day, it's probably subjective to some degree - but couldn't you say the same thing about this entire project?