My last article for WhatCulture.com looked at potential winners for the Royal Rumble. I'm sorry to say that the one man I left out of my list went on to win. The reason for this is simple: I was under the impression that a Batista win was so obviously stupid and worthless to the fanbase that WWE would be out of their minds to even tease it, much less leave Daniel Bryan OUT of the Rumble altogether. Here's my problem in the short form; I keep thinking of WWE as a rational company. They're not. They're led by powerful egos who fancy themselves infallible due to past successes. Also, I'm an old school wrestling fan. I'm also in my early middle age, and I remember a time when fans mattered, and legitimate fan heat caused push, not the other way around, or at least fan input wasn't clearly and almost spitefully ignored. A second problem that exists is that everyone is 'smart' to the product to some degree. Kayfabe is a thing of the past, and we need to get that through our heads. There still has to be some form of secrecy, so that there's a reason to watch a scripted fight. The internet has changed the nature of wrestling fandom such that WWE has been internally managing their announce teams to no longer use internet verbiage like 'five star match' and 'match of the year'. These terms first were used on the old internet chat areas called Newsgroups where Rec.Sport.ProWrestling was king of all Pro Wrestling journalism online. And its king was a current WhatCulture contributor, Scott Keith. His weekly reviews of Raw and Nitro on Smarks.com and Rantsylvania in the late 90s were the gold standard of in-depth match and angle review. I am still a fan, and was a huge fan of his reviews. As author of the RSPWFAQ - the Frequently Asked Questions of the old Newsgroup and the virtual Rosetta Stone of kayfabe of modern fandom - as well as author of nonfiction books about pro wrestling, he's most of the reason many fans online have a common language about wrestling. His maintained and co-authored FAQ informed fans as to what t makes a good worker vs. what makes a bad worker and so forth. It exposed fans to the concepts of ring psychology -- and why they were important. Why do I bring him up? Well, because with this knowledge comes the major problem the WWE is going to have going forward gaining new fans over the age of 11. (Or whatever age parents take the blinders off their kids' internet usage or explain to them about Santa, The Easter Bunny, Chanukah Harry and Kevin Nash's Quad...) Scott Keith opened the eyes of fans to the best part about being a fan; the work being done in the ring, so that while the kids are appreciating the overblown characters and stories, you're enjoying the actual art of the work itself. But that means, once you know what's happening in the ring, the stories and common wisdom of the 80s and 90s in booking make no damned sense these days. In the beginning, professional wrestling started at carnivals, with guys who were trained in bareknuckle fighting, wrestling, and catch as catch can wrestling (an undisciplined form of grab, snag, and break bones that has been refined over the years) would fight a mark from the crowd. That's the reason why fans are often regarded as 'marks' -- they were the ones getting fooled. When it became clear that the ringers hurting paying customers would be a limited moneymaker, they started agreeing to put on scripted or at least agreed upon bouts between fighters. The marks, who didn't have the benefit of radio, television, or having seen an actual fight in their lives, didn't know that what they were watching wasn't legitimate. So, now, we're not standing in a tent, watching a mystifying event of rare danger -- we're watching a choreographed event representing real events to tell a story. But, if that's the case, if fans can literally punch a few words into their search engines and see the real deal, then the WWE is going to have to seriously consider changing their common wisdom about professional wrestling -- or sports entertainment to tell a convincing story. This article covers five things that the WWE can steal from MMA to make their product not only more exciting, but believable to a casual observer. I'm leaving out one obvious one (a dangerous tack judging by precedent): blood. In this age, the McMahons and WWE want to be seen as family fare for some reason, so when one cannot show the real consequences of punching and kicking insofar as blood is concerned, one should become more creative. Here's the five easiest ways, in descending order.
Dan has taken a chairshot to the face from Ballz Mahoney. He grew up in Tampa, mere blocks from the Sportatorium, watching wrestling and taking it all in. He's a writer, and a professional illustrator.
