About twelve years later it was cool again. With The Rock, Stone Cold, and the redubbed 'WWE sports entertainment', it was as if Vince McMahon finally woke up, and realized all those little Hulkamaniacs were now in their twenties, so he adjusted -- instead of Hulk Hogan's prayers and vitamins, there was Steve Austin's cooler of beer. I don't remember how I got back into it, but once I was I watched it loyally -- this is like 2000-01, and I was recording the shows on VHS, (pre-DVR), because I worked nights. As this was the beginning of the internet, I became something of a student of wrestling, I found the Wrestling Observer newsletter, and in particular when Meltzer would do ten thousand words on some forgotten wrestler's work in some extinct backwater territory, I'd reread it over and over, trying to catch up on the fragmented, fascinating history of pro wrestling from legit to fixed sport.
The WWE in 2001, while often described as a male soap opera, was more like live improvisational theater built over the framework of athletic competition. With the last competition of Vince McMahon's career, that being the Monday Night Wars against the Ted Turner-owned WCW, radicalizing the gimmicks and stories both companies tried; with the internet birthing the generation, (my generation), of smart marks, a growing percentage of wrestling fans clued in on how wrestling worked, how the winners and losers were decided, and thus changed how we judged the content the companies provided; with a new generation of performers learning to interact with smartened-up live audiences; all of these things made for a mutated product: the '98-'02 era of WWE RAW was the first meta-television show. As it informed on itself, it reached a peak of popularity.
And then one day I moved from one state to another, and like when I was a kid, I left the wrestling behind. The last big show I watched is of some interest, it was the main event of Summerslam 2002, a match for the Unified WWE World Championship, a match where I knew the ending prior to watching. It was simple really: The Rock was the champ, he had already been part-time for a year while filming movies, and it was known he was breaking from the WWE to pursue acting full time, this would, in effect, be his retirement match. His opponent was this young phenom with a rocket strapped to his back, (anyone betting on who was going to be the biggest wrestling star of the next decade would have bet on this wrestler over anyone). His name is Brock Lesnar. I knew Rock was gone, and Brock was the next guy, and paid money to watch a match I already knew the end to. Because it was about how Rock would lose to Lesnar. How the torch-passing story would be told. Dwayne Johnson lost clean, and, while Brock Lesnar would be a star no matter what, it helped to win the big belt by beating the big star without cheating, or any of the usual pro wrestling shenanigans. It was a nice goodbye. But this idea, that I knew the finish of the match, yet wanted to watch the story of the match out of curiosity of it's narrative quality, is the difference between the nine year old and the twenty-one year old. But without loving it as a nine year old, one can't see it this way, that wrestling fans judge the performers as actor-directors, the matches their stories. Once you understand this, you understand the aesthetic; the nine year old liked Hulk Hogan; the twenty-one year old looked back, and preferred Ric Flair.
And ten years later, both have come back to wrestling. Rock is a rare thing, because every old wrestler ends up coming back, and telling the fans it is because they "love the business", which means they've failed outside of wrestling, and are back for the old paycheck, (I'm looking at you, Hulkster), whereas the Rock really did come back out of love of the game, because he's from a family of wrestlers, and his window of ever doing it again was closing, (his acting career has never been hotter). Lesnar on the other hand, came back because he had to quit real combat fighting, and WWE gave him the Godfather offer. They both came back to feud with the biggest stars in the WWE, names like John Cena and CM Punk. And there is the distant possibility of a Rock/Brock rematch, over a decade later, probably at Wrestlemania. How do I know this? Because I was sitting in a motel last year, on a Monday night, and tuned in. Sure enough, I was pulled back in. In 2012 I might have watched ten shows, but I followed it a bit on the internet, and then I subscribed once again to the Wrestling Observer site, (while once I was mailed a newsletter every week, now its digital newsletters, and podcasts), and slowly, surely, here I am, in 2013, DVR'ing wrestling, following the dumb stories, taking stock of the new performers, buying in behind some of them as stars on the come-up. Maybe my off-generation habit of returning to wrestling will hit again this time, because despite the corny tasteless part of the WWE, there is a lot of fun stuff happening:
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This is Daniel Bryan. For a long time a darling of the wrestling smart-set, he is on the verge of becoming a top star, a true main eventer. He has done it partially by, as old-fashioned as it seems, being great at wrestling. When a guy wrestles the longest best match live every Monday night, fans notice the work rate, the effort; combine this with the fact that he looks like Ric Flair's nerdy son grew a Bruiser Brody beard, that he is a little guy, (for wrestling); a vegan yogi comic book fan who wrestles a Japanese-influenced style with kicks, submissions, and great reversal chain wrestling unique in the WWE, and you're looking at a wrestling hero for hipsters. And the WWE is smartly casting themselves as the old-fashioned company of bodybuilders who don't get him, thus casting Bryan, (and his fans), as the underdogs. The genuine excitement of the arena crowds when he comes out is hard to manufacture, and this popularity is in spite of how the WWE has handled him, so there is a legitimacy to the heat behind Daniel Bryan. He's earned it. He is main eventing the big show this month, Summerslam, against the biggest wrestling star in the world, John Cena, for the big belt. It feels like money. It feels like that thing that can only happen in wrestling, (being half-sport/half script): the paying audience are choosing their hero. Daniel Bryan makes them feel unashamed to buy in. 
The man on the right is old wrestler Dutch Mantel in his new gimmick as Tea Party radical/wrestling manager Zeb Colter. In a clever reversal of the old anti-foreigner 80's
WWF, Zeb is the bad white guy hating on the latino wrestlers and fanbase. But it gets better, the wrestler on the left, Colter's second client, (his first is Oklahoma white boy Jack Swagger, naturally), is Antonio Cesaro. Antonio Cesaro is from Switzerland. Beautiful. An isolationist right-wing bad guy manager who manages a foreign bad-guy wrestler. So Zeb Colter doesn't dislike all foreigners, just the non-white ones. But it gets better. I've seen this gimmick play before a Benetton of Brooklyn hipsters, as well a majority Mexican-American crowd in Laredo, Texas, and when Colter and his cronies put their hands over their hearts, and chant, "We The People!", instead of booing, these crowds, blue state/red state, blue collar/white collar, white skin/ brown skin, chanted along with him. They're in on the satire, and it's fun. It's like a meta-joke inside a riddle inside an ice cream sammich. A crowd of Mexican-Americans in Texas cheering along with a racist white Tea Party villain and his Swiss client, as those characters decry the browning of America. I find this heel gimmick a more artful satire of the political absurdities than either newschannel talking heads, or "elite" scripted dramas, have provided. Brown people don't watch Jon Stewart, or Aaron Sorkin dredge, they watch wrestling.
 A five tool prospect in baseball is a kid with speed, a strong arm, great glove, can bat for average, bat for power --- we're talking about Ken Griffey Jr. or Barry Bonds or Mickey Mantle. In wrestling, the five tools would be athleticism, ring psychology, mic skills, physique, and gimmick -- we're talking the Ric Flair, Randy Savage, Rock kind of prospects. While WWE are talent rich with up and comers right now, the kid above, to me, is the five tool guy. There is no ceiling. Yes, Mickey Mantle is a husky hillbilly in a rocking chair. And his name is Bray Wyatt. His athleticism is the kind that surprises when a three hundred pound guy displays it; this always gets over in wrestling. His ring psychology, telling a story in the ring, shows great potential. His mic skills are spectacular, already he's better than 90% of the roster. His physique is not WWE bodybuilder, but as an aspect of his character, it is good, and frankly, being a big rugged dude without a spray tan helps him stand out as new and different from the generic wrestler, he's kind of a throwback to the pre-steroid 1970's wrestlers. And finally gimmick. Often times, like with Rock and Steve Austin, the guy takes a while to find the money gimmick. Not so, Bray Wyatt. Wow, the gimmick. I've never seen the iconography of a wrestling gimmick get over so fast. Fans in the arenas are dressing like this guy, and he hasn't wrestled a match yet. The Wyatt character is a panhandle cult leader, with a family of scary hill people as followers, who seems to care not at all about the usual things wrestlers pretend to care about in storylines, like becoming champion, but more about, well.. it seems like he cares about his performance in the way Ledger's Joker did in The Dark Knight-- he's here to burn the whole thing down, expose the absurdity of the WWE to the other workers, and, maybe, convert a few. The character is like DeNiro in Cape Fear crossed with Charles Manson if Manson was a 6'3, 300 lb, long haired, long bearded, tattooed hillbilly in white pants, a Hawaiian shirt, a straw fedora, sitting in a rocking chair with a gas lamp while his troglodyte henchman beat down jobbers. It's nutty and awesome. His entrance is subdued and menacing, completely unlike the average turbo-charged wrestling entrance -- the entrance was over even as it happened the first time in real time. It was live TV, and anyone who was nine years old watching Jake the Snake once, saw what I did, a star being born. |
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