Bear with me for a bit.
R.D. Reynolds (not his real name, but never mind) has been running Wrestlecrap for many years. There was a down period when he couldn’t scrape up the money for the server anymore, but thankfully that’s long past. The site has become expansive and branched out in numerous ways, but its purpose is still the same, showcasing “the very worst in pro wrestling”. (Apparently he started doing it on a lark and was pleasantly surprised to find out he could actually make a living at it.) It’s covered everything from moronic gimmicks to bungled in-ring performances to ridiculous special effects, in every significant wrestling league going back to the AWA.
The usual format for an entry is two long columns divided into rows, each row with a picture in one block and text in the other. The odd-numbered rows have the picture on the left and the text on the right; this is reversed for the even-numbered rows.
Sometime last year, something curious happened. In the third row, he reused a picture from a previous entry, Man Mountan Rock shrugging while holding his guitar. He explained that whenever he makes a new entry, he copy-pastes the old one and simply deletes whatever’s in them. This time, for whatever reason, he decided to keep picture #3.
He kept that picture for the next entry. And the one after that. And the one after that. At this point I stopped visiting the site, thinking that something was seriously wrong. But I went back to see 2011’s the Gooker of the Year, and wouldn’t ya know it, Man Mountain Rock was STILL there! And from the text that accompanied it, it looked like R.D. was so…so enamored of this pic that he could never take it off.
Now, normally when I see something mired in an eternal running gag, my first thought is, what a hack, complete waste of time. But he’s not a hack; if anything, he’s one of the smartest website owners I know.
Then I thought…is he just tired of this? You can see it in his recent articles. He used to go at it with a sense of humor and wit, and now it looks like it’s a chore for him. Could the unchanging MMR pic simply be something he’s desperately clinging to, the “Yeah, I don’t know either, dude,” being the only thing he enjoys anymore?
It’s tough…I used to visit that site avidly, even bought his merchandise, too, but I have no desire to get wrapped up in someone else’s angst.