The Freeky Files (8)_The Lost Art Of Professional Wrestling

[FreekyDeeky]

The Freeky Files (8)_The Lost Art Of Professional Wrestling

Hello lads and ladies and welcome to yet another edition of The Freeky Files. I’m up to number eight today and boy, has the month and a half I’ve been writing columns gone fast. This week’s Raw, with Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne, was another good broadcast and too see the heels finish the show still standing for once was a good thing. It also looks as if I may have been wrong a few columns ago when I said Kofi Kingston was destined to stay in the mid-card. He has been really impressive since Bragging Rights and if he gets a chance to captain a team against Orton at this year’s Survivor Series it could help catapult him to the Main Event; at the very least it will mean he is the top guy in the upper mid-card. Before I continue on with the main part of the column it’s time for Freeky’s Fact of the Day



Freeky’s Fact of the Day


The Undertaker has wrestled for thirty one minutes and twenty nine seconds over three PPVs since his return at the end of Summerslam.


Now this stat shows something is clearly not right with The Deadman and the WWE are currently trying to hide it with multi-man matches. The Fatal Four Way at Bragging Rights, whilst very good, should have gone on for longer than ten minutes and the less said about his two matches against CM Punk the better but I am willing to bet that the triple threat at Survivor Series will not last longer than thirteen minutes and it is because The Undertaker is physically not where he should be. The WWE need to realize this and take him off of TV for two months, so he can get himself into shape otherwise he could seriously injure himself as well as tarnish his legacy.



The Lost Art of Professional Wrestling


After Hulk Hogan signed for Total Nonstop Action he gave an interview where he said one of his motives for signing with the company; he wanted to teach a lot of the young guys the lost art of professional wrestling. Hulk said that nowadays feuds are over before they have even properly begun whereas in his day they would last six or seven months. When I read that I thought it was completely illogical and here is my argument as to why.


Back in the late eighties and early nineties the WWE (then WWF) would hold four Pay Per Views: Royal Rumble (in January), WrestleMania (at the beginning of April), SummerSlam (in August) and Survivor Series (in November). All of the important matches of that time were saved for these events and the build for the matches would stretch from one pay per view to another or in some cases even longer. Wrestlers, such as Hogan, would hardly ever wrestle on free Television so as to make the paying customer feel like they are getting something special for their money so the feuds would predominantly be verbally fought out or participants would be placed in tag team matches to make neither man look weak. In this era the WWF used feuds such as Hogan/Savage, Hogan/Warrior, Hogan/Andre, Hoga…well basically Hogan versus anybody to sell the PPV.


In the current era the WWE are entering a new phase where they are using a gimmick to sell a Pay Per View. So far we have seen Breaking Point (a submission event), Hell in a Cell and Bragging Rights (Brand Supremacy) and they have had mixed successes. The point of a gimmick match, previously, in the WWE has been to settle a feud or help it along towards an even bigger ending. With these themed events feuds such as CM Punk/Undertaker are now being rushed and not being appropriately prepared for the next event as they would have been had they not had the gimmick match forced upon them to early in the feud. The perfect example of this was in fact the Punk/Taker feud. After Bragging Rights, where Punk executed a screwjob to retain the World Heavyweight Championship, there were three weeks to build the momentum for Hell in a Cell but two of them were wasted in making the Undertaker’s Hell’s Gate submission hold legal only for him not to use the hold in the match at all.


However, the themed events are not entirely to blame for Hogan’s statement; for a long time both WWE and TNA have held too many PPVs (I will not go off topic and discuss how they can improve this but fourteen! DAMNNNN!) In the summer months the WWE generally has three weeks between an event, which means that if they are going to have a prolonged feud then they have to stretch it over four or five Pay Per Views. This then leads certain fans (mainly the IWC) to label these feuds as boring with the reasoning that we are just seeing the same match repeated over and over. While it would be great for WWE to go back to four or five PPVs a year the competition in the market from the likes of UFC and TNA means it is just not going to happen which has lead to WWE introducing gimmick events in order to keep the paying customer entertained. Also the premise of the big name wrestlers wrestling at the big events only died a long time ago. The Monday Night Wars between WCW and WWE meant that both had to give away Pay Per View quality matches for free on Nitro and Raw. Events such as In Your House were held in order to further feuds along so that when one of the big four came along a feud could have a blow off match.


The art of professional wrestling which Hulk said, prematurely, was lost has simply evolved as all things to do in order to survive. Hogan himself has played a part in this. Before he was the first true wrestling superstar we had the era of the territories where the only Pay Per View was Starrcade, but Vince McMahon (with the help of Hogan) changed that. What we see today with the current wrestling product that it is simply an evolved form of what we saw in the early nineties. Unfortunately too much basis is placed on the E in WWE but they still do their best to provide us with shows that are strictly wrestling based such as SmackDown and ECW. The same cannot be said for TNA who, during their two hour broadcast, have approximately thirty minutes of action and just seem to float their wrestlers from meaningless feud to meaningless feud. I cannot see how TNA will improve this though as they, at the minute, do not have the ratings to warrant a second show. They have to change their creative outlook if they ever want to compete with WWE and I don’t think Hogan is the man to do it for them.


In my opinion the art of professional wrestling is not based around the length of a feud, it rests not only on the shoulders on the men and women performing but on the people who book the matches as well. The creative team always needs to be coming up with ideas how to keep feuds fresh and exciting as well as building them up for the gimmick PPVs. An example of good booking was the Punk/Hardy feud where at first they played off of Punk using dishonest tactics to win, then they took Punk’s heel turn into overdrive by him bringing up Hardy’s past and saying he is better because he is sober. An example of bad booking was the Orton/Triple H feud which had all the signs of being epic until they made it all about the WWE Championship when it should have been about Triple H’s revenge on Orton. The two performers also play their part though with the way that they portray their characters; even if a feud is booked shoddily if the two wrestlers perform it can be made into a good feud, something which I don’t think Hogan can help TNA with. When was Hogan ever the best performer? If he wants TNA to go back to how things were when he was in his prime then TNA stand to lose a lot of money come Pay Per View time as they will need to lose a lot of their events.



Freeky’s Final Thought


The two main events of Survivor Series are now set and I find it strange how the dynamic of both are similar, with a tag team going against each other as well as the champion. I, for one, am glad of Chris Jericho’s involvement in the SmackDown triple threat, the last thing we need is a reincarnation of last year’s Big Show/Taker feud but I still think the Raw Triple Threat will throw up a heel turn from either The Game or HBK, we shall see. For now I have been FreekyDeeky and I’m telling you the art of professional wrestling is not lost.

[Super Chrisss]

First things first, don't bother saying "ladies and gentlemen" because I do believe there's probably one girl or woman (at most) who reads your columns - no offence, of course

The content was very straight-forward and flowed beautifully, but you should really work on centering your section's headers or adjusting their font. The Fact of the Day may be cool, but is it really as important as our main topic? I'd hope not, so changing the size/colour/font of your column's title will surely help it stand out.

Apart from a few errors here and there, this was a good read. Keep it up Freek.

[Uncle Joe]

Your facts of the day are awesome dude, thats a defo keeper.

Yes, there are too many pay per views, but an un well known fact is that a lot of wrestlers pay greatly depends on those bonuses they receive from making the PPV. It's a necessary evil I suppose.

Well done porn dude.

[FreekyDeeky]

Chrisss - cheers for the formatting advice, i agree having the side part of the columns heading as big as the main part does take away from the importance a bit, i'll look into it next time mate. Cheers for the feedback.

Joe - I was thinking about not bothering with them anymore but if it's liked then I suppose it stays. I'd never thought about bonuses when moaning about the amount of PPVs this gives the WWE further justification why they'd need so many I guess. Cheers for the feedback mate.

[Leonard]

Some really intriguing stuff here, and I'm surprised that more haven't stopped by to put in their two cents.

As for mine, I certainly long for the times where there were the "big four" plus King of the Ring, but you're very accurate in stating that what Hulk percieves as "the lost art" is actually just the business changing with the times. I've always said that there should be ten shows a year (the big four, plus two "brand exclusive" shows for each brand to provide a longer buffer for feuds--kind of a compromise between what Hogan's talking about and what's happening now), but that's just no longer fiscally responsible. At any rate, thought provoking all the way through. Good work.

As an aside, I hope they don't crap all over Kofi's push like they did with MVP. Just sayin'.

--Leonard

[FreekyDeeky]

Leonard - Cheers for the feedback bro, i wish we could back too the five a year format too but Joe makes a very good point about the wrestlers bonuses

[Freeman]

Hello Freekster, sorry I'm a bit late to your thread, but better late than never yar?

I tend to agree with Hogan with regards to longer feuds, but they shouldn't be used all the time. Back in the day, Sting and Hogan had an epic almost one year build up to their Starrcade match. I'd love to see something like that happen again. I also agree with your point on TNA; matches on Impact always suck. I know it's free TV, but they could at least give us a decent one every now and then to keep us watching.

This was pretty good though dude, and probably my favourite one of yours so far. You've got a good, no nonsense style that fits in quite well with everyone else around here. There are still a couple of long winded sentences here and there in need of breaking up, but I can see improvement on that front already, so I'm sure in time I'll have nothing more to criticise you on!