Now That’s How You Cut a Promo
Professional wrestling was huge hobby of mine growing up as a kid. Along with my brothers, we were die-hard, loyal fans of the NWA and WWF brands since as early as we could remember.
There were a few reasons why professional wrestling caught my imagination. In the 1980s, the theater production was just emerging but grueling and entertaining athletic matches were the focus. However, as the demand for bigger grapplers grew, the quality of the product chipped away. Muscle-bound wrestlers standing at towering heights and weighing almost 300 pounds could not go the distance that many of the smaller wrestlers who had pulled me into the ’sport’ could. Also, the basic storylines meshed with the, in retrospect, good versus evil times of the Reagan years. It was a ’sport’ of simplistic absolutes with clearly defined lines in the sand.
Soon, Vince McMahon, who steered the dominant promotion into national and increasingly international success, came clean with the scripted nature of professional wrestling. In his message to fans in the early to mid-’90s, McMahon described how in life, there’s a lot of gray area using professional wrestling terms like “character development” in public for the first time.
In the late 1990s, which was junior high school for me, professional wrestling was widely popular amongst young people, rivaling professional baseball and football at the time. It always seemed to me, a long-time fan of professional wrestling, that many of these newcomers were fans because it was the thing to do at the time. This was also around the time the raunchiness of the television storylines escalated as the WWF transitioned from the family-oriented “New Generation” to the “Attitude” era.
Unfortunately, once Ted Turner’s WCW promotion folded in 2001 and was bought out by McMahon, the quality took a major nose dive. (Professional wrestling always had a ridiculous sense about it with crazy characters and storylines, but after 2001-2002, things just got even worse.)
WWF was forced into a name change by the World Wildlife Fund in 2002 and began putting even more focus on the drama and the raunchy storylines than the actual wrestling, hyping their new branding as more entertainment than sport. By this time, I had given up on it all together.
Later, it turned out that the newly renamed WWE began playing up the history as it buried the last remnants of the “WWF” acronym. This as the promoters decided to abandon years of history by “unifying” (read: abandoning) all of the storied championships with decades of history behind them, only to dust them off a few years later.
Fans of professional baseball often argue about the effects of the “Steroids Era” in Major League Baseball — the inflated statistics and artificially-enhanced records. But one thing MLB held over the professional football and basketball was its long, contiguous history that predated the latter sports by several decades. The stadiums themselves were a bastion of history and fond memories. And just as the “Steroids Era” spat on the previous generations, the post-2001 era of professional wrestling falls into the same category: screwing with history.
And in all of this, several paragraphs about my thoughts on professional wrestling generated by a single video, perhaps it is just a reflection of me, and who I am: someone who seeks structure and continuity.
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