The State of Professional Wrestling

It's been at least a year now or more since I decided to start watching Pro Wrestling again. Which these days pretty much means WWF(E) since I don't get TNA and haven't seen anything of ROH.

So after a years worth of Raw and Smackdown and WWE Vintage Collection. I would have to say, I wish that they would give 'Mean' Gene Okerlund a 3 hour show every week. The old vintage matches from the 80s and 90s are so much better than what we get from week and week out.

Now, I just recently went to a live house show of Smackdown back in the spring, and it was a great show. But when I watch the shows and the PPVs week in and month out. They are supposed to be part of a bigger picture.

These pictures are just mostly boring but serviceable. Now, I grew up with this stuff. I used to go to the Atlantic Grand Prix wrestling live shows when I was a small kid every time they passed through town. I watched it on TV religiously.

The thing that seems to strike me these days is that the WWE has re branded Pro Wrestling as Sports Entertainment. But they seem to have all but forgotten the SPORTS aspect of it.

When I watch the Vintage Collection stuff, that is the part that strikes me. We all know that it's always been about entertainment. It's a soap opera for males. But it was a SPORTS oriented soap. The ref wasn't just there to be part of the show. He was there to make sure that the matches were fair and followed the rules. Y'know the rules, the part that made it appear to be a real sporting contest and not the mostly scripted and choreographed show that it was, and still is.

This comes home a lot more with the vintage stuff because you get to see much of the shtick that they don't even bother with anymore. And now the ref just seems to hang around the ring, until one person or the other is done showboating some rediculous series of moves ( Cena and MVP come to mind, although I can see that harken back to the Rocks Peoples Elbow) and he's needed to make a three count and that's it.

Maybe it's just nostalgia since everything you grew up with is better than what's around now. Or maybe it's just like everything else, they just don't make things like they used to.

I will say one thing, I hope that TNA does well, and I get to see some of it on TV soon. WWE needs some competition. Some of the best years I remember watching was during the Monday Night Wars with Raw Vs Nitro. And that's been over for a very long time now.