The Issue #1
By: Bryon Frazier
June 19, 2003
The Issue
"Damn it! It's quarter after nine!"
That was me this Monday night. Yes, I really was angry that I missed the first fifteen minutes of Raw. This goes in stark contrast to most internet wrestling writers these days. As it turned out, I missed Mick Foley's opening interview segment and the first thing I saw was Ivory/Dudleyz vs. Team Kill Whitey. To be honest, I'm not a big Foley fan and like everyone else I truly can't stand Triple H, so it didn't bother me to not see them verbally masturbate each other.
Wait, what's this? Triple H didn't do the talking? Randy Orton did? Impressive indeed. Eh, upon second thought I'm sure somewhere in there Trips was still verbally masturbated -- you know, like having both parties frequently mention that that Helmsley guy retired Mick Foley. Anyway, then I read that Maven and Al Snow do the run-in save when Evolution attacked Foley. Hey, at least they're trying. No really, they are trying and I commend them for it. If all this leads to Orton and Maven getting over by association then I'm all for it. It would show that it finally dawned on the braintrust that maybe, just maybe, they should work on getting some younger talent over via the popularity of established stars.
You see kids, the WWE can't stay alive with the exact same stars forever. Foley is retired, Austin is retired, the Rock is semi-retired, Shawn Michaels is old, Undertaker is old, Kurt Angle just had Voodoo surgery (which means it's only a matter of time before his head falls off). I mean, the only major star they've had in the past 5 years that isn't done in the wrestling business is Triple H. Sure, you can argue for Chris Jericho and Brock Lesnar, but let's get serious. Jericho gets jerked around so much that he'll never be truly over and Lesnar is just too young at the moment. He almost killed himself in his first Wrestlemania match for Pete Gas's sake! That's not work ethic or passion for the business, that's just plain stupidity. Everyone else that's ever been even near the main event scene is damaged goods, dead in the water, too old, or too burned out. Hell, quite a few of them fall into more than one of those categories. So as it turns out, that Triple H is even more cunning than we originally feared!
Short story longer, if the WWE wants to avoid those pesky $4.1 million quarterly losses they need make new stars, and stop sabotaging their own properties with all the screwjob finishes, non-finishes, DQ finishes, and interferences. Well, that and of course they should also stick to wrestling and stop trying other endeavors (XFL and the World, I'm looking at you!), but that's another issue for another time.
A Reason Why I Miss WCW
I was recently a small part of a discussion of Raven on some board somewhere on the 'net (vague, huh?). It really made me think back to when I first started watching WCW. It was back in the summer of 1998, when wrestling was becoming the cool thing to watch. I had first heard of Raven a few weeks prior to actually seeing him, and I really had no idea what to expect. I always hear people say how he was so much cooler in ECW before he went to WCW, but I'm willing to take what I can get and what I got was one of the most original characters I'd ever seen in wrestling. The promos, Raven's rules, the Flock, "I feel your pain;" what was there not to like?
Raven made me realize that you don't have to be big, or muscular, or overly athletic to be both entertaining AND believable in the world of wrestling. The guy would smile when in submission holds, and yet he didn't make me say those evil words, "Wresting is so fake," because I was able to believe in the character. These days there's no one that makes me want to believe in them. Not a one. Now it's just a bunch of carnies trying a new approach to selling me the same product. It's all "I'm cool because. . ." these days. A character like Raven isn't even possible in the WWE because only WCW's chaotic preparations for shows, not to mention the THREE FRIGGIN' HOURS of Nitro every Monday night, allowed a guy like Scott Levy the freedom to do just about whatever he wanted out there. It gave the show a different feel when he was in or around the ring, like the company had been hijacked for a moment or two. Without WCW (or something very much like it), I'll never have something like that to enjoy again.
We'll call that Reason #33 of why I miss WCW.