The Issue #3
By: Bryon Frazier
July 7, 2003
The Issue
The world is full of bandwagon fans -- people who jump onto the tide of any winning franchise. In professional sports the most popular (and most hated) teams are the ones with rich histories of winning, and in time those bandwagoners can become full fledged fanatics. In professional wrestling, this phenomenon isn't quite what it used to be. Way back when the barrier was still there and people didn't completely realize that wrestling is (gasp) fake, the guys who won were the guys who were popular. However, now that we know the results of wrestling matches are predetermined, as well as the general evolution of the industry over the years, there's an extra wrinkle with pro wrestling that real sports don't have to deal with. I'm referring to gimmicks and characters; the purpose of their existences is to make a given wrestler stand out from the pack and hope that the viewing public likes what they see.
No matter how great a character is or how charismatic a particular worker may be, fans still want to cheer or boo a winner. The problem these days is that the WWE truly seems to be unaware of which wrestlers the fans like and dislike. If they were paying attention then I'd no longer have to watch while a guy like Christian is labeled as "lucky" by the braintrust, or Booker T is made to look like a choke artist in the big matches, or John Cena does the J-O-B to Billy Gunn (WTF?). I'm basically asking what ever happened to the art of the push?
Why is it that the guys I like to watch can never win matches consistently? I understand that they like to build this whole mystique of "you never know what will happen" but what's happening instead is that they're creating a product of predictable unpredictability. I knew without a shadow of a doubt that there is no way that Christian would beat Booker T on Raw because a guy not named Triple H can't just go out and successfully defend his title any more. That's why the Intercontinental Title isn't worth a damn any more. Whomever holds it is cursed to winning in backhanded manners like double pincounts, belt shots, and of course the dreaded botched interference. It's also why John Cena, who's probably my favorite these days, can't even beat the lowly Billy Gunn. Eddy Guerrero was getting some fantastic face pops during his tag match, and yet they decide to turn him heel for the 994th time. It's getting disturbing.
The last guy to be successfully pushed to the main event level by the WWE was Brock Lesnar. How did he make it? He won matches. It's just that simple sometimes. This is the same formula that made Goldberg into a major player. Get a guy with intensity and an imposing look, give him a string of wins and the fans will respond. The real art of the push though isn't just giving a guy some victories. You can push an individual by making him the focus of the show, and by having the other wrestlers and personalities treat the individual as someone to be reckoned with. That formula is how Triple H got over, and conversely that's how Jericho didn't. Sure, Chris Jericho won the unified World Championships on that fateful night. He then followed that up by playing second fiddle to not just Stephanie McMahon, and not just Triple H, but also to their divorce proceedings AND their dog. That's another example of anti-booking, where the goal is to seem like you're pushing a guy when in fact you're trying to bring him down a notch.
I guess we can only hope for the day when someone realizes that the way to promote the wrestlers is to not make them all look like nothing more than weak morons.
A Reason Why I Miss WCW
WCW never mastered the art of the push, but it was very fun to watch them try in the dark to wander into success. The beauty of WCW's pushes was that anyone in their company got a turn. WCW also made sure to treat their champions with respect. On any given Nitro, you could expect to see some title defenses, and they were almost always successful. On Smackdown Rey Mysterio successfully defended his title, and even did so relatively cleanly, but then I had to watch as Eddy Guerrero and Tajiri dropped their belts and Eddy immediately turned. No seeds of dissention planted, just a hotshotted feud for reasons I don't even want to fathom.
Regular title changes and match-ups where neither competitor can afford to lose used to be saved strictly for pay-per-views. That was always supposed to be the draw of pay-per-views, to see the match-ups that you've always wanted to see, where the fans can truly feel like they don't know if the champ will be leaving with the belt. Instead they put these kinds of matches all across every television show, meaning that every match ends with either a DQ, a screwjob, or no-contest, with a 50-50 chance that a belt will be changing hands.
I can remember watching WCW for the first time, Booker T and Chris Benoit were having their best of 7 series to see who would face Fit Finlay for his TV Title. What didn't I see during this? I didn't see Fit Finlay come out to watch ringside, nor did I see him go to the broadcast booth and commentate. He didn't involve himself in any way. Instead he had his own matches EVERY show, and every show I saw him win cleanly via a tombstone piledriver. Do you know what effect that has to someone willing to suspend disbelief? It gave me the impression that either Benoit or Booker was going to have a hell of a time to try to beat this guy. Finlay's never been a big star in wrestling, but at least WCW put him out there and put him over cleanly night after night. They would try to put anyone over consistently to see how the fans react. As badly as the WWE seems to push A-Train, you never see them slap a belt on him and put him over clean for months on end. It was this gung ho nature to WCW's pushes that I loved.
Goldberg will never work out in the WWE because they aren't willing to job EVERYONE to him like WCW was. The Berg won the US Title and proceeded to defend it on every show. The same goes for most of the other champions they had (World Title excluded for obvious reasons, except for when Goldberg had it). If Juventud Guerrera was the Cruiserweight Champion, you could bank on it that he'd be wrestling, and winning, and that was fine by me. I will always be a fan of jobber matches as a way to establish wrestlers, and it pisses me off that they only exist in the WWE on their tertiary shows such as Velocity.
The fact that they let the champs (whom would be anyone at a given time) win matches cleanly is Reason #71 for why I miss WCW.