Talking to Myself: State of Professional Wrestling (part 1)

Written for The Wrestling Game

   Hello people of TWG™ and whoever stumbled upon this article! I am Ninoslav Maricic and I will be your host for this episode of "Talking to Myself: State of Professional Wrestling". In this article and those that will follow, I will share with you my views and thoughts about this sport and people who compete in it or work behind the scenes. Before I start, let me assure you that all of the typos, misspellings and grammatical mistakes are intentional and have nothing to do with he fact that English is not my native language (wink-wink, nudge-nudge, say no more).

  I would like to start with a little bit of history (yes, this will be yet another article about the "Attitude Era" and "Monday Night Wars") just to give you my thoughts on why wrestling has become how it is today, so sit back, relax and try not to fall asleep.

  As you know, in mid 90's WCW started a program called "Monday Nitro" in order to give WWF (later renamed to WWE) some serious competition. WCW was struggling for a bit until Eric Bischoff (or so they say) came up with the idea of creating a fraction that will try to "take over" WCW. WCW recruited Razor Ramon (renamed to Scott Hall) from WWF and had him interrupt WCW program. He was later joined by Diesel (renamed to Kevin Nash) who was also recruited from WWF and Hulk Hogan to form NWO. Many other WWF and WCW talent followed them and NWO became a seemingly unstoppable force.

  The ratings shifted in favor of WCW and WWF eventually ended up being a number two wrestling organization for over 80 consecutive weeks (that's over a year and a half). Organization number three was ECW. ECW will only get a mention here since they were never a real competition to WCW and WWF even though ECW was able to make a big impact in pro wrestling and had a major role in shaping this sport into what it is today. The reason that they never made it to the top might be timing, luck or the fact that WCW and WWF had more money to toss around and they kept "stealing" ECW's top talent.

  "Monday Night Wars" changed wrestling in more ways then one. Wrestling was more famous then ever before and all the struggling for ratings and all of the new ideas and attempts to "invent" something new, different, never seen before had a strange side effect. Up until then, things were simple. You would give people a good guy and a bad guy. They would cheer the good guy and they would boo the bad guy. Simple, right?

  Well, with the appearance of NWO in WCW and people like "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, Dwayne "Rocky 'The Rock' Maivia" Johnson and Degeneration X in WWF, being the bad guy became fun. Bad guys were more entertaining then good guys and people started cheering the bad guys. Writers, promoters and bookers found it hard to adept to the situation and wrestling was becoming a mess. Best laid plans were backfiring and nobody new what they were doing any more. I know some people will disagree with me here, but they still have no idea what they are doing.

  Anyway, a few bad decisions from WCW later, the balance of power shifted back to WWF and WCW was struggling in vain to get it back. ECW lost their top talent and closed and eventually WWF bought WCW. With "Monday Night Wars" being over, Vince McMahon could breathe more easily and shape wrestling in any way he wanted. Unfortunately, he decided to turn it into a beauty contest.

  With all real competition gone, it seams WWF/WWE stopped trying to give people a quality program. It could be that they have nothing to compare it with. WCW kept making them push harder and since they are gone, there is no one to steal their fans. TNA is trying, but all they do is trying to copy WWE.People that stop watching WWE don't want to watch a bad copy of it, so they just stop watching wrestling, i guess.

   Linda McMahon decided to run for senate which brought the "PG Era" to WWE. One good thing that came from that is that wrestling became safer for wrestlers. Bad thing is: wrestling lost more fans. In the attempt to bring more fans to wrestling, WWE started recycling storylines. Naturally, TNA is doing the same.

  Old storylines that worked once no longer work. The fact that they still persist in using them over and over and over and over again makes me think that there is a few people pulling all the strings in pro wrestling. People who got their status by selling people a few good ideas and now they have no idea what to do next. Their new ideas are crap, their old ideas don't work and they are just running in circles now. Too bad there isn't a game on the internet (lets call it "The Wrestling Game") with a bunch of people playing it who have a whole bunch of great ideas running inside their heads. If WWE or TNA would hire some of them, maybe they could help wrestling become more popular.

  Well, that's all I have for this time. I will talk about current WWE talent in part two of "State of Professional Wrestling" and I'll try to explain more about what I meant by Vince McMahon turning WWE into a beauty contest. This is your host, Ninoslav Maricic, and you were reading part one of "Talking to Myself: State of Professional Wrestling". I'll be back with more next week (I hope).