How Wrestling's Present Brilliance Has RUINED Its Future

It's not as if there's a new movement out there unfolding that the majors will one day co-opt - another worrying omen of the future of the form.

So, more pertinently, what is the way out of this increasingly over-familiar sense that it's all been done and that it all looks the same?

The irony of the whole veteran discourse of the last few years - and the irony of AEW arguably declining in quality the more vets were signed to develop the youth movement, the more tenured agents were drafted to reel everybody in a bit - is that the feeling of sameness has deepened. The irony is that a young wrestler, one whose career was actually bogged down when paired with a vet, may possess the answer. In a medium completely overwhelmed by the pursuit of critical acclaim - what is probably the core problem is that everybody is consumed by being the best artistically, and not the most effective at the fictional goal - Daniel Garcia gets it.

He does not self-consciously strive for the "banger" that has infested the medium and rendered it so woefully homogenised. He doesn't need 20-25 very grabby maximalist minutes to tell his stories in a time where match length has long since been conflated with value (when was the last time a five minute match earned five stars?).

Garcia wrestles to his age and level of experience. He isn't a hybrid guy who could do it all and do it immediately just because, to increasingly diminished returns, he could. He makes deliberate mistakes in his matches. He seeks to master the primary genre of technical wrestling but has (purposefully) failed in that pursuit so far - because he's only 25, he was there before this recent push to do jobs, and if he was a specialist immediately, where else was there for him to go?

In a medium diluted by the misappropriation of strong style psychology, Garcia is astute enough to take something from the puroresu landscape that actually makes sense for his character: the tentative, error-strewn arc of the Young Lion. The short answer is in the discipline not to do something.

GUNTHER knows to only take to the skies with his big splash when confronted with a particularly fierce challenge. Bryan Danielson, who is justified in doing a lot because he can do it all brilliantly, worked a match against Zack Sabre, Jr. last year in which neither man left the ring. Cody Rhodes - who still dives! - was clever enough years ago to resuscitate the beautiful simplicity of the earnest North American babyface.

Great wrestling can still mean everything. It need not be boring, but a delineation of style must happen - or, if it doesn't, those who exercise discipline will ascend and extract meaning from the malaise.

You can't all be Kenny Omega or Tomohiro Ishii.