Over the past twenty years, wrestling has come and gone around a bend when it comes to the head injuries that occur.
In 1990, we were watching what I will call "classic" wrestling, for complete lack of a better term. The injuries were there, but going through a table was considered extremely violent. Time wore on, and WCW became a valid competitor, while ECW started providing a new, more (ugh) "extreme" product that hadn't yet been seen in this country outside of dusty bars with two dozen people in attendance.
Directly due to the competition now around, wrestling got Violent. As wrestling fans, we like to have our heartstrings tugged, and it's tougher to feel sorry for someone who got sucker punched from behind than it is to feel sorry for a face who got dropped through five tables on another network. Violence became the means of comparison between the three organizations; ECW with their emphasis on violence, and WWE/WCW as mainstream alternatives who utilized escalating violence in order to gain an edge on their competition (later using it just to keep up with the other.) Chair shots to the head. Blood galore; there was once a time when you saved blood for the big pay-per-views, but for a while it became an expected occurrence on Monday nights. Tables. Falls from increasingly tall ladders. This all happened so fast that the casual observer could easily miss how much pro wrestling changed in those short ten years from 1990-2000.
Fast forward five years later. WCW and ECW are dusty memories. The violence starts tapering down, because there's no more need for it; as a mechanism for differentiating yourself from your competition it was no longer necessary, and shows like '24' were providing better options on Monday nights for people who just wanted to see other people getting hurt. Ratings drop. (I don't correlate the ratings drop to the 'violence' drop, I relate that to the lack of competition and the lack of intriguing storylines. The two happened at the same time though, which is important in a way.) Most importantly, the first reports linking concussions to depression and suicide started to come out. They were brushed aside at first, and then there was the whole Chris Benoit unpleasantness.
It often takes tragedy to create change; paying in the blood of innocents for our oversights is part of the human condition, not exclusive to professional wrestling. We move forward to today. I cannot speak on the medical care WWE currently provides to their wrestlers when it's suspected they've taken a serious injury. (For instance; when Gail Kim knocked herself out on RAW, was she taken for a scan, did she have to make the decision on her own to get scanned, or did she have herself checked out at all? I don't know.) However, the WWE has made changes to try to prevent those head injuries where possible. Piledrivers have been banned for a while now (excluding Undi and the Tombstone, but the way he delivers it it's one of the safest moves you can take.) Chair shots to the head are gone. I haven't seen anyone perform a swan dive since Benoit, although I've seen wrestlers perform virtually every other one of his signature moves in on-the-nose style tributes. (How many times has HHH locked on a Crippler Crossface to be met with awkward silence by the announcers? A dozen?)
It's a dangerous profession. Certainly it's not one I can do, having an overwhelming desire to not want to walk around like Bret Hart when I'm in my 50's. But the unnecessary risks of injuries are being slowly peeled away.
If you've made it this far, I salute you. We're almost to the part where we discuss. With the rise of TNA, will we start seeing an increase in those 'risky' maneuvers? (Just for the sake of argument, assume TNA becomes a valid competitor to the WWE, which four months ago seemed certain, and now appears to be a sick joke.) Will TNA start utilizing an increasingly more violent product in order to differentiate themselves from the WWE? We're already seeing it to a degree with Ric Flair (he always loved the blading), with the thumbtack drops. Will this continue to escalate, and if it becomes successful, will the WWE feel they have to respond to violence with violence?
Second point for discussion; what makes a violent wrestling match? Violence is all relative; someone going through a table in 1990 would be shocking, someone going through a table in 2010 would be Monday night. Does wrestling need these violent moves in order to be able to appeal to a wider audience? Short form of the question; what is violence's place in professional wrestling?
As for my own answer, I don't know myself. I have trouble watching the big two these days, but I blame the lack of compelling storylines rather than the lack of shocking violence. Shock will always be at the center of any good story writer, but in the absence of good story writing, shock is irrelevant. But on the same hand, I confess I like watching someone get pasted with a chair. There's a large part of me that winces when I see someone take a hard shot to the head with a chair, and if you think that's something easily faked, go grab a buddy and a folding chair and tell him to almost hit you with it until you get a good, solid "whack" sound out of the chair. There is no magic trick to it; if you want a chair shot to look solid, you hit someone with a solid chair shot. But there's another part of me that loves that stuff. Who didn't mark out when Mankind went through the top of the cage at Hell in the Cell? I thought for sure he was dead or permanently broken, but I kept right on watching.
What are your opinions on the necessity and degree of violence in professional wrestling?
In 1990, we were watching what I will call "classic" wrestling, for complete lack of a better term. The injuries were there, but going through a table was considered extremely violent. Time wore on, and WCW became a valid competitor, while ECW started providing a new, more (ugh) "extreme" product that hadn't yet been seen in this country outside of dusty bars with two dozen people in attendance.
Directly due to the competition now around, wrestling got Violent. As wrestling fans, we like to have our heartstrings tugged, and it's tougher to feel sorry for someone who got sucker punched from behind than it is to feel sorry for a face who got dropped through five tables on another network. Violence became the means of comparison between the three organizations; ECW with their emphasis on violence, and WWE/WCW as mainstream alternatives who utilized escalating violence in order to gain an edge on their competition (later using it just to keep up with the other.) Chair shots to the head. Blood galore; there was once a time when you saved blood for the big pay-per-views, but for a while it became an expected occurrence on Monday nights. Tables. Falls from increasingly tall ladders. This all happened so fast that the casual observer could easily miss how much pro wrestling changed in those short ten years from 1990-2000.
Fast forward five years later. WCW and ECW are dusty memories. The violence starts tapering down, because there's no more need for it; as a mechanism for differentiating yourself from your competition it was no longer necessary, and shows like '24' were providing better options on Monday nights for people who just wanted to see other people getting hurt. Ratings drop. (I don't correlate the ratings drop to the 'violence' drop, I relate that to the lack of competition and the lack of intriguing storylines. The two happened at the same time though, which is important in a way.) Most importantly, the first reports linking concussions to depression and suicide started to come out. They were brushed aside at first, and then there was the whole Chris Benoit unpleasantness.
It often takes tragedy to create change; paying in the blood of innocents for our oversights is part of the human condition, not exclusive to professional wrestling. We move forward to today. I cannot speak on the medical care WWE currently provides to their wrestlers when it's suspected they've taken a serious injury. (For instance; when Gail Kim knocked herself out on RAW, was she taken for a scan, did she have to make the decision on her own to get scanned, or did she have herself checked out at all? I don't know.) However, the WWE has made changes to try to prevent those head injuries where possible. Piledrivers have been banned for a while now (excluding Undi and the Tombstone, but the way he delivers it it's one of the safest moves you can take.) Chair shots to the head are gone. I haven't seen anyone perform a swan dive since Benoit, although I've seen wrestlers perform virtually every other one of his signature moves in on-the-nose style tributes. (How many times has HHH locked on a Crippler Crossface to be met with awkward silence by the announcers? A dozen?)
It's a dangerous profession. Certainly it's not one I can do, having an overwhelming desire to not want to walk around like Bret Hart when I'm in my 50's. But the unnecessary risks of injuries are being slowly peeled away.
If you've made it this far, I salute you. We're almost to the part where we discuss. With the rise of TNA, will we start seeing an increase in those 'risky' maneuvers? (Just for the sake of argument, assume TNA becomes a valid competitor to the WWE, which four months ago seemed certain, and now appears to be a sick joke.) Will TNA start utilizing an increasingly more violent product in order to differentiate themselves from the WWE? We're already seeing it to a degree with Ric Flair (he always loved the blading), with the thumbtack drops. Will this continue to escalate, and if it becomes successful, will the WWE feel they have to respond to violence with violence?
Second point for discussion; what makes a violent wrestling match? Violence is all relative; someone going through a table in 1990 would be shocking, someone going through a table in 2010 would be Monday night. Does wrestling need these violent moves in order to be able to appeal to a wider audience? Short form of the question; what is violence's place in professional wrestling?
As for my own answer, I don't know myself. I have trouble watching the big two these days, but I blame the lack of compelling storylines rather than the lack of shocking violence. Shock will always be at the center of any good story writer, but in the absence of good story writing, shock is irrelevant. But on the same hand, I confess I like watching someone get pasted with a chair. There's a large part of me that winces when I see someone take a hard shot to the head with a chair, and if you think that's something easily faked, go grab a buddy and a folding chair and tell him to almost hit you with it until you get a good, solid "whack" sound out of the chair. There is no magic trick to it; if you want a chair shot to look solid, you hit someone with a solid chair shot. But there's another part of me that loves that stuff. Who didn't mark out when Mankind went through the top of the cage at Hell in the Cell? I thought for sure he was dead or permanently broken, but I kept right on watching.
What are your opinions on the necessity and degree of violence in professional wrestling?