Unless you take any boxing match with Don King fighters and judges. Then the winner was predetermined.
I’m with you. Austin was the perfect antihero combination of good and bad: the face that acted like a heel. He went to my undergrad - I never met him, but a couple of my friends did.
I won’t argue that Shawn and Bret didn’t draw the same number of people as Hogan or Austin, but I based my picks on pure ability. I will say that they helped change wrestling from the “big man punch and kick” style of the 80’s to the mix of high flying and technical styles that were popular in the 90’s. The Rock and Austin led wrestling back into the 80’s style of wrestling, which pushed away a lot of fans like me. I found what I was looking for with RVD, Super Crazy, Tajiri, and people like that when HBK and Bret Hart were pretty much done.
The Undertaker is the only big guy that I ever though was entertaining. He could wrestle against any type of wrestler and still isn’t afraid to go to the top rope or take a hard bump. I’ve been a smark for almost 20 years and even I wasn’t sure if he really did knock himself out against HBK at Wrestlemania last year. 
don’t get me wrong, i grew to love the more riskier moves and technical wrestling compared to the boring leg drop and Hulk super power strength when he got repeatedly punched in the face. But I think my true love affair of wrestling really began with Hogan. That era of wrestling with lesser known names like Koko b ware, Junk Yard Dog, Elizabeth and Randy Savage, Piper, that was when I took to it as a true fan. The older I got the more avid a fan I became, learning more of the jargon etc… I appreciated it more but I never had that “first love” feeling with wrestling as i did with those early days as a kid. I’m seeing the past with rose-colored glasses. and i forgot to mention, I didn’t like the Mexican brand Luchadore wrestling too much. That high flying intensity seemed way too choreographed to me.
i love Shawn Michaels to death, and he deserves every accolade he’s ever received. He can have a great match with anyone and that’s no small feat. He busts his ass every time he’s out there and that deserves recognition. However, it’s my opinion that Shawn has never “re-invented” the business. Hogan, (as much as I hate his political ass), Flair, Austin, Thesz , George and others have re-defined what it meant to be a pro wrestler. That means something.
Michaels might be the greatest physical worker of all time but that doesn’t encapsulate everything it means to be a great pro wrestler. This is show business after all.
Austin is unparalleled on the mic, but that’s an opinion so I’ll let it be. He had many great matches after the Owen Hart incident with Bret, Rock, Triple H, Benoit, Angle, Jericho and others. He dragged a great match out of Savio Vega! A two bit talent that had no business in the ring with him, and it got him noticed. Prior to the “Ringmaster” he was one half of the Hollywood Blondes with Pillman and hung with the likes of Flair and Steamboat in the midcard in WCW. He was not a fluke, or lucky.
WWE has went “family friendly” recently and has downgraded their ratings to coincide with Linda McMahon’s senatorial run in Connecticut. No blood, and no risque material. (Just really bad wrestling…)
This thread is evolving, but if anyone has any general questions they want to ask I’d be happy to answer them. I was serious earlier about an “Ask the Pro Wrestling Fan” thread. If you want to ask them here I’d be delighted, otherwise I’d be glad to open another thread. Otherwise intelligent people really do enjoy the industry.
perhaps someone should make a poll on who the greatest pro-wrestler is.
My bet is all the non-fans of pro-wrestling will come out of the woodwork and make Hogan the winner.
I’ve heard pro wrestling described as “ballet for dudes”, and I think that’s by far the best description I’ve ever heard of it. Like ballet, pro wrestling uses genuine athletic ability to tell scripted stories - albeit usually of the “these two men hate and are trying to kill each other variety”, but the principle’s the same. There are fight scenes, or scenes meant to evoke combat, in ballet - one could describe those as “fake”, but that’d just be missing the point.
Probably so. Doesn’t mean they know anything about pro wrestling, as this thread has aptly demonstrated. 
(Hogan would deserve the spot, doesn’t mean I hate him any less. )
I agree that he earned everything that came to him, but I think he was forced to change his style dramatically after his match with Owen. While he would be busy spending 20 minutes of driving a monster truck to the ring and drinking beers over an unconscious Vince and Shane, I was longing for a 20 minute match with Bret, Owen, Shawn, Undertaker, or someone that would put on a show in the ring.
That was what pushed me to ECW. RVD and Sabu could be sloppy at times, but they weren’t scared to risk killing themselves. Mike Awesome and Masato Tanaka also had some brutal matches. I remember an Awesomebomb from inside the ring to the outside floor that looked like it would have totalled Tanaka. Tajiri and Super Crazy seemed to wrestle each other every week and I ate it up each time.
My favorite part of them choreographing each others death was that they didn’t talk. They would come out, do their job, and leave. If someone got on the mic in ECW, it was usually something to hear, not the same thing each Monday night. Austin has a pretty good shoot against WCW from his ECW days.
at its core i would agree to this then in the storyline era of pro wrestling it became the “soap opera for men”. I think nowadays it’s about feuds and long lasting storylines. Before, when i was a kid, it was pretty much a named guy fighting some no name jobber. You knew who won, you just watched it for the gimmick of the name whether it be a bad guy or a good guy. Like after Jake the Snake won, you wanna see Damian (a python) slither all over the unconscious jobber on the mat. Or perhaps George the Animal Steele destroying the turnbuckle and eating its contents. That shit was awesome.
Me. And tons of Southern wrestling fans. The WWF product of the 80s was very cartoonish, and not at all like the stuff we got with our local promotions, like Mid-South/UWF, GCW, WCCW, FCW, SECW, etc. The style was much stiffer, kayfabe was much tighter, the matches were longer and considerably more violent, and the focus was on the in-ring action rather than skits. Incidentally, Hogan used “Eye of the Tiger” as his entrance music before “Real American”.
I’ll concede that Hogan was a major contributer to McMahon’s effort to take his regional promotion, WWF, national–and killing the territories in the process. My “glory days” of wrestling fandom were from the mid-70s through the late 80s. It was all downhill after that, at least from an old school perspective.
In terms of the all-time biggest draw in wrestling, yeah, it’s Hogan, hands down. Austin’s era was hotter, but also much shorter. Hogan was a main eventer in major promotions for years. Worked on top in Verne’s AWA, WWF, and later in the abomination that WCW became before it died. If you ask any random person over 25 or so to name one pro wrestler, they’re probably going to say Hogan, especially if they aren’t wrestling fans. He had cross-over appeal and recognition after his appearance in Rocky III.
For the person that mentioned Austin–he was a much better in ring worker before he went to WWF. Check out some of the clips on Youtube from his time in WCW, or even SECW.
Which is accurate because the bumps and bruises aren’t as bad as they are played up to be (which is not to say they are non-existent) and the fighting isn’t actual fighting. Saying that they get serious bumps and bruises will never be answer to the accusation of fakery till they are as bad as they would be if they weren’t pretending.
And the Mankind/Mick Foley example appears again to discount this fakeness. They have a job that requires them to pound on each other over and over. If they didn’t pull the punches they wouldn’t last very long. People can’t use this as fact that it’s fake. They get injured and some wrestlers even fight through the injury and finish the match then get medical attention. And even with the “blading” example of the wrestlers cutting themselves for blood. That’s real blood, no fake blood, they may use fake shit in skits and what not but there are real elements in the industry to make the all emcompassing word of fake on the wrestling industry such bull.
If these great big guys actually pounded on one another’s heads week in week out for significant periods of time as they appear to do they would be much worse injured than they are. Their pounding is fake. That the guys sometimes do get injured doesn’t falsify this proposition.
But that doesn’t actually matter, because even if you were able to truthfully tell me that what they do produces greater injury than what they pretend it does, and that they were hitting harder than they appeared to, and suffered worse injury than they seem to, it would just mean that what they are doing is a different type of fake.
Fake means something which is not what it appears. That they may be doing something doesn’t mean it isn’t fake. It is only not fake if what they are doing is what it is represented to be.
What you are saying is like saying that because a stuntman actually risks his neck doing car stunts while filming the Dukes of Hazzard, the show is a documentary.
Been metioned upthread already but, as a wrestling fan, I’ll just say: the storylines are no doubt fake, but that doesn’t mean the whole thing is fake. Two guys who hate each other in the ring may be best friends when the cameras aren’t rolling (I remember Jerry Lawler insulting Stu Hart, Bret and Owen’s dad, on one WWF show when I was a kid. But, years later, when Owen passed away–RIP–Jerry gave a very touching speech about how much he loved the Hart family). However, the physical stunts performed during the matches are probably real. I once saw a tape of Mick Foley (another of my all-time favorites) wrestling in Japan. He dove off a ladder onto barbed wire and then rolled onto a bunch of thumbtacks spread around the ring. That must have hurt!
Others may dislike the term “sports entertainment,” but I think it’s probably the best description of pro-wrestling. Part of it is fictional entertainment, but an equal part is actually sports athleticism.
Bah. FCW should be CWF. FCW was a later promotion, and not nearly as good.
No, that is not at all what he is saying. The pounding is “real” in the sense that actual, painful contact is being made. Granted, it’s done in such a way as to avoid inflicting injury and look more painful than it actually is, but a wrestler’s “working punch” would still knock you on your ass if you took it.
Are you even aware of what you’re writing? They pull punches. They sometimes use fake blood. They used to blade themselves to get the blood flowing. But oh no, you can’t use that as evidence that it’s fake! You admit that the matches are predetermined, but that’s not fake either! Pretty much the only thing you seem to be defending is that fact that the performers take real risks and sometimes get injured (which usually happens when someone misses their spot) or if someone like Mick Foley really wants to try to push the envelope. But I knew it was fake when I would see someone drop an elbow from the top turnbuckle onto the throat of a prone opponent, then the opponent would still kick out. If ANY human being REALLY dropped an elbow onto the throat of someone else from that height, there would be no kicking out, no matter how strong or well-trained they are. Every piledriver is fake, except the ones that injure someone and that’s because someone screwed up. THEY DELIBERATELY FAKE THINGS TO CREATE AN ILLUSION. Yes, there is real risk and if they screw up they could be injured or even die. They’re performing high-risk stunts. But it’s NOT a legitimate sport, no one is “trying” to win, and ultimately it’s STILL a carny act.
Myself, I enjoy watching from time to time, I used to be a big fan of Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka, but I can’t for the life of me understand why any semi-intelligent fan would be offended by someone saying that wrestling is “fake.” It IS. Saying it’s fake is like saying the fighting in a Jackie Chan movie is fake. It IS. Jackie Chan took lots of risks in his movies and got hurt often, but everything was choreographed and practiced to create an illusion, and people usually only got hurt if someone screwed up the timing or spacing or something. It’s still fake. You suspend your disbelief and enjoy it, but it’s still fake.
It’s an accurate representation of his overall position. He thinks pro wrestling isn’t fake because there is some real pounding and risk. But overall, what pro wrestling presents itself as and what it actually is are not the same. It’s fake. The Dukes of Hazzard is a good analogy: the activities undertaken by the stuntment resemble and have some of the risks of what the characters appear to do. This does not make it a documentary. If it were to present itself as a documentary, it would be fake.
Similarly, the activities undertaken by the stunt guys in pro wrestling resemble and have some of the risks of what their “wrestling competition” characters appear to do. This doesn’t make it a real wrestling competition. Unlike the Dukes of Hazzard though, pro wrestling does present itself as real, so its fake.
Ugh, is that why it went TV-PG? I used to watch WWF back in the late attitude-era and every once in a while I’ll watch it now and it just pales in comparison. Boring everything pretty much describes it now. I can’t believe they even got rid of the hardcore title. Any chance of them returning to their TV-14 glory after the election?
Regarding the whole fake/real thing, to me, to consider something “fake”, it has to honestly present itself as real and expect the viewer to think it’s real as well. I simply don’t buy that most people who watch professional wrestling today (besides children) thinks the matches are real and the storylines are actual real-life occurrences. Sure, a lot of the wrestling audience may not be the most sophisticated bunch, but they’re not as dumb to believe it’s all real. It requires a suspension of disbelief, like any action movie or other TV show. But to call something fake that any person of reasonable intelligence knows isn’t “real” in the first place is just grasping as a way to insult the business.