A friend of mine was a WWE referee and I told him I’d like to see a storyline where the refs got their revenge. He liked the idea and said he’d talk to someone but nothing ever came of it. This was at the time that Test was wrestling and part of his gimmick was deliberately roughing up the officials. My friend actually did get badly injured from being knocked out of the ring, so it’s not all total acting, but the refs role is really minor, they’re closer to being props than wrestlers.
Don’t they also play a role in managing the match? I thought they were the guys who told the wrestlers when to wrap it up sometimes.
But yeah, one day I want to see a ref just go off on a wrestler and beat the snot out of him. They booked Vince to beat the holy hell out of Midian once in a parking lot because Vince was defending his daughter. If old man Vince can take a wrestler by surprise and beat him down a ref should be able to.
The only thing close to that that I can remember is Johnny Boone and Evan Kurageous trading punches on a Nitro.
Tag team matches. I get insanely angry every time a ref gets to a 2-count and the outside-the-ring tag partner jumps in to break the hold RIGHT IN FRONT OF THE REF and there is no DQ. What is the purpose of a tag match if the tagged-in/tagged-out distinction is meaningless?
Really, the lack of any consistent rules in general is turning me off. It’s a scripted serialized TV show. Game Of Thrones has a set of internal rules that the show has to follow for disbelief to be suspended. Now wrestling is no GoT, let’s be real here, but the same internal consistency would really help WWE.
And don’t get me started on the dreadful announce team.
Occasionally they do, but mainly as the mouthpiece from management. You’ll see in the WWE that they now have earpieces and instead of hand signals from someone at ringside they’ll be hearing directly from someone backstage. By ‘role’ I meant as part of the storyline where usually any ref will do. However, now more than ever with the high impact style of wrestling part of their job is to check on the safety of wrestlers after a big hit, so their job is by no means minor.
This is another thing that bothers me - not only are the rules inconsistent, but there’s never any consequence when they’re broken. Look at the last PPV, where Miz blatantly and intentionally got himself DQed by using the belt as a weapon. He lost the match (which doesn’t seem to have any consequences either), but he gets to keep the championship and enjoy the benefits thereof. In a real sport, these kind of antics would get you fines, suspensions, or both (and you’d probably lose your license to compete), but in WWE one starts to wonder why heels ever lose their championships - if the match starts to turn against them, all they have to do is kick the babyface in the balls in full view of the ref, the match is over, and they get to keep the belt.
There was a “run-in” of sorts, once, and it made headlines.
As for “if the title changed because the ref didn’t see a boxer get hit with a crowbar,” watch the end of Million Dollar Baby - the champ hit Maggie between rounds and ended up paralyzing her, but since the referee didn’t see it, she (apparently, based on what Maggie’s mother told her) wasn’t DQed and was declared the winner.
My recent problem with WWE: on the air, nobody knows who’s in charge, but things happen anyway. Somebody is making the matches, but it’s either “the celebrity GM of the week” or “the return of the Raw Anonymous GM,” but nobody says how they got in charge of Raw in the first place.
The whole General Manager making matches thing is silly in the first place, since it implies that Raw regularly goes on the air without anyone having decided what the main event (or even the first match) is going to be. One imagines Hunter just pacing back and forth frantically in the Gorilla position, hoping two guys will go out on their own and cut promos on each other so he can book them to fight.
That depends on the promotion, and to some extent, the referee. In the territory days, it was common for the babyfaces and heels to dress on opposite sides of the building. The refs were used to relay instructions from one dressing room to the other.
In the ring, some refs were more involved than others. A guy like James Beard, with years of experience and sometimes being involved in management of the company in addition to his in ring duties, would sometimes call the match–ie, tell the wrestlers what to do and when to do it, especially when working with relatively inexperienced talent.
Others refs were sometimes wrestlers-in-training themselves, and were mostly expected to stay out of the way, and make the three count when appropriate.
When it comes to announcing, Heenan was the man. Heenan and Monsoon called matches very well and though I’d like to see matches called where the spots and moves are named correctly (seemed like just about every move was a either a missile dropkick or a guillotine legdrop when Schiavone was calling them), Heenan and Monsoon did a good job of getting into the psychology of the match and what the one wrestler is going to do to the other. They need to ease back on pushing WWE product and PPVs and concentrate on the matches a little more.
Or when they have a cage hanging above the ring and the cage match is made afterwards.
WCW would actually advertise a main event for Nitro a couple of days before and then have the match come about because of something that happened on Nitro.
Lack of consistent rules is a good point though. With WWE having TV writers now, and with shows in general being more internally consistent than they were in the 80s, WWE really should try harder.
Another thing I’d like to see more of is one main eventer squashing another. Not every main event has to be a back and forth, super close contest that lasts 20 minutes. If you really want to put someone over as a monster, book a match with all the hype of Tyson-Spinks with the same result. I imagine some fans would be pissed, but personally I’d rather see a 2 minute squash job that’s clean then a 20 minute match end in an indecisive way(the ref did a fast count! Find out what happens on Monday!).
It has been almost 2 decades since I’ve watched, but what annoyed me the most back in the day was that every tag team match followed the “face in peril” formula.
If you’re not familiar, it goes like this: Match starts, good guys (faces) kick the bad guys (heels) ass for a bit, then one of the faces makes a mistake. As he’s lying in/out of the ring doubled over in pain, the heel tags off. Both the heels proceed to beat the face in his sore spot and prevent him from tagging off. They raise heat by using illegal tags and other illegal manuevers when the refs back is turned. The match then centers around the face juuuuust missing desperate tags while the heels use all sorts of illegal moves, including choking and manager interference, to keep the face from tagging.
Finally the face manages to tag in to a huge cheer from the crowd while the heels are just stunned. OH MY GOD HE TAGGED IN?!?! NOW WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO?!?! Face beat down on both of the heels ensues, and then usually (but not always) the face in peril miraculously recovers and jumps in on the beatdown.
Once i noticed this, it became apparent that Every. Single. Tag-team. Match. followed this formula. It didn’t matter if both teams were experienced guys who only did tag matches or if it was a special match pitting mostly solo superstars together, I’ve never seen a tag match that didn’t do the face in peril. And I started watching during the early/mid 80’s, which I would argue is at least one of the highlights of tag team eras.
I watched it less and less, until we got to the Nitro era, where the ridiculousness just spiraled out of control. One of the last matches I remember involved Robocop, or at least a guy in a bulky, immobile Robocop costume. It was apparent that the guy could barely move, yet the heels fled in terror as if they were in mortal danger.
I felt the same way about Austin and his damned leg braces. Even after he retired and came back for visits, people would act terrified of him. Me, I’d be looking sideways at those knees and saying it’d be a shame if something happened to them.