New wrestling VS Old school wrestling

[Psykohurricane55]

I've been watching wrestling for the past 30 years now and it's weird but fr the last 6 years, i've been less and less into watching wrestling. I still watch WWE because it's pretty became second nature to watch wwe and i also watch TNA because even with all the crap that it produces every week, it'S still the closest thing to what i use to love about wrestling.

I use to love watching wrestling every week and hearing the fans cheering for the good guy and booing for the bad guys, i love how you could just watch the show and believe that these guys we're like what the showed on tv in real life. I love watching a match we're every move told a story and the wrestlers would let it breathe and let you absord what you we're watching. i miss the keyfabe era of wrestling.

Now i tried to watch other wrestling company like ROH, New Japan an lucha underground, but i'm not able to get into this at all. For ROH my main problem is the fans in general, these guys have a great matches but the crowd takes me out of it instantly. i watch a guy like Jay Lethal, one of the greatest heel of this era, he'S doing everything a heel should do but the fans cheer him because they like what he doing in the ring. It the same thing in WWE on bigger scale now, somebody like Kevin owens would have made a great heel in the 80's. The guy works like a heel, acts like a heel and talks like a heel and then on when the camera are off, he's to greatest guy ever so no wonder nobody boos him.

Also the fact that this new crop of wrestlers thinks they have to do big spot after big spot to have a great match. I look at a match like the controversal match between ricochet and will ospray. These guys are great cruiserweight talent and they put on a great match from what i heard, but i for one couldn't stand watching more then 5 minutes of it because they'Re wasn'T any psychology behind what they we're doing, it was just a spotfest for being a spot fest and that's not my type of wrestling. That's why i'm not a fan of the young bucks either for the same reason.

The weird thing is that i love to listen to the jim cornette experience podcast mostly because i kinda agree with a lot of what he's saying. A lot of the indy wrestlers seems to be to concern about what move or what spot they're going to do and not enough on telling a story.

In the end, i'm just wondering if anybody that's being watching wrestling during the time that keyfabe was still existing are like me and have trouble watching the new version of wrestling like ROH, lucha underground or i'm just in the minority here.

 

[rmp0012002]

ROH is a little closer to what I grew up on during the Kayfabe era but WWE and TNA are unwatchable for me. I grew up on the unpolished studio shows of CWF and Mid-Atlantic and they got more in in that one hour and leave you wanting more. I can't sit through three hours of monologues and soap opera drama.

 

[Psykohurricane55]

I just watch the last episode of impact wrestling and I saw something that I haven't seen in a long time, heels actually being heels and fans actually hating them. I loved how mike benett cheated to win the x division champion, it's been a while since have seen a heel cheat to win a match.

You see, I grew up on wwf, nwa/wcw and awa wrestling so over the top characters and in ring promos where something that happen a lot for me. I really like tna because the crowd isn't a smart crowd like most of the others product, so the react the right way for babyface and heels. I also like nxt for the way the show is structured with one big match every week and the rest bing squash match, it takes me back to when I watch wwf superstars on saturday mornings. I miss this type of shows and fans reactions.

 

[Makaveli31]

1) The larger than life characters. Andre the Giant. King Kong Bundy. Big John Studd. Even guys like Hulk Hogan, Ultimate Warrior, Diesel, Mabel the list goes on and on. I watch WWE TNA ROH Smackdown. The guys just look like regular guys that you would see at your local gym. I mean Roman Reigns, Seth Rollins, Dean Ambrose. They look like big guys but nothing "larger than life" stands out about them.

Guys like Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels are probably 50 pounds less than those guys but the way they carried themselves were larger than life. When their music hit, when they walked to ring, they had aura around them that you knew something big was about to happen. They ring work, charisma, character development. It was all them. They steered the boat. Nowadays it seems manufactured. Everybody plays a role like part of a bigger movie script.

2) I also miss shows like Superstars of Wrestling or All American Wrestling. Those shows gave us a chance to invest in a character. We saw vignettes of Razor Ramon MONTHS before the debuted. I think the taped promos they did for those shows also enhanced the performers skills on the mic. It gave us a chance to listen to them and only them as opposed to a back and forth in the ring. The squash matches helped us focus on a character. He learned his mannerisms in the ring. His moves. It gave us a chance to really invest in a character without the distraction of another main character being in the ring at the same time. After a few squash matches then he move on to the main card.

 

[jpickens]

And let's not forget the interviews,promos, etc where except for the pre attitude era WWF wrestlers would often say and do things that they would get crucified if they done and said (for example Ernie Ladd saying that he was going to slap the black off of the Junkyard Dog or a heel trying to hang a face) the the stuff they did today in other words guys like Jonathan Boyd, Robert Fuller, The Sheik, Abdullah the Butcher, and David Schultz would have a hard time finding work in today's environment.

 

[Stonz]

I love Stone Cold, probably one of my favorite all-time characters in wrestling, but he killed it for all the guys nowadays. NO ONE so far has even touched what he did. He wasn't a super-big guy, but he talked and could work the match! These guys nowadays don't TALK like he did - the only one since him that could work the mic was The Rock (and was still around the same time as he was era-wise).

We would all be lucky to see another Rock or Stone Cold-like character in our lifetime. I hope we do, but it isn't likely. If we did, it would make wrestling fun again. The closest thing I can see is a Jay Lethal or a Jay Briscoe....

 

[agentmichaelscarn]

I personally love old school wrestling. I love the story telling involved with it, there aren't high impact moves but every move meant something. The psychology was top notch. But unless you're a die hard wrestling fan you are going to get bored to death with that nowadays.

Nowadays our attention spans need non stop action, that's why Major League Baseball used to be the biggest sport in the U.S. now it's number 2 or 3 because of the lack of action. That's why you don't see selling in matches any more, or if you do it's few and far between.

I also agree with the fact that today's guys just look like ordinary people. I'm not a big guy, I'm about 6' 220lbs but I'm just as big or bigger than many of the top guys in WWE now and I don't like that. You want your heroes to be larger than life, it would be like if every basketball player or football player was the same size as me, I wouldn't like it.

 

[SharpShootingCrossface]

I've been watching wrestling since i was 5 years old, now I'm 32, as old as Wrestlemania. It ebbs and flows, lucha underground is sick, wwf is currently doing excellent, dunno what you're moaning about dude!!

 

[Jack-Hammer]

For me, it's all about perception.

Regardless of what anyone says, I find it all but impossible to believe that becoming a smart fan via the internet, dirt sheets, forums, etc. has little to no influence on how you view pro wrestling. If the internet, wrestling websites, social media, etc. all existed circa 1986, I have very little doubt that wrestling fans from teenagers straight up through adults well into their 30s, 40s or even older would often have the exact same gripes that I commonly read about on a regular basis.

When I was 6 years old, I looked at wrestling through the eyes of a 6 year old and thought it was real, that these guys were almost like living, breathing superheroes & villains come to life fighting against each other. As a result, I didn't care about storytelling, whether or not the booking "made sense", whether the heels were being heel enough, what their ring gear looked like, what their entrance music was, what the set for the TV show looked like, etc. Even today, I don't care about some of that stuff, like ring gear and entrance themes. When I was a teenager during the Attitude Era, I mostly cared about seeing what sort of shenanigans WCW and WWE could muster each Monday night; in hindsight, when I look back on some of what I was watching during the Attitude Era and when I was a kid, and when I take nostalgia out of the picture, some of it was just pure, 100% garbage every bit as bad, in some cases even worse, than the worst of the stuff we complain about today.

The mystique of wrestling is gone and there's nothing that can be done to bring it back; the curtain has been pulled back and we've all seen what's behind it thanks to any and all things related to the internet. In some ways, I liked wrestling better as a kid because I was a kid and simply didn't know any better. In some ways, I like wrestling better now because it's more action packed and many of the fundamentals are still there; many of us just don't think they are because they don't do it exactly the way we remember them doing it when we were snot nosed brats.

Like anyone else, I have personal preferences for what I'd like to see happen, who I'd like to see pushed, how I'd like to see a match booked and a storyline progressed. The problem, however, is that can sometimes be a slippery slope that many fans, and wrestling journalists, find themselves sucked into and have for a long while; they're more interested in being bookers themselves, feeling that they somehow know what the best ideas are and criticizing whenever those ideas aren't realized by the various creative teams of wrestling promotions.