Loss

I'm not quite sure what I want to say about this topic, but I think it's interesting and wanted to at least start the discussion. Message boards already seem a bit archaic, but obviously the posters at our board have been aging for a while now. Now we're also seeing that in wrestling at large. I thought this could be a catch-all thread for people to discuss why they think this is happening, thoughts on what to do about it, and also over time just post more examples of this trend taking hold in different forms. Wrestling doesn't seem to have much appeal to teens and people in their early 20s at the moment and there are a lot of reasons for that, most likely. Not even thinking about wrestling as a whole, but just this subgenre of hardcore fandom, I do sometimes wish we had more "young" voices involved that were discovering a lot of things the rest of us grew up on the first time, but those voices seem hard to find. Anyway, have at it.

It sounds like Flair and Arn would rather not talk about the specifics of their drifting apart publicly, and I won't hold that against them. They are entitled to that type of privacy if they want it.

Yes, I think it's a legal term he started using in the WON so he wouldn't be sued for saying someone showed up drunk or high.

As someone who never paid much attention to the watchalongs, I wanted to ask: Do you think these sessions create groupthink? I could see everyone deciding collectively where they land on stuff when they watch together. I'm not saying that happens, just asking if it does.

That's awesome!

Selfishly, I want to know if Tony Khan knows who I am. I am just curious.

I'm proposing a rule that we ban the phrase "Great Match Theory", a label that until El P did it above no one ever used to describe their own approach to watching wrestling to my knowledge. Continuing to say it 8 years after the thread that prompted the phrase also feels like a cheapshot. Can we move on from bashing it?

I'm all for defining criteria out of the gate. I also think it's important to add that objective/subjective debates are a waste of time. If someone states an opinion, saying, "Yes, but that's your opinion" adds nothing. Everyone understands that opinions aren't facts. No reason to point it out.

So do people buy into the narrative that Misawa spent the last 10-15 years of his career desperately wanting to pass the torch, only to reluctantly have to be the top guy again over and over because attempts to replace him never worked? Or do people think that narrative is a little too clean to be entirely true?

The General Jim Cornette stuff at the end was pretty bad. I think he put himself over too much too. He didn't need to manage Al Snow and Unabomb when Snow was developing really well as a talker himself.

Not sure I get his value to AEW. More than anything, it seems to go against their image of being different than WWE. We'll see how it goes, but it doesn't make much sense to me at first.

I always cracked up at his stories about people coming up to him in airports and only wanting to talk about Eddy Guerrero or Alex Wright or whoever. That must have been a real drag because he always vented about it on commentary.

My big issue with Bobby Heenan has always been that I've never seen a promo from him that really hyped me to see a match. I say that while also realizing that he was immensely talented of course. I love his bumping and he's as quick witted as anyone. I'm open to the idea that his AWA work reveals someone who was better at doing serious promos than I have seen, but his really special talent seemed to be adding to matches as a ringside second.

Abdullah the Butcher video set to D-Train???

Click through for the rest of this surefire plan.

I am looking forward to the Heyman version when I get to it because anything is better than this.

The even bigger change of the 80s was the emphasis on physique. Tommy Rich was probably the most popular babyface in America in 1981. By 1984, at the ripe age of 28, he was past his peak.

The "wrestling isn't as good as it used to be" stuff took hold in a big way in 1984-1985 when Vince was changing wrestling, and again in 1989-1990 when the territories were dead and those changes had become entrenched. There was an audience for that in 1993, especially with wrestling in such a dark age everywhere at that point. Anyway, Cornette missed the first wave since he was in companies that were still cranking out great stuff, but was part of the second wave. I became a fan in the mid-80s and REALLY became a fan in the late 80s, so I don't view those time periods that way, although when I watch the stuff that preceded it now, I get why longtime fans were disillusioned with some of the changes. Something gets lost each time there's major change, even if those changes are often for the better on the whole.

OVW TV is really bad, and when I watch it now, it surprises me that anyone ever liked it. It doesn't evoke the old school things that it claims to and I can't recall a single clean finish on TV. Like, seriously, not even one time. Cornette also creates faux enthusiasm by SCREAMING constantly as an announcer in a way that is grating, and by being a half-second ahead of what's actually happening when he's calling it, perhaps because he booked it and is too aware of what's coming next. Anyway, OVW was horrible. Not long ago, I watched them show clips of a Louisville Gardens show on TV where 120 people were in the crowd. When they didn't have the major WWF stars of the time coming in to pop a house, it was as cold as wrestling gets.

If there was yelling (I don't remember this), it wasn't because someone didn't understand a Kinks reference, it was likely because someone who knew they shouldn't be talking too openly here about what exactly that forum is was doing so anyway, despite knowing better. "DM a mod" = "We're not going to answer that question in a public forum because the content there is sensitive", not "How dare you not know Kinks album titles". Use common sense means if you know what's in that folder, you should understand why we don't discuss it out in the open.

Hogan himself could be a strong draw in cities over a long period of time, but his programs usually didn't have much staying power. That's what Bruno was getting at. They couldn't really run rematches with him as much as they could Bruno. I'd have to look into it, but it would be news to me that Hogan couldn't remain a draw in a market for a long time. It's less that than it is that his feuds ran out of steam quickly.

Wrestling can probably be way more popular than it is, but the answers don't lie in going back to the way things used to be, even if looking for what successful periods have had in common can be valuable as a resource in mapping a way forward. The common denominators have usually been either going with brand new stars or repackaging existing stars in a very fresh way that people haven't seen, and those people seeming like they are a relevant part of the larger popular culture of the time period. That has meant different things at different times. What usually doesn't work in wrestling is an attempt to "recapture" something.