If you listen to enough wrestling podcasts, you’ll notice that it seems like every wrestling pundit has a pet peeve about the business. For instance, Stone Cold can’t stand the fact that DDTs are transition moves. Ric Flair hates that wrestlers aren’t allowed to have fun on the road like he did. But nobody, it seems, is more critical than Jim Ross. He’s very old school, but also very ornery about some of the aspects of wrestling that fall short of the good old days. He decided to illuminate some of these points in a recent blog post.
Here are a pair of excerpts:
The vast majority of wrestlers these days are not good promo talents. Reason being is that creative staffs seemingly have to justify their existence by role playing with these individuals and scripting virtually every word that the talents say. That system is both outdated and unproductive as fans today can recognize a wrestler reciting a promo from memory instead as from their heart within a few sentences.
Wrestling is best when it comes from a logically, realistic place and is executed inside the ring as an athletic contest built on common sense and not an acrobatic show that exposes the business as a sham with no selling and the complete lack of some talent’s ability to properly apply an actual wrestling hold.
The faster some talent perform the louder that they tell us that their skill set is lacking and that they are trying to get by on sensationalism instead of realism.
Some feel that we are allegedly in a pending “boom” period because there is so much TV wrestling product available o n a weekly. Does average, at times at best average, TV product indicate “Boom” to any one who actually thinks about it? I think not.
The product is by and large over thought and those in creative charge seemingly feel compelled to take a tried and true product and put their personal finger prints on it as if they are going to be the one who is forever known as “changing the wrestling business forever.” The wrestling business changed forever when the territories died due largely because local promoters got lazy and complacent and did not want to move into the modern era of marketing and producing TV programs plus they stopped developing new, young stars. Blame who you want but the territory system stopped doing what brought them to the dance and that was featuring new stars in compelling rivalries that were based in easy to understand, common sense story lines produced in weekly, episodic television. Plus, the talents back in the day were, by and large, better story tellers than we are fed today with some exceptions.
An essentially, easy to watch, non complex hour of TV that virtually anyone could understand and enjoy was what worked best for many of us lifers.
Where have those days gone?
Can’t say he’s too off-base here. These are pretty much the complaints I see here at WS in the comments pretty much every week. However, the young stars in NXT and across the world are pretty spectacular, but Ross has such a love for his era that they’ll never measure up. I like it better when Max Landis does this…
You can read the full post here.
