Mick Foley has recently been very extremely critical of the WWE product. During his missive explaining why he could potentially be giving up on WWE Raw altogether, he made an extremely valid observation:
They can’t flip birds, and use the colorful language. They can’t bleed – even when the situation seems ripe for it. But all the blood, the language and the violence paled in comparison to the real secret weapon of the Attitude Era; the FREEDOM TO CREATE…THE FREEDOM TO TRY…THE FREEDOM TO FAIL…
It’s the difference between cutting the type of promos Stone Cold Steve Austin and Dwayne The Rock Johnson gave, and the cookie-cutter approach all too often employed these days by WWE creative. One style allowed for creativity and emotion. The other calls for memorization and recitation.
Not one to mince words, Stone Cold Steve Austin echoed this sentiment recently on The Taz Show: Bodyslams & Beyond. While it’s yet another round of ‘cool WWE legends say stuff the internet says,’ again, he’s bang on:
It’s a different PC world that those guys are operating in, so I feel for those guys. And I love WWE, I’m still part of the company, but it’s just tough these days on these kids. I don’t like to be the bitter veteran that complains about the system, but, I don’t believe that promos should be ‘scripted’. A couple of bullet points, yes, to point a cat in the right direction, but you’ve got to be out there and be able to feel at home and believe with conviction and your heart and your soul with everything that you’re saying and if you’re just trying to be an orator or someone who delivers a speech, that’s not effective in my opinion. And to me, to draw money, you’ve got to be able to reach people’s heartstrings and reach some kind of guttural response or just anything that resonates with them.
While the points are the same, so are the problems with what they’re saying. It’s easy to see how two people made infamous by their own promo skills during a specific period of time would want to get back to it, but realistically they’re both burying a very solid point in nonsense. The most easily adaptable thing from the Attitude Era that would show the most success isn’t blood everywhere and middle fingers and *shudders* puppies, it’s the organic response to something that feels organic. The thing people lose in this near-blind nostalgia for that period of time is that a good majority of what WWE was producing was just the drizzling sh*ts. It was bookended by greatness, people like Stone Cold and Mick Foley who used their words to catch you up in a moment and make you a part of an admittedly ridiculous universe.
You saw exactly what they’re both referring to in the neutering of CM Punk after his ‘pipebomb.’ The promo heard ’round the world that made everyone sit up and listen showed Punk’s strength in delivering something he believed in, which then exposed his weakness for reciting what he didn’t. You see it today in people’s fervent love of The New Day, contrasted with people’s outright refusal to BELEE DAT or anything else Roman Reigns says. Well, that and friendship-based wrestling is the best wrestling, but I digress. Roman Reigns calling Renee Young a garbage whore or whatever isn’t going to make him any more likable because he’s being less ‘PC,’ because chances are it’s still going to be the same jaw-clenching, deadpan delivery that turns people off of his babyface shenanigans now. It was easy to love him in The Shied because, you know, he was mostly quiet and they were a fully functioning unit made up of people who counterbalanced each other’s strengths and weaknesses and [insert three more paragraphs about why The Shield was great and we miss them every day here]. Also, stuff like this:
https://youtu.be/jtFM8oWVNwc
‘Roman Reigns doesn’t know what a sheep looks like’ is much easier concept to connect to than ‘Roman Reigns is a monotonous guy who is inexplicably wet all the time and punches really hard.’ Do you want to feel like you felt during that period of time, or do you want to sit through, say, yet another labored promo about how X-Diva is jealous of Y-Diva? Or X-Randy Orton hears Y-Voices so he has to wrestle Z-Sheamus? No. Even thinking of those examples is as sleep-inducing as the second Ambien you took because you couldn’t remember if you took the first one or not. None of those things lead to moments like, say, this one:
The Rock, Stone Cold, Mankind — there will never be anyone like them again. But recreating the less ‘PC’ environment isn’t going to suddenly turn today’s WWE performers into charismatic personalities. Dean Ambrose being able to give someone the middle finger and get away with it isn’t going to cement his legacy as the UNHINGED CINCINNATI LUNATIC WILDCARD JOKER MAN or whatever we’re calling him these days. The market has changed. The gender balance is shifting. Even if it doesn’t seem like it…probably ever, the world has progressed in roughly a million ways that WWE and wrestling as a whole hasn’t. But people still connect to wrestlers in the exact same way: Authenticity of character.
This weekend, I’m gonna watch an anthropomorphic ant wrestle another anthropomorphic ant because they used to be friends, but now they’re not, and I have so many feelings about it when, based on that incredibly over-simplified description alone, I super shouldn’t. You shouldn’t be able to hand me a glass of wine and ask me about wrestling ants and watch me get real shouty about things that happened three years ago as a start. But this is the life I lead, and these are the feelings they created in me because they’re talented people telling a story that — at its core — draws on authentic emotions. Recitation of an emotion designed by committee ultimately overseen by people whose jobs are dictated by things like sponsors and television rating regulations? Naw. Fans have been so conditioned to look for the reality and spot ‘the work’ that when they sense anyone else’s hand in something, they pull away.
The framing of the sentiment is way off base, and realistically is predicated on WWE personalities selling your feelings back to you in an inauthentic way that will still engender the very real feelings you probably type on the internet all the time. And at the end of the day, isn’t that exactly what they’re talking about here, though? These guys are the best at what they do. Whether it’s all a big WWE-driven conspiracy or not, the heart of what Foley and Austin are getting at is an apt analysis of one of WWE’s most glaring flaws. When you lose sight of the humanity in your performers, and stop trusting their ability to do the very thing you hired them for, you lose out the things that elevate pro wrestling from a series of moves to an actual artform. You lose sight of the emotional needs of your audience, and if you continue moving forward without trying to get that back, you lose those fans.
Wrestling will never be what it once was, but isn’t that a good thing? It seems to me that evolving and adapting to the current cultural climate is much better than applying a cookie-cutter approach because it worked once upon a time. Some wrestling fans may cling to the eras of the past, but new fans don’t. People who don’t like wrestling who could be turned into fans don’t. Maybe a further analysis would see their own words in the argument against what they’re saying. To move backwards and rely on a recitation of the past, doesn’t that ultimately hamper the freedom to create, the freedom to try, and the freedom to fail?
It seems to me that nobody wants that.
