05/23/00 -- Wrestling Rant

Only slightly less ridiculous than the last ramblings

This was posted, originally, on the Wrestling on the Fringe website and then e-mailed to the WCW.com feedback address.

After watching Nitro last night, I found myself thinking about the following:

* I want a fair fight. I mean, I *really* want a fair fight. One-on-one.  No run-ins. No chairs. No tables. No weapons pulled out of trunk-waistbands or shoes. No bumped ref who misses the "real" pinfall.

* I want more *wrestling*. See above. I can even deal with a little bit of double-teaming in a tag-team match, but I want real wrestling. No more red goo from the ceiling. No more people coming up from the bottom of the ring. Once in a while for things like that is fine, it makes them shocking. At this point, things like that have become predictable.

* I want Mike Awesome to just *go away*. He's dangerous and stupid and I can't decide if the number of times people have been getting out of his 'devastating' moves lately is because they're unwilling to take a chance that he'll screw someone up *badly* by planting them wrong.

* I don't want to see 12-year-olds in the ring. Yeah, I'd like to see someone kick David Flair's butt, but I don't think it should be his 12-year-old brother. I can't believe Standards and Practices would let *that* happen on the air, but not the El Kabong on Kimberly from DDP. What's the difference? It's okay for siblings to have a knock-down drag out on national TV? Why?

* And while I'm on the subject... I want consistency. If you're gonna DQ one guy because someone else has run in and saved him, then do it consistently. If you *have* to have run-ins, bump the ref. Or maybe make a point that the ref is in someone's pocket. I dunno. I just want it consistent. If it's a no DQ match, then *say it up front*.  Except for the one night when Bischoff was changing the rules of the match as it went along (which was entertaining), I think a lot of people expect certain things to be consistent. If it's a hardcore match, people expect one thing. If it's a ladder match, they expect something else. If it's just a plain ol' wrasslin' match, they expect yet another thing.

* I want to see the cruiserweights flying again. I loved watching matches with Kidman, Rey, Psicosis, etc. They were great. The speed, the acrobatics. They kept me on the edge of my seat. I could oooh and ahhh and it wasn't just over pretty boys.

* I want to see the female wrestlers used *as wrestlers*. I don't care if it's a women's match every other Thunder, or if they're teaming up with the guys against other guys, but I want to see at least one of them get over. And, in the same vein, I want to see the managers/valets out of the ring if they don't feel comfortable there. If they don't have enough training, if they don't look like they want to be in there, then get them the heck out of there and put them back on the sidelines where they can cheer and (with a suitably distracted ref) hit a low-blow on their man's opponent now and then (but *not* every night, *not* every time).

* I want a happy medium between story telling and wrestling. Yes, you have to build the characters to make people care about them, but there are also people who watch to see those characters *wrestle*, to beat the heck out of each other in the squared circle. I'm sure that there was a time (sure, it was a long time ago and before I watched men's pro wrestling) when people didn't have to see fifteen run-ins, twenty eight thousand illegal objects, nine or ten too-dangerous-looking bumps, and a partridge in a pear tree in a wrestling show to care about the characters. All they needed to see was some good ol' wrasslin'. Yes, I know that this seems to be the way of the future: the movement from wrestling toward "sports entertainment". But maybe, just maybe, Vinnie Ru can take a look at some of the Old Skool wrestling tapes and recapture some of that. Right now I don't feel like there's a whole lot of "sport" in the "sports entertainment". Heck, the few times I've watched the last half of Raw I've seen more in-ring-wrestling than I've seen in several episodes of Nitro and/or Thunder. And that frustrates me. I *care* about the characters in WCW. I don't want to give them up to watch *wrestling* on WWF where I *don't* care about any of the characters. Maybe I'd find the same problems on WWF if I watched it enough, but right now, the grass is looking greener on the other side of the satellite dish.

Maybe I just had a bad evening (and a subsequent bad night's sleep and bad morning from the point when the alarm went off and no caffeine yet), but everything that's been frustrating me about WCW since April 10th (and probably before that) just bubbled up watching the show last night.

Don't get me wrong, I like a lot of what Vinnie Ru and Bischoff have done since they came back -- at least I don't get up during a commercial break and forget to come back and watch the last hour and a half of the program now. But last night's Nitro left me feeling a little bit ... empty. I wanted more from it than I was getting.