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Guest luckysalt

By Guest luckysalt
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luckysalt Collaborator

luckysalt

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TNA spoilers

Foley debuts on this weeks TNA Impact but only on the big screen and he's not on the following weeks show because Ive read the spoilers for that too, but he is announced to be on the following weeks show

Bound For Glory TNA's next PPV and biggest of the year has announced two matches so far

TNA World Title - Samoa Joe v Sting

Kurt Angle v Jeff Jarrett

I pressume Foley will have a match on the card as well, although against whom, Im not sure...

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luckysalt Collaborator

luckysalt

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Smackdown taped last night

heres the results

* SmackDown opens with Chavo and Vickie backstage. Chavo says that The Undertaker told him that he is coming for her tonight.

* Jeff Hardy & Triple H b. MVP & Brian Kendrick

- Triple H got the win via pinfall after hitting a pedigree on MVP.

* Shelton Benjamin comes out to cut a promo. When he is finished he drops the mic and walks away. R-Truth comes out and interrupts.

* Shelton Benjamin vs. Santino Marella is announced for next week.

* Maria & Brie Bella b. Natalya & Victoria

- During the match Brie switched places with her sister Nicole Bella (who was hiding under the ring). Maria got the win after hitting a cross body off the top rope for the three-count.

* Vladimir Kozlov vs. The Great Khali

- Triple H comes out during the match. The Great Khali attacks Hunter. Kozlov joins in... Out comes Jeff Hardy for the save. Triple H gets his sledgehammer and hits Khali.

* The Undertaker vs. Big Show is announced for No Mercy.

* The Big Show, Chavo Guerrero, and Vickie are shown talking about The Undertaker. Vickie tells Chavo that his match is up next.

* Chavo Guerrero b. Jimmy Wang Yang

- After the match the lights go out for a few seconds. Chavo is very nervous and runs away.

* Carlito & Primo Colon b. Zack Ryder & Curt Hawkins to win the WWE Tag Team Championships.

- Carlito got the win via pinfall after hitting the back stabber on Zack Ryder.

* Jesse & Festus come out to get Zack Ryder & Curt Hawkins in a "MyMoving Company" van. Ryder & Hawkins get away. They open the back of the van and Kenny Dykstra is inside wrapped in bubble wrap, ready for the move to MyNetwork TV.

* Vickie, Big Show, and Chavo Guerrero are in Vickie's office talking about how they are going to smoke out The Undertaker. The shot cuts to them heading out to the ring.

* The lights go out and Chavo is gone. He is backstage being beaten by The Undertaker. Big Show leaves Vickie in the ring by herself to go help. The lights flash again and The Undertaker is in the ring with Vickie. Tombstone on Vickie!

Vickie is taken out on a stretcher to end SmackDown.

Apparently there was a dark match involving Taker and Show and Taker got beat up, and reinjured his knee and limped to the back, not sure how serious it is

Edited by luckysalt
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Greeny_Musicchild Newbie

Greeny_Musicchild

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Whatever the PPV it was where the Hardys, The Dudleys and Edge and Christian did the first TLC match.

that's the best thing i ever saw...i saw a lot of that time. I jut loved that match. ooo...or Mankind Vs Triple H in and then on and then off the cage....

Wrestling is sick.

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luckysalt Collaborator

luckysalt

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Kurt Angle interview with the sun newspaper

brings up some very good points and some very intersting things, he's just won't let the MMA thing go

Kurt Angle was interviewed this week by the UK Sun and spoke at length about what he feels is wrong with today's TNA product and can "almost guarantee" he'll be fighting in the UFC next year. You can read the entire interview at this link.

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/sport...icle1723920.ece

The highlights:

TNA Gimmicks and Match Stipulations: "Being in TNA is exciting and frustrating at the same time. We’ve been doing a good job but what we need to do right now is to simplify things. We get a little bit too complicated with our gimmick matches and run-ins. I’ve spoken to the bookers, writers and owners of TNA and said: “Listen. Wrestling is very simple, keep it simple.”

Why TNA Overindulges in Gimmicks: "TNA do it because we want to be different from WWE and innovative. But what happens is sometimes we are, but then sometimes we are too old school. Let’s face it, a tar and feather match today wouldn’t go over too well. But we’ve actually done that. That’s a 1960’s match, this is 2008. We’re in an MMA world. Fans want to see mano a mano. One on one. Let’s go at it. We call ourselves Total Nonstop Action Wrestling. We say: “TNA – we are wrestling.” No we’re not. We’re f***ing gimmick matches."

TNA Protecting Talent: "At the last PPV, No Surrender, we had a triple threat main event between me, Christian Cage and Samoa Joe. We had a great match, but Samoa Joe won because Jeff Jarrett came in and hit me with a guitar. I would have won if Jeff didn’t do that. I believe that Joe should have kicked my ass and Christian’s ass and won straight up and then afterwards Jeff could have come in or even waited until the next night on TV and attacked me. I’m trying to make our younger guys more popular. I let AJ beat me the last four times we wrestled for a reason. To make him a bigger star. I wanted Joe to beat me and Christian at the PPV to make him a bigger star. But what’s been happening is we have run-ins to create the wins, so I get protected. I don’t want to be protected and I don’t need to be protected. I’m having a real struggle with it. We need to back up and realize who we are and what we’re trying to get across. We have the best wrestlers in the world, WWE can’t compare. But how do we use them to our advantage? By simply wrestling, because that’s what they’re good at."

His Future In MMA: "I’m talking to several fight companies about doing MMA by the end of next year - 2009. I’m going to cross over to the MMA world for a while but I want to end up back in TNA and back in wrestling. I’ve always wanted to do it. I’m the only Olympic gold medallist that will enter the Octagon and it feels right for me. I can almost guarantee you’re going to see me in the Octagon."

Edited by luckysalt
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Uncle Liam Newbie

Uncle Liam

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Its obvious that Kurt isnt going to renew his contract with TNA. The man is so insane that come next year, i would not be surprised to see him in some form of MMA. He can make a lot of money doing it. I mean, look at how much Brock gets, and Angle is a much bigger star than Brock. And if Kurt is willing to commit to MMA full time, imagine the money UFC could make by promoting Lesnar v Angle.

Sooner or later, he'll end up back in Vince land or a Shawn Michaels esque deal.

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Uncle Liam Newbie

Uncle Liam

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Dave Meltzer on the state of Raw and WWE in general:

With the Raw rating, which seemingly is the only one that anyone pays any attention to, falling to an 11-year non-holiday low, it opens up a Pandora’s box of questions about the product.

I wasn’t alarmed at all by the Raw rating, because the NFL most seasons is going to take 10% off the Raw number. When you have the highest rated game in history, it will have more of an effect. Now, granted, we’ve had NFL games every Monday in the fall for all of these 11 years, but Raw is also at a lower ratings level by a significant margin than it has been in general since late 1997. There have been plenty of 3.0 level ratings over the past several months, and given that, you would expect some 2.7 ratings this fall against football. Most years, Monday night ratings take a hit this time of the year and people panic, and come January, they almost always bounce back. There is always that shock of a rapid decline most years at this time, and an overreaction in January of the comeback. As for pro wrestling in general, WWE is taking in more revenue than ever with multiple streams and is as healthy overall as a company that it has been with the possible exception of the 2000-2001 era. Generally, an economic recession is said not to hurt the entertainment industry. Sports in general have held up well thus far in an economic downturn, and people always point to the movie business being strong in the 30s. Still, the mid-70s recession did hurt the wrestling business in many, but not all, parts of the country, and while there were other factors involved, Bill Watts to this day points to the 80s economic problems in his territory as the key reason his promotion went from behind enormously profitable 18 months earlier to losing $50,000 per week and him being forced to sell in 1987.

But I don’t know that on a national basis in the last 24 years, pro wrestling has ever been less popular. And in many parts of the country that had a strong regional product, you could make a case to take that number back decades.

It’s funny, because when wrestling was at its peak nearly a decade ago, and baseball was becoming less relevant to the younger audience, I can recall people saying to me that baseball was a dying sport. One thing I’ve learned is that nobody can predict the long-term future, and current trends don’t help you much. In 1995, when many of the key people in wrestling were bemoaning to me how they simply couldn’t compete with UFC because it was real, who would have thought that UFC would have been beaten down and that pro wrestling would be at an all- time national popularity peak three years later? In 2001, who could have ever predicted that UFC would be routinely tripling WWE in North America on PPV in five years? Nobody has a crystal ball and sometimes, to borrow a cliche, the darkest time is just before dawn.

The problem, and this is the same problem as MMA is facing, is overexposure. Too much product to digest, making fans less excited about the product and very little becomes special. For all the talk of cyclical patterns, it’s not so much cycle as it is the nature of television. When something gets hot, television wants more. We can call it the “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” syndrome. One of the reasons people aren’t watching wrestling is because there is far too much product to keep up with. In the territorial heyday of wrestling, most places had either one hour per week of first run programming, or some promotions had two hours per week, and it was an easy basic product, that probably wouldn’t draw big ratings today, but then again, what we’ve got now doesn’t really draw big ratings anymore either. WWE produces five hours per week. When WCW started overloading the amount of hours it was presenting, it led to a swift decline, exacerbated by horrible television and the worst booking imaginable. WWE now has the former problem, and is surviving and hasn’t turned off its paying audience to the WCW level degree because it hasn’t presented the latter.

Some shows lack spark. It’s not the best written wrestling I’ve ever seen, but it’s rarely horrible, and when it is, usually it’s only one segment that lasts five minutes and you return to normal.

Paul Heyman in his column in The Sun this past week felt the company was at a crossroads, calling Raw an overproduced, plodding show and even the good episodes tend to drag.

“Nothing feels young and vibrant,” he wrote. “Even Ted DiBiase Jr. and Cody Rhodes, who are in their early 20s and are already fantastic in their roles, have haircuts and ring attire that can be worn by people in their mid-30s.” Hell, aside from younger faces and being a lot smaller and less muscular, how they look and dress is no different from Batista. He noted that now, even when the company is clearly ushering in a youth movement, they aren’t aiming them at a younger audience.

“The reason is because too many people inside the organization are not concerned with the reaction of the ticket buying crowd, they’re instead trying to solely appease WWE chairman Vince McMahon.”

He blamed those in WWE for not knowing pop culture and what is coming up in it. But the problem is the culture shift. For all people are saying about WWE not connecting with the youth, my experience, and going to a live show bears this out, is the youth is all they are really connecting with. Raw is still among the higher rated shows among teenage males–at times this summer among the top five in broadcast or cable, an audience Smackdown also does well with. Go to the arena. It’s filled with kids and teenagers. Who are the people no longer attending? It’s the adult males who, according to TV ratings, are still watching the shows, and even older people.

For what it’s worth, there are people in the promotion who are not exactly enamored with Heyman, but have told us they think he hit the major problem right on, which is the writers writing to please Vince and not writing for the fans. But it was also noted a big problem with that is the writers try to please Vince, but they never know what will please him, noting that what pleases Vince on Thursday may be something he doesn’t like on Monday, which is why directions stop and start so often.

The problem is, WWE, and pro wrestling in general, has lost the older wrestling fans and the wrestling fans who crossed over from being sports fans. This was the audience that carried wrestling during most of its history in the U.S. They feel alienated by a change from the product they grew up with. The NFL, NBA, Major League Baseball, yeah, there are some differences in all the games and how the TV is produced from 1984. Players change every year and teams go up and down, but you don’t see age groups disappearing at the games.

But essentially, they are the same game people grew up with. A lot of people grow up as wrestling fans, and still do today. But at some point they lose interest. When I grew up, to most of the boys in grade school, wrestling was the ultimate water fountain talk, particularly the Monday after a big angle was shot.

When I was about 14, that was no longer the case, and a lot of it was because the stars of a few years ago were gone and not replaced by equal level stars. I don’t know if that was because the territory started falling on its ass at that time and couldn’t match what it had been, or if where we lived, when you start getting new interests, you drop wrestling. I’m relatively certain that phenomenon was more regional, and that in places where wrestling stayed strong, you didn’t have that drop. Certainly I don’t think people who were in high school during the late 70s in the Carolinas or Georgia never talked about wrestling angles, or in the late 80s. When I was in college, about the time Georgia Championship Wrestling hit it big on cable and the AWA was on TV, wrestling was, not like in sixth grade, but still people talked about the new modern stars, Ric Flair, Hulk Hogan, The Fabulous Freebirds.

It clearly it got even bigger a few years when WWF started expanding with what at first were considered by area standards, “all-star” shows. In the 80s, among adults at the gym I trained at, wrestling was always a topic of conversation, quite frankly, far more than I would have liked, because people loved the idea of the huge bodybuilders like Hogan, Ultimate Warrior and the Road Warriors who never lost, and imitated the interviews of Dusty Rhodes, Randy Savage, Roddy Piper and Ric Flair.

The same was true in the late 90s. It wasn’t the age group, or the young people, but just having the right top personalities who clicked. Nitro really ushered it in because the big talk was always about how WCW’s wrestling was so much faster and better than WWE, which, ironically, is a style WWE to this day thinks is “wrong,” although with their history of injuries, sometimes you have to sacrifice. The death of that audience came in the spring and summer of 2001, and it’s never came close to recovering. It was a younger audience that contributed to recent increases in popularity, but a business is a lot more stable with a fan base in its 30s and 40s who are set in their ways, then teenagers who will move on to the next fad. Witness the NFL or baseball, which may go up or down 5% each year, but doesn’t have the wild variations in trends in attendance, that wrestling has.

Virtually all of my friends from college were big wrestling fans. Today, almost none of them watch, yet many have a cursory interest that is limited to one of two questions of how it’s going or maybe flipping around and watching for a few minutes before remembering why they stopped watching. Judging by the fact almost all did watch in 1998, and loved to talk about it, it’s not the age, or the time of life, but the wrestling, that has made the difference.

It’s not an age thing, but a product shift, and keep in mind, the 1998 product was nothing like the 1972 product. But the 1998 product was filled with larger-than-life stars. You had new top TV stars plus the 80s national stars were still around and in many parts of the country, you had vestiges of the last generation of big-time regional stars. Today, there is no larger-than-life charismatic character, whether it be the regional idol like Bruno and Crusher who could go on until they were close to 50 and still draw, or Hulk Hogan before people had to deal with the steroid issue and contradictions, or the explosive Bill Goldberg, or ultra cool Rock and Steve Austin. The only regional star left is Jerry Lawler in Memphis, and he’s more a TV announcer. HHH is clearly a superstar when you go to the shows and a very good worker. Mentally, from a timing standpoint, maybe he’s tremendous at timing and it’s a similar knack, or maybe he’s predictable, because more than any wrestler I’ve ever seen, I can call the ebbs and flows in his match right before he does, and actually I think that’s real good. But for whatever reason, I don’t know any casual wrestling fan who cares about him, not like the names mentioned above.

They don’t hate him. A lot of people see through him, far more than you think because there are so many people who don’t go that are fully aware he’s part of the McMahon family and when they see him pushed as the top guy, whether he’s good or not, it reminds them of people they know at their own job, and one thing I do know is people watch wrestling as a release from their job and daily lives, not as a reminder. That’s one of the reason the Kurt & Karen Angle break-up stuff, which came across as far too real, was such a turnoff to so many and badly hurt Kurt’s character even though it was very well done and believable.

Quite frankly, the only thing you can never ascertain from going to live shows and listening to the people who are there, is what the person who stopped going is thinking and why. WWE has done plenty of work to try and get the “lapsed” fan (a term WWE marketing actually created because of the realization so many fans, particularly older, stopped watching TV and going to shows in 2001), which they are fully aware exists, to return. And they market to them with 24/7 and the DVD releases that are now a significant part of company income. But for the most part, they have not been successful and putting together a product that brings them back.

John Cena, on the other hand, he fills arenas with kids and teenagers, and for some reason, runs off people who are older. Do they see him as a poser? Do they not respect him and see him as an artificial star? I don’t know. The reason people boo him less is not because he’s won people over, but because the audience that booed him stopped coming, and was replaced by an audience that saw him as the biggest star. But the point is, all that heat there used to be at his matches with the cheering and booing that everyone thought was good, was both good and bad, particularly if those booing aren’t coming back.

Still, when you sell merchandise and bring in new fans when nobody else is doing the latter, you hardly want to make a significant change in that character. And Cena as a turnoff wouldn’t hurt business if there was an Austin to counter him. But as great as Michaels is as a worker, he has never been close to being that person. HHH is not. Undertaker is not either. Batista absolutely was in 2005, but didn’t maintain that level once he moved to Smackdown.

Older fans do still like Undertaker, but he’s not enough to keep them watching and he’s not a ratings, buy rate or attendance mover, as his returns from sabbaticals almost always do disappointing numbers.

There was always a cursory interest in Ric Flair and his final departure, creating a period when there was no Flair, Hogan, Goldberg, Rock, or Austin, the either enduring legends or stars of the last boom, in the game, caused an audience to lose interest. There was a post-Wrestlemania Raw ratings tumble this year the likes of which is inconsistent with any year in history, so something did happen at Mania that caused people to lose interest.

Some stopped watching on TV. Others may still watch, but a lot of them it’s more creature of habit watching as opposed to really watching. You can tell by the lack of ability to convert those viewers into PPV buyers at a rate never before seen. You can also tell when there is a special being pushed hard, like the last Saturday Night’s Main Event, or a few weeks back with the switch for one night to Sci-Fi, things promoted like crazy, yet a shockingly large percentage of the usual audience didn’t get the message. They know to watch Monday at 9 p.m., or Friday at 8 p.m., because it’s the weekly schedule. But it’s not so important that they remember a time switch or channel switch.

For this audience, the not being well connected to pop culture isn’t an issue. It’s presenting a type of product they don’t really care to see, and more so, losing their connection to the product. Players come and go, and all of those people got married, had kids, moved on from old friends, and guess what. They all still watch the NFL every Sunday. Wrestling as mindless entertainment doesn’t keep people for the long haul like wrestling stars in quests for something important. The current product doesn’t allow for things to be important.

Another major issue is the loss of a certain type of fan. The current fan base is a complete star-based fan as opposed to a wrestling product-based fan. Part of that has to do with the end of the wrestling war. How many times on Nitro did guys like Billy Kidman and Juventud Guerrera, with no push, go into the ring, have a great match, and tear down the crowd more than the main eventers? Guys who had tryout matches on WCW would get over if they had a good match. Historically in wrestling with most audiences, if you put two complete unknowns in the ring and they have a good match, it’ll get over. With WWF, it has been purely star power. I can recall watching guys kick ass in tryout matches at WCW shows and get over, and the same match before WWE fans had complete indifference. I once saw a young Miguel Perez Jr., when he could really go, do a WWF tryout match that was incredible and he got no reaction because he wasn’t a TV star, and this goes back to the Bret Hart era.

Today, it’s impossible. If you think back at that Raw episode where they talked about the best technical unsigned wrestler facing C.M. Punk and people thought it might be Bryan Danielson (it turned out to be William Regal). I can recall after the show, talking with Gabe Sapolsky, and we both joked that if Danielson had shown up and worked with Punk, it wouldn’t have mattered how much time they gave or how well a match was laid out, that the match never would have gotten over to that audience.

If people believe you aren’t a star, and that’s based on your being pushed in the star group, you can’t get over. That makes it impossible for anyone but the chosen ones, and the chosen ones all look and work a certain way. Sooner or later, that means with limited vision that Vince McMahon has of what a star can look like becomes what fans are indoctrinated to, it is dooming a lot of potential stars. I dare say that if you took the 50 biggest drawing cards of the last 30 years and brought them into the business today and put them on Raw today, 35-40 wouldn’t have a prayer of making it. Mick Foley, for one, never would have gotten into developmental, let alone out of it. And that’s why there is such a depth problem. A few years back, Dwayne Johnson remarked to me about watching the show and too much sameness of everyone’s look, noting he was suddenly missing the agile fat guy like Buddy Rose.

Fact is, in Japan, all those problems I mention are worse by tenfold and they still present a product not all that different from the heyday. The problem there is the Japanese product was based on national heroes who would represent them against bigger, stronger, but less skilled big-name foreigners. You can go through the evolutionary process, but essentially a big deal came when the American big companies became so lucrative to work for that there was no way to have access to the true American stars. The casual audience declined, because the level of gripping matches were gone, even though the 90s was a hell of a boom period even as TV ratings declined, because Japan was presenting the best wrestling in the world and while they didn’t have access to as many foreign stars, those stars that were essentially Japanese-only foreign stars, still existed and performed at a high level.

The stars got older. Lack of TV on networks in a good time slot meant the next generation stars were only known to hardcore audiences. And Japan no longer was the premiere spot for wrestling, as became obvious when a superior American product filled with top stars that the Japanese groups had no access to were shown. MMA also played a huge role in the decline of Japan, because MMA took the spot of pro wrestling in the general public’s eyes.

MMA may have killed the old style of pro wrestling in the U.S. as several older promoters predicted 13 years ago had McMahon and Eric Bischoff not changed it at first for the better. Perhaps it is a bigger part of the reason for pro wrestling going from mass appeal to appealing mostly to the young except when it comes to TV viewing. The average TV viewer is 36 of Raw, yet if you go to an arena, you see very few people over the age of 36. Ten years ago that wasn’t the case.

Historically, wrestling always drew tons of people in their 50s, 60s and 70s who had been going for life. Ratings show they still watch on TV, but you never see them at live shows. Perhaps it is something to do with no longer being part of the community. For that audience, the weekly, or monthly, wrestling show was part of the routine and social process. When you come to a city once a year, it becomes novelty appeal, lure being see the stars, and people in their 50s hardly care about who the stars are as much as they simply do things that they always do with their social group. Yet, when I attend concerts or baseball games, I see an age group and fan base that I would never see at a wrestling show, yet ten years ago and 30 years ago, I would have.

Heyman has always looked to the future. If you watch ECW, the constant attempt was made to use the older stars to create newer stars in a traditional manner, by putting them over. After a while, it stopped working. I remember watching him job Sandman to death because he thought Sandman had become an act that had its run on top and his only effective role was to create new stars by losing to them, just as he had used Terry Funk to create so many ECW- created stars. But no matter how many times he beat him, Sandman stayed over. And he’d push guys like Justin Credible, Steve Corino, Rhino and others to the moon, and the fan base never really saw them as real stars. When winning and losing stopped being important, using wins and losses to make new stars stopped working. On Raw this week, when Lance Cade pinned Shawn Michaels, if results still mattered, everyone would be talking about Cade and he’d have been an instant star. In another era, Sting became a superstar in one night going to a televised draw with Ric Flair. But instead, that night, and the next day, nobody was talking about Cade.

Five years earlier, Heyman created an entire roster of cult heroes by having established people putting them over, and it stopped working. In theory, he was doing the right thing to make them stars. People can say he picked the wrong guys, but what happened was, we entered a period where fans stopped caring about outcomes because they were presented like they didn’t matter. That’s why a tiny percentage of the audience watches PPV shows. PPV shows are all about matches and the idea of paying to watch outcomes of big matches. When outcomes have no meaning, and people don’t care who wins and loses the big matches, and the titles don’t mean anything, what are you getting on PPV, aside from one or three big shows a year, that you aren’t getting endlessly on television?

Title changes mean a little to the younger fans because all titles mean nothing because everyone knows they are fake watered down marketing tools, and I blame boxing for that as much as wrestling. They don’t mean a thing to the older fans because people who want to be fans for life get slapped in the face so many times for that, that after a while, you still watch but don’t care, or you move on.

What wrestling needs is the right stars who people can relate to and care about, and make them stars. If golf had parity booking, Tiger Woods wouldn’t exist, and golf would be far worse off for it. There isn’t one person right now who fits that bill. Cena is valuable, but he will never appeal to the generation that has lost interest. He may be a great guy, but the adult audience sees through his routine. They know his delivery is fake, and don’t buy him as being the person in the role he plays, and whether he is or isn’t, they don’t believe he’s really tough. Whether people believed it was real or not, if you look at places where wrestling was popular, the fans believed the top guys were bad asses in a real life. Plus, in many cases they were right. Everyone knew stories of the local star being put in a situation and the stories almost always ended badly for the person who put them in the situation.

Rey Mysterio is awesome for kids and underutilized, but that’s his role, not as the guy who carries the promotion. Can an adult watch Mysterio vs. Kane for more than two minutes and not mentally say this whole thing is ridiculous? Did people in 1998, or 1973, say that pro wrestling was something for young children and that, like Hannah Montana, that no self-respecting adult would be caught dead watching it? In 1973, it was the bastard dirty little secret of sports fans, and maybe people wouldn’t admit to watching it in public, but there were an awful lot of arenas that were filled regularly. In 1998, it was a pop culture phenomenon. Today, it is nowhere close to either.

Yeah, there is a problem Heyman related to and that is the look of the characters. Hell, everyone in wrestling knows that. Everyone looks the same and works the same. They were all trained in the same system and when it comes to what they do in the ring, they’ve had every bit of creativity beaten out of them because you are taught to conform. Ironically, it is that creativity–the something new, that is what separated the mid-carders from the superstars, unless you had a hulking body to do the trick. It’s funny, because Vince is sitting there wishing for another Superstar Graham to come down the pike and change the game with the way he dressed and cut promos and capture the imagination of the public, but that person today would talk like everyone else, have the same haircut as everyone else and work in the ring like everyone else. Graham himself has told many people that if he came along today, he could not have been successful.

One of the best wrestlers of the 80s was Ted DiBiase. He had a good look. His body wasn’t the best, but he could work as well as anyone and spoke great. He was great to have in a territory because every angle he was in would get over because he could verbally and physically deliver the goods. But Bill Watts used to put it best. DiBiase was a catalyst to make the company go around. But his role was to make the money guys, whether it was Junkyard Dog, Jim Duggan, or whomever, appear to be better than they were, and get the angles involving them over. WWE has created a circuit fell of young wrestlers taught to be Ted DiBiase, and that’s real good. A lot of these guys are going to be great technicians, and give me a company where you have 20 guys like that and a half-dozen charismatic unique guys for them to play off of and you’ll have a ton off success. Except they don’t have the mass appeal guy to play off of because they are all too busy making sure they it a certain mold, that everyone has already seen.

Former writer Court Bauer echoed a similar view as Heyman.

“The overall WWE brand isn’t tapped into the cultural fabric of today and tomorrow’s pop culture and trends which is what wrestling needs to be. It’s no longer hip or presented as hip. But at its core, the creative writing department’s process is broken, and has been a broken process for years. It’s dysfunctional. There’s poor communication, brand turf wars between the three shows writers, political, in a petty sense where politicians who win out don’t ultimately help, but hinder the process. Pushes, storylines and character development are routinely compromised after given the go-ahead and there’s way too much input from people who aren’t well versed in the nuances of presenting a 2008 product that resonates.

“Writers are constantly undermined and have their credibility compromised by other writers or even Stephanie herself. It’s a disaster and a frustrating experience, especially if you’re on the talent end of the process. There’s little hope for success in the creative team dynamic regardless of if you are a prolific idea generator or otherwise.

“The first thing I would do if I was given the carte blanche to the WWE creative writing is shut down the creative writing division. It’s an experiment that has failed. Sucks to say, but the proof is in the pudding. Eight plus years later there’s been nothing but stagnation and a consistent decline in TV ratings. Show me any other show on any other network that has had a series in a ratings decline year-after-year and continued to staff the same lead writer for that entire period. Only in wrestling. The numbers don’t lie.”

Another former writer noted, “I watched Raw after the (football) game. The show to me is just lacking oomph. The one thing that always bugged me in my tenure–it’s (WWE) booked around personal feelings and not what’s best for business. The example of (C.M.) Punk. Look at how he was screwed out of the title at the PPV. Then gets a cage rematch. No promo to talk about it. Then loses. Then never heard from again to throw his hat into the ring for the rematch. Imagine the excitement of having Punk confront Jericho at the end of the show, only to have Orton/new generation take him out again. At least invest in that program some more and pour some gasoline on it since as the lea leaves look, Punk is sliding into a third-level position.

“The show is written by a 63-year-old who never watches any television, a 36 or 37 year old (Brian Gewirtz) who is very into pop culture and is a very good writer, just not a great booker or great at getting wrestlers over. The show is vetted through a group of agents who are decent wrestling guys, but who would think the Jonas Brothers were a tag team The Funks worked with. Vince preached for years to me–and to everyone–“Know your audience.” Yet they don’t.

“HBK and Jericho isn’t box office because as soon as it was becoming box office, they f**ked with it. After the angle with HBK’s wife, they should have just had Jericho in the scramble and winning the title. Last night would have meant more. Yeah, the idea that HBK beat Jericho on the night Jericho won the title is intriguing, but not as much as the personal issue of HBK disappearing for a while after his wife gets punched. Simple works. Slow works.”

He pointed to Couture vs. Lesnar as a dream match the type of which WWE has been unable to put together for a long time. Cena vs. Batista was rushed and ultimately meant little. With Couture vs. Lesnar, for the first time in a long time, there is a match where the imagination of what the match is takes on a life of its own, and is something no angle can surpass, and quite frankly, no “good match” can live up to. An interesting note is that one former writer who kept in contact with many other former writers, as well as questions I’ve either asked this week or been told in the past by several former writers, is that with no exception anyone can find, nobody who was there would be interested in coming back. And keep in mind that in virtually every case, they went there with the idea it was their dream job

This from the Wrestling Observer newsletter, which everyone really should subscribe to.

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Dave Meltzer on the state of Raw and WWE in general:

With the Raw rating, which seemingly is the only one that anyone pays any attention to, falling to an 11-year non-holiday low, it opens up a Pandora’s box of questions about the product.

I wasn’t alarmed at all by the Raw rating, because the NFL most seasons is going to take 10% off the Raw number. When you have the highest rated game in history, it will have more of an effect. Now, granted, we’ve had NFL games every Monday in the fall for all of these 11 years, but Raw is also at a lower ratings level by a significant margin than it has been in general since late 1997. There have been plenty of 3.0 level ratings over the past several months, and given that, you would expect some 2.7 ratings this fall against football. Most years, Monday night ratings take a hit this time of the year and people panic, and come January, they almost always bounce back. There is always that shock of a rapid decline most years at this time, and an overreaction in January of the comeback. As for pro wrestling in general, WWE is taking in more revenue than ever with multiple streams and is as healthy overall as a company that it has been with the possible exception of the 2000-2001 era. Generally, an economic recession is said not to hurt the entertainment industry. Sports in general have held up well thus far in an economic downturn, and people always point to the movie business being strong in the 30s. Still, the mid-70s recession did hurt the wrestling business in many, but not all, parts of the country, and while there were other factors involved, Bill Watts to this day points to the 80s economic problems in his territory as the key reason his promotion went from behind enormously profitable 18 months earlier to losing $50,000 per week and him being forced to sell in 1987.

But I don’t know that on a national basis in the last 24 years, pro wrestling has ever been less popular. And in many parts of the country that had a strong regional product, you could make a case to take that number back decades.

It’s funny, because when wrestling was at its peak nearly a decade ago, and baseball was becoming less relevant to the younger audience, I can recall people saying to me that baseball was a dying sport. One thing I’ve learned is that nobody can predict the long-term future, and current trends don’t help you much. In 1995, when many of the key people in wrestling were bemoaning to me how they simply couldn’t compete with UFC because it was real, who would have thought that UFC would have been beaten down and that pro wrestling would be at an all- time national popularity peak three years later? In 2001, who could have ever predicted that UFC would be routinely tripling WWE in North America on PPV in five years? Nobody has a crystal ball and sometimes, to borrow a cliche, the darkest time is just before dawn.

The problem, and this is the same problem as MMA is facing, is overexposure. Too much product to digest, making fans less excited about the product and very little becomes special. For all the talk of cyclical patterns, it’s not so much cycle as it is the nature of television. When something gets hot, television wants more. We can call it the “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” syndrome. One of the reasons people aren’t watching wrestling is because there is far too much product to keep up with. In the territorial heyday of wrestling, most places had either one hour per week of first run programming, or some promotions had two hours per week, and it was an easy basic product, that probably wouldn’t draw big ratings today, but then again, what we’ve got now doesn’t really draw big ratings anymore either. WWE produces five hours per week. When WCW started overloading the amount of hours it was presenting, it led to a swift decline, exacerbated by horrible television and the worst booking imaginable. WWE now has the former problem, and is surviving and hasn’t turned off its paying audience to the WCW level degree because it hasn’t presented the latter.

Some shows lack spark. It’s not the best written wrestling I’ve ever seen, but it’s rarely horrible, and when it is, usually it’s only one segment that lasts five minutes and you return to normal.

Paul Heyman in his column in The Sun this past week felt the company was at a crossroads, calling Raw an overproduced, plodding show and even the good episodes tend to drag.

“Nothing feels young and vibrant,” he wrote. “Even Ted DiBiase Jr. and Cody Rhodes, who are in their early 20s and are already fantastic in their roles, have haircuts and ring attire that can be worn by people in their mid-30s.” Hell, aside from younger faces and being a lot smaller and less muscular, how they look and dress is no different from Batista. He noted that now, even when the company is clearly ushering in a youth movement, they aren’t aiming them at a younger audience.

“The reason is because too many people inside the organization are not concerned with the reaction of the ticket buying crowd, they’re instead trying to solely appease WWE chairman Vince McMahon.”

He blamed those in WWE for not knowing pop culture and what is coming up in it. But the problem is the culture shift. For all people are saying about WWE not connecting with the youth, my experience, and going to a live show bears this out, is the youth is all they are really connecting with. Raw is still among the higher rated shows among teenage males–at times this summer among the top five in broadcast or cable, an audience Smackdown also does well with. Go to the arena. It’s filled with kids and teenagers. Who are the people no longer attending? It’s the adult males who, according to TV ratings, are still watching the shows, and even older people.

For what it’s worth, there are people in the promotion who are not exactly enamored with Heyman, but have told us they think he hit the major problem right on, which is the writers writing to please Vince and not writing for the fans. But it was also noted a big problem with that is the writers try to please Vince, but they never know what will please him, noting that what pleases Vince on Thursday may be something he doesn’t like on Monday, which is why directions stop and start so often.

The problem is, WWE, and pro wrestling in general, has lost the older wrestling fans and the wrestling fans who crossed over from being sports fans. This was the audience that carried wrestling during most of its history in the U.S. They feel alienated by a change from the product they grew up with. The NFL, NBA, Major League Baseball, yeah, there are some differences in all the games and how the TV is produced from 1984. Players change every year and teams go up and down, but you don’t see age groups disappearing at the games.

But essentially, they are the same game people grew up with. A lot of people grow up as wrestling fans, and still do today. But at some point they lose interest. When I grew up, to most of the boys in grade school, wrestling was the ultimate water fountain talk, particularly the Monday after a big angle was shot.

When I was about 14, that was no longer the case, and a lot of it was because the stars of a few years ago were gone and not replaced by equal level stars. I don’t know if that was because the territory started falling on its ass at that time and couldn’t match what it had been, or if where we lived, when you start getting new interests, you drop wrestling. I’m relatively certain that phenomenon was more regional, and that in places where wrestling stayed strong, you didn’t have that drop. Certainly I don’t think people who were in high school during the late 70s in the Carolinas or Georgia never talked about wrestling angles, or in the late 80s. When I was in college, about the time Georgia Championship Wrestling hit it big on cable and the AWA was on TV, wrestling was, not like in sixth grade, but still people talked about the new modern stars, Ric Flair, Hulk Hogan, The Fabulous Freebirds.

It clearly it got even bigger a few years when WWF started expanding with what at first were considered by area standards, “all-star” shows. In the 80s, among adults at the gym I trained at, wrestling was always a topic of conversation, quite frankly, far more than I would have liked, because people loved the idea of the huge bodybuilders like Hogan, Ultimate Warrior and the Road Warriors who never lost, and imitated the interviews of Dusty Rhodes, Randy Savage, Roddy Piper and Ric Flair.

The same was true in the late 90s. It wasn’t the age group, or the young people, but just having the right top personalities who clicked. Nitro really ushered it in because the big talk was always about how WCW’s wrestling was so much faster and better than WWE, which, ironically, is a style WWE to this day thinks is “wrong,” although with their history of injuries, sometimes you have to sacrifice. The death of that audience came in the spring and summer of 2001, and it’s never came close to recovering. It was a younger audience that contributed to recent increases in popularity, but a business is a lot more stable with a fan base in its 30s and 40s who are set in their ways, then teenagers who will move on to the next fad. Witness the NFL or baseball, which may go up or down 5% each year, but doesn’t have the wild variations in trends in attendance, that wrestling has.

Virtually all of my friends from college were big wrestling fans. Today, almost none of them watch, yet many have a cursory interest that is limited to one of two questions of how it’s going or maybe flipping around and watching for a few minutes before remembering why they stopped watching. Judging by the fact almost all did watch in 1998, and loved to talk about it, it’s not the age, or the time of life, but the wrestling, that has made the difference.

It’s not an age thing, but a product shift, and keep in mind, the 1998 product was nothing like the 1972 product. But the 1998 product was filled with larger-than-life stars. You had new top TV stars plus the 80s national stars were still around and in many parts of the country, you had vestiges of the last generation of big-time regional stars. Today, there is no larger-than-life charismatic character, whether it be the regional idol like Bruno and Crusher who could go on until they were close to 50 and still draw, or Hulk Hogan before people had to deal with the steroid issue and contradictions, or the explosive Bill Goldberg, or ultra cool Rock and Steve Austin. The only regional star left is Jerry Lawler in Memphis, and he’s more a TV announcer. HHH is clearly a superstar when you go to the shows and a very good worker. Mentally, from a timing standpoint, maybe he’s tremendous at timing and it’s a similar knack, or maybe he’s predictable, because more than any wrestler I’ve ever seen, I can call the ebbs and flows in his match right before he does, and actually I think that’s real good. But for whatever reason, I don’t know any casual wrestling fan who cares about him, not like the names mentioned above.

They don’t hate him. A lot of people see through him, far more than you think because there are so many people who don’t go that are fully aware he’s part of the McMahon family and when they see him pushed as the top guy, whether he’s good or not, it reminds them of people they know at their own job, and one thing I do know is people watch wrestling as a release from their job and daily lives, not as a reminder. That’s one of the reason the Kurt & Karen Angle break-up stuff, which came across as far too real, was such a turnoff to so many and badly hurt Kurt’s character even though it was very well done and believable.

Quite frankly, the only thing you can never ascertain from going to live shows and listening to the people who are there, is what the person who stopped going is thinking and why. WWE has done plenty of work to try and get the “lapsed” fan (a term WWE marketing actually created because of the realization so many fans, particularly older, stopped watching TV and going to shows in 2001), which they are fully aware exists, to return. And they market to them with 24/7 and the DVD releases that are now a significant part of company income. But for the most part, they have not been successful and putting together a product that brings them back.

John Cena, on the other hand, he fills arenas with kids and teenagers, and for some reason, runs off people who are older. Do they see him as a poser? Do they not respect him and see him as an artificial star? I don’t know. The reason people boo him less is not because he’s won people over, but because the audience that booed him stopped coming, and was replaced by an audience that saw him as the biggest star. But the point is, all that heat there used to be at his matches with the cheering and booing that everyone thought was good, was both good and bad, particularly if those booing aren’t coming back.

Still, when you sell merchandise and bring in new fans when nobody else is doing the latter, you hardly want to make a significant change in that character. And Cena as a turnoff wouldn’t hurt business if there was an Austin to counter him. But as great as Michaels is as a worker, he has never been close to being that person. HHH is not. Undertaker is not either. Batista absolutely was in 2005, but didn’t maintain that level once he moved to Smackdown.

Older fans do still like Undertaker, but he’s not enough to keep them watching and he’s not a ratings, buy rate or attendance mover, as his returns from sabbaticals almost always do disappointing numbers.

There was always a cursory interest in Ric Flair and his final departure, creating a period when there was no Flair, Hogan, Goldberg, Rock, or Austin, the either enduring legends or stars of the last boom, in the game, caused an audience to lose interest. There was a post-Wrestlemania Raw ratings tumble this year the likes of which is inconsistent with any year in history, so something did happen at Mania that caused people to lose interest.

Some stopped watching on TV. Others may still watch, but a lot of them it’s more creature of habit watching as opposed to really watching. You can tell by the lack of ability to convert those viewers into PPV buyers at a rate never before seen. You can also tell when there is a special being pushed hard, like the last Saturday Night’s Main Event, or a few weeks back with the switch for one night to Sci-Fi, things promoted like crazy, yet a shockingly large percentage of the usual audience didn’t get the message. They know to watch Monday at 9 p.m., or Friday at 8 p.m., because it’s the weekly schedule. But it’s not so important that they remember a time switch or channel switch.

For this audience, the not being well connected to pop culture isn’t an issue. It’s presenting a type of product they don’t really care to see, and more so, losing their connection to the product. Players come and go, and all of those people got married, had kids, moved on from old friends, and guess what. They all still watch the NFL every Sunday. Wrestling as mindless entertainment doesn’t keep people for the long haul like wrestling stars in quests for something important. The current product doesn’t allow for things to be important.

Another major issue is the loss of a certain type of fan. The current fan base is a complete star-based fan as opposed to a wrestling product-based fan. Part of that has to do with the end of the wrestling war. How many times on Nitro did guys like Billy Kidman and Juventud Guerrera, with no push, go into the ring, have a great match, and tear down the crowd more than the main eventers? Guys who had tryout matches on WCW would get over if they had a good match. Historically in wrestling with most audiences, if you put two complete unknowns in the ring and they have a good match, it’ll get over. With WWF, it has been purely star power. I can recall watching guys kick ass in tryout matches at WCW shows and get over, and the same match before WWE fans had complete indifference. I once saw a young Miguel Perez Jr., when he could really go, do a WWF tryout match that was incredible and he got no reaction because he wasn’t a TV star, and this goes back to the Bret Hart era.

Today, it’s impossible. If you think back at that Raw episode where they talked about the best technical unsigned wrestler facing C.M. Punk and people thought it might be Bryan Danielson (it turned out to be William Regal). I can recall after the show, talking with Gabe Sapolsky, and we both joked that if Danielson had shown up and worked with Punk, it wouldn’t have mattered how much time they gave or how well a match was laid out, that the match never would have gotten over to that audience.

If people believe you aren’t a star, and that’s based on your being pushed in the star group, you can’t get over. That makes it impossible for anyone but the chosen ones, and the chosen ones all look and work a certain way. Sooner or later, that means with limited vision that Vince McMahon has of what a star can look like becomes what fans are indoctrinated to, it is dooming a lot of potential stars. I dare say that if you took the 50 biggest drawing cards of the last 30 years and brought them into the business today and put them on Raw today, 35-40 wouldn’t have a prayer of making it. Mick Foley, for one, never would have gotten into developmental, let alone out of it. And that’s why there is such a depth problem. A few years back, Dwayne Johnson remarked to me about watching the show and too much sameness of everyone’s look, noting he was suddenly missing the agile fat guy like Buddy Rose.

Fact is, in Japan, all those problems I mention are worse by tenfold and they still present a product not all that different from the heyday. The problem there is the Japanese product was based on national heroes who would represent them against bigger, stronger, but less skilled big-name foreigners. You can go through the evolutionary process, but essentially a big deal came when the American big companies became so lucrative to work for that there was no way to have access to the true American stars. The casual audience declined, because the level of gripping matches were gone, even though the 90s was a hell of a boom period even as TV ratings declined, because Japan was presenting the best wrestling in the world and while they didn’t have access to as many foreign stars, those stars that were essentially Japanese-only foreign stars, still existed and performed at a high level.

The stars got older. Lack of TV on networks in a good time slot meant the next generation stars were only known to hardcore audiences. And Japan no longer was the premiere spot for wrestling, as became obvious when a superior American product filled with top stars that the Japanese groups had no access to were shown. MMA also played a huge role in the decline of Japan, because MMA took the spot of pro wrestling in the general public’s eyes.

MMA may have killed the old style of pro wrestling in the U.S. as several older promoters predicted 13 years ago had McMahon and Eric Bischoff not changed it at first for the better. Perhaps it is a bigger part of the reason for pro wrestling going from mass appeal to appealing mostly to the young except when it comes to TV viewing. The average TV viewer is 36 of Raw, yet if you go to an arena, you see very few people over the age of 36. Ten years ago that wasn’t the case.

Historically, wrestling always drew tons of people in their 50s, 60s and 70s who had been going for life. Ratings show they still watch on TV, but you never see them at live shows. Perhaps it is something to do with no longer being part of the community. For that audience, the weekly, or monthly, wrestling show was part of the routine and social process. When you come to a city once a year, it becomes novelty appeal, lure being see the stars, and people in their 50s hardly care about who the stars are as much as they simply do things that they always do with their social group. Yet, when I attend concerts or baseball games, I see an age group and fan base that I would never see at a wrestling show, yet ten years ago and 30 years ago, I would have.

Heyman has always looked to the future. If you watch ECW, the constant attempt was made to use the older stars to create newer stars in a traditional manner, by putting them over. After a while, it stopped working. I remember watching him job Sandman to death because he thought Sandman had become an act that had its run on top and his only effective role was to create new stars by losing to them, just as he had used Terry Funk to create so many ECW- created stars. But no matter how many times he beat him, Sandman stayed over. And he’d push guys like Justin Credible, Steve Corino, Rhino and others to the moon, and the fan base never really saw them as real stars. When winning and losing stopped being important, using wins and losses to make new stars stopped working. On Raw this week, when Lance Cade pinned Shawn Michaels, if results still mattered, everyone would be talking about Cade and he’d have been an instant star. In another era, Sting became a superstar in one night going to a televised draw with Ric Flair. But instead, that night, and the next day, nobody was talking about Cade.

Five years earlier, Heyman created an entire roster of cult heroes by having established people putting them over, and it stopped working. In theory, he was doing the right thing to make them stars. People can say he picked the wrong guys, but what happened was, we entered a period where fans stopped caring about outcomes because they were presented like they didn’t matter. That’s why a tiny percentage of the audience watches PPV shows. PPV shows are all about matches and the idea of paying to watch outcomes of big matches. When outcomes have no meaning, and people don’t care who wins and loses the big matches, and the titles don’t mean anything, what are you getting on PPV, aside from one or three big shows a year, that you aren’t getting endlessly on television?

Title changes mean a little to the younger fans because all titles mean nothing because everyone knows they are fake watered down marketing tools, and I blame boxing for that as much as wrestling. They don’t mean a thing to the older fans because people who want to be fans for life get slapped in the face so many times for that, that after a while, you still watch but don’t care, or you move on.

What wrestling needs is the right stars who people can relate to and care about, and make them stars. If golf had parity booking, Tiger Woods wouldn’t exist, and golf would be far worse off for it. There isn’t one person right now who fits that bill. Cena is valuable, but he will never appeal to the generation that has lost interest. He may be a great guy, but the adult audience sees through his routine. They know his delivery is fake, and don’t buy him as being the person in the role he plays, and whether he is or isn’t, they don’t believe he’s really tough. Whether people believed it was real or not, if you look at places where wrestling was popular, the fans believed the top guys were bad asses in a real life. Plus, in many cases they were right. Everyone knew stories of the local star being put in a situation and the stories almost always ended badly for the person who put them in the situation.

Rey Mysterio is awesome for kids and underutilized, but that’s his role, not as the guy who carries the promotion. Can an adult watch Mysterio vs. Kane for more than two minutes and not mentally say this whole thing is ridiculous? Did people in 1998, or 1973, say that pro wrestling was something for young children and that, like Hannah Montana, that no self-respecting adult would be caught dead watching it? In 1973, it was the bastard dirty little secret of sports fans, and maybe people wouldn’t admit to watching it in public, but there were an awful lot of arenas that were filled regularly. In 1998, it was a pop culture phenomenon. Today, it is nowhere close to either.

Yeah, there is a problem Heyman related to and that is the look of the characters. Hell, everyone in wrestling knows that. Everyone looks the same and works the same. They were all trained in the same system and when it comes to what they do in the ring, they’ve had every bit of creativity beaten out of them because you are taught to conform. Ironically, it is that creativity–the something new, that is what separated the mid-carders from the superstars, unless you had a hulking body to do the trick. It’s funny, because Vince is sitting there wishing for another Superstar Graham to come down the pike and change the game with the way he dressed and cut promos and capture the imagination of the public, but that person today would talk like everyone else, have the same haircut as everyone else and work in the ring like everyone else. Graham himself has told many people that if he came along today, he could not have been successful.

One of the best wrestlers of the 80s was Ted DiBiase. He had a good look. His body wasn’t the best, but he could work as well as anyone and spoke great. He was great to have in a territory because every angle he was in would get over because he could verbally and physically deliver the goods. But Bill Watts used to put it best. DiBiase was a catalyst to make the company go around. But his role was to make the money guys, whether it was Junkyard Dog, Jim Duggan, or whomever, appear to be better than they were, and get the angles involving them over. WWE has created a circuit fell of young wrestlers taught to be Ted DiBiase, and that’s real good. A lot of these guys are going to be great technicians, and give me a company where you have 20 guys like that and a half-dozen charismatic unique guys for them to play off of and you’ll have a ton off success. Except they don’t have the mass appeal guy to play off of because they are all too busy making sure they it a certain mold, that everyone has already seen.

Former writer Court Bauer echoed a similar view as Heyman.

“The overall WWE brand isn’t tapped into the cultural fabric of today and tomorrow’s pop culture and trends which is what wrestling needs to be. It’s no longer hip or presented as hip. But at its core, the creative writing department’s process is broken, and has been a broken process for years. It’s dysfunctional. There’s poor communication, brand turf wars between the three shows writers, political, in a petty sense where politicians who win out don’t ultimately help, but hinder the process. Pushes, storylines and character development are routinely compromised after given the go-ahead and there’s way too much input from people who aren’t well versed in the nuances of presenting a 2008 product that resonates.

“Writers are constantly undermined and have their credibility compromised by other writers or even Stephanie herself. It’s a disaster and a frustrating experience, especially if you’re on the talent end of the process. There’s little hope for success in the creative team dynamic regardless of if you are a prolific idea generator or otherwise.

“The first thing I would do if I was given the carte blanche to the WWE creative writing is shut down the creative writing division. It’s an experiment that has failed. Sucks to say, but the proof is in the pudding. Eight plus years later there’s been nothing but stagnation and a consistent decline in TV ratings. Show me any other show on any other network that has had a series in a ratings decline year-after-year and continued to staff the same lead writer for that entire period. Only in wrestling. The numbers don’t lie.”

Another former writer noted, “I watched Raw after the (football) game. The show to me is just lacking oomph. The one thing that always bugged me in my tenure–it’s (WWE) booked around personal feelings and not what’s best for business. The example of (C.M.) Punk. Look at how he was screwed out of the title at the PPV. Then gets a cage rematch. No promo to talk about it. Then loses. Then never heard from again to throw his hat into the ring for the rematch. Imagine the excitement of having Punk confront Jericho at the end of the show, only to have Orton/new generation take him out again. At least invest in that program some more and pour some gasoline on it since as the lea leaves look, Punk is sliding into a third-level position.

“The show is written by a 63-year-old who never watches any television, a 36 or 37 year old (Brian Gewirtz) who is very into pop culture and is a very good writer, just not a great booker or great at getting wrestlers over. The show is vetted through a group of agents who are decent wrestling guys, but who would think the Jonas Brothers were a tag team The Funks worked with. Vince preached for years to me–and to everyone–“Know your audience.” Yet they don’t.

“HBK and Jericho isn’t box office because as soon as it was becoming box office, they f**ked with it. After the angle with HBK’s wife, they should have just had Jericho in the scramble and winning the title. Last night would have meant more. Yeah, the idea that HBK beat Jericho on the night Jericho won the title is intriguing, but not as much as the personal issue of HBK disappearing for a while after his wife gets punched. Simple works. Slow works.”

He pointed to Couture vs. Lesnar as a dream match the type of which WWE has been unable to put together for a long time. Cena vs. Batista was rushed and ultimately meant little. With Couture vs. Lesnar, for the first time in a long time, there is a match where the imagination of what the match is takes on a life of its own, and is something no angle can surpass, and quite frankly, no “good match” can live up to. An interesting note is that one former writer who kept in contact with many other former writers, as well as questions I’ve either asked this week or been told in the past by several former writers, is that with no exception anyone can find, nobody who was there would be interested in coming back. And keep in mind that in virtually every case, they went there with the idea it was their dream job

This from the Wrestling Observer newsletter, which everyone really should subscribe to.

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