My thoughts on wrestling

I know normally I use this blog to review movies and games. Well this time I figured I'd use it to comment on something I have enjoyed in the past and that's professional wrestling. It started when I was a kid watching the old WWF. I remember guys like The Undertaker, Bret Hart, Hulk Hogan, Yokozuna and the Ultimate Warrior. Now of course as a kid I thought that everything I was seeing was totally real and nothing was fake or staged. It was a lot of fun to watch them on TV or to go to a live event and cheer them on and to be able to say I saw my favorite compete.

Now I remember that I eventually fell out of interest with wrestling. The last thing I really remember was a storyline where this guy Papa Shango put a voodoo curse on the Ultimate Warrior and even I as a kid thought this was pretty stupid and I lost interest. It wasn't until I went into college and got a roommate that was into wrestling that I got an interest in it again. Now I came in at time where The Rock and Stone Cold Steve Austin were already established superstars and they had really reached the height of their popularity and success. So off and on through college and even after I continued to watch it but I've found over the years I'm starting to lose interest in it again.

Now I know a lot of you are going to say right off the bat that wrestling is fake. I will say that it is not fake. It takes a lot of skill and training to do what those guys do night after night. Also you look at many of them and you'll see some of them have sustained some pretty serious injuries, including a guy by the name of Droz who is now paralyzed in a wheelchair after an incident in a match where his neck got broken. But what I will say is that wrestling is controlled. Early on matches used to be choreographed down move by move. Then eventually wrestlers didn't want to do this anymore so they adopted a more open style. In this case they already knew ahead of time who was going to win and if there were any big moves or events that were going to happen in the match those were planned out ahead of time. But it's really up to the wrestlers themselves to figure out what they are going to do and how they are going to do it. Then they take their queues from the ref as well as the announcers as to when they need to end the match.

The biggest problem that I have with wrestling right now is how predictable it has become. Most of the time when I'm watching a match it's really easy for me to know when a guy is going to kick out of a certain move or when the ref is going to get knocked out or someone is going to hit someone they don't mean to with a chair or other weapon. It is only on a rare occasion that I am indeed surprised. A few examples I can think of are when Kurt Angle beat Shawn Michaels at Wrestlemania by making him submit or when Kurt Angle beat Samoa Joe in TNA, thus ending his pretty long undefeated streak, by making him submit or most recently when Matt Hardy hit his brother Jeff with a chair after he had lost a championship match.

There is a term that some wrestling fans know and that's to mark out. A mark is a person who is a fan of wrestling and thinks that it's all real. So when someone marks out it means that at that particular moment they don't care what's going on and how controlled it may be they are just having fun and I have had a few of those moments and they are really enjoyable.

It's just lately with the rise of guys like John Cena where it's just the same thing over and over again. I like John Cena but it seems like he has to be in every single main event and he wins over and over again. It seems like the championship has been passed between him and Edge so many times I can't even count. Now TNA suffers from a bit of the same thing. Most of their main events include Kurt Angle, Samoa Joe or Sting and there's only so many ways they can book the same matches over and over again without it getting stale.

But the one thing about wrestling that non-fans will talk about is is the story lines. Wrestling is like a soap opera for men. It's got all of those off the wall stories and stupid moments that just make you scratch your head and wonder what you just saw. Anyone who's been a fan of this for the past few years is probably familiar with the Katie Vick story line involving Kane. If you aren't familiar with it just type that name in Google and you'll get some interesting results. So I think that wrestling as a whole really needs to either ditch the stupid stories and go with the approach where it's more about the matches than the talking. I remember when I tried to get back into wrestling during the WCW versus WWF days and I turned on WCW Nitro and for a good 30 minutes it was nothing but talking I just gave up. Now you watch a good 2 and a half our episode of Raw and probably almost half of that is talking. I turned on a wrestling show to watch wrestling not to watch people talk about who they're going to beat up. That's mainly why I just usually watch the Pay-Per-Views after the fact because that way I'm guaranteed to get some good matches and not nearly as much talking.

Lastly I'm going to talk about TNA a bit. If you aren't familiar with it TNA stands for Total Non-Stop Action and it is a wrestling company that was started to compete with the WWF/WWE after they bought WCW. It has some really good talent including some people that used to be in the WWE but got tired of dealing with Vince McMahon and his crap. They use a six sided ring instead of a four sided one and they tend to have a lot more gimmick matches like for example they have a Pay-Per-View called Lockdown where every single match is a cage match. But TNA suffers from the same thing I said earlier with the bad story lines and the repetitive matches. I think they are a good company with a lot of potential but if they are going to compete with the WWE they really need to book better matches.

But I think my biggest problem with TNA are the fans that come to the events. Now I have never been to one of their events myself but it's pretty obvious that the fans are the most easily swayed people in the world. They are very quick to chant things like "holy shit" or "this is awesome" or "this is wrestling" or something like that even when what's going on isn't that great. Most of the time I find them chanting that something is awesome and thinking to myself "no it isn't." There are many times when I wish I could just put a giant mute button on the crowd when I watch one of their Pay-Per-Views. In fact now that I think of it they are a lot like the crowd for American Idol. No matter how much something sucks they will love it and give heat to anyone who doesn't love it as much as they do.

That's all I'm going to say for now but I welcome your comments and feedback. What do you think of wrestling? Do you watch it at all? If so how long have you watched it and what do you enjoy most about it? Or did you used to watch it in the past but you don't anymore. If so when did you last watch and what exactly made you stop? Well I hope you enjoyed my little rant here and I look forward to hearing from you.