Thursday 10 March 2011

Has Wrestling Really Changed? By John Adams

Has wrestling really changed or is it just the fans that have?

No matter what sport you follow, no matter what team you cheer for, you will have witnessed a “golden age” where the players were your heroes, people you bought into thinking they were the best thing ever to grace their sport.

Let me talk about football for a moment, I started watching football as a kid in the late 80’s/ early 90’s where players like Diego Maradonna, Marco van Basten, Georghe Hagi had me mesmerised, that was my golden age of football. That’s what kids do they look up to the people they see on tv or wherever and buy into them being the best thing ever. Kids growing up watching football nowadays may idolise Wayne Rooney, Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi and this is their golden age of football, it isn’t mine. And when the kids of today grow up they’ll still be talking about their heroes that they saw when they were children in exactly the same way that I talk about mine, and the generation before me talk about theirs.

How does this fit in with wrestling?

No matter what wrestling news, view, rumour or opinion you see, hear or read will predominantly have one theme and that is; “I WISH THEY WOULD BRING THE ATTITUDE ERA BACK”! And why is that?......Because that was our golden age.

What todays adult wrestling fans don’t seem to want to acknowledge is that the kids in the arenas today cheering for John Cena, are doing exactly the same things that we did when we were cheering for The Rock. The only difference is in todays world people can boot up the computer and spend night after night bitching and moaning. You think back in the attitude era there weren’t fans hankering back to the time of Hogan and Savage? Of course there were but they had no way of vocalising their discontent.

I think Jim Cornette said it best when he used an analogy about trapeze artists, which went something like:

At first there was just a guy swinging on a trapeze, and the crowd lapped it up because they’d never been able to see that live before, then, after watching the same routine time after time they got bored. So along came another trapeze artist who could do a back flip, again the crowd were amazed by this new thing so they forgot all about the first guy although he was really talented, but again the crowd got bored of the backflip and wanted more, so along came a guy who said he could do double backflips, so the crowd again followed the new guy, he got up on the trapeze, tried to do his double backflip but he slipped, and he died. Now the crowd had no trapeze artists to watch they were bored of the first two, they’d seen the routine a million times, so they had to wait, until again another guy entered the arena and said “I can do the double backflip”, he got up on the trapeze, and again the crowd was gripped, on the edge of their seats as he took off from the trapeze, one backflip, two backflips and he landed safely back on the bar of the trapeze. The crowd went wild, they had witnessed the best thing ever. So they forgot all about what had gone before, the first guy just swinging, the first guy to do a backflip, the guy that died attempting a double backflip…..But eventually they got bored of the double backflip guy as well, only this time nobody could do more than a double backflip, no one could better what the audience had already seen, so the crowd dispersed and no one wanted to watch trapeze acts any more.

We were spoilt by the attitude era, the excitement, the spectacle, it was awesome, but after witnessing what we did then of course your going to feel short changed by the wrestling product of today. However much you dislike it WWE’s product IS PG, it is in the most part aimed at the kids in the crowd, let them enjoy it, let them find their heroes, Let them fall in love with Wrestling like we did, share your stories and your memories but,

PLEASE DON’T DISRESPECT THEIR GOLDEN AGE.

No comments:

Post a Comment