A little over a month ago, I wrote a piece on International Object about wrestling commentary. I argued that in its current state it served almost no purpose (in fact, I called it harmful), and that one may very well enjoy the show more without it. As a general rule, I’m a theoretical journalist: I observe, posit new ideas, and let people think about them. And while there were quite a few people who did just that, I’m not sure anybody turned the volume down to watch wrestling because of the article. But I did.

Since I wrote the article, I’ve only listened to the audio on a wrestling show once: The Royal Rumble, as I watched that with a group. Every other show I’ve watched has been served in silence.¹ I’d like to take this time to go over a few interesting realizations during this experiment.

1) I miss the crowd.

There’s just no way around this: crowd noise is seductive. It’s instantly understandable why a wrestler’s job is to create as much of it as possible. Without crowd noise, it would be very difficult to tell how the pace of a match is going with the selected audience. It’s also seductive to other audience members—I found myself yearning for the crowd noise at times, wondering what the collective found good or bad about a match. Even though I find myself to be a quiet fan most of the time, there’s something very assuring about knowing the reactions of 20,000 people.

But because it simply wasn’t there, I had to look at match quality from different angles. I had no commentary to tell me if a move had been done very well or poorly (or, as what happened on Raw this week, the schizophrenic feeling when a move is done incorrectly but the announcers call it like normal), and no audience reaction to guide me. I was on my own completely to judge the quality of the matches I saw.

Because of this, I found the largest change was that I actually had to pay attention. You can’t half-watch video with no sound. There are no cues to tell you when to glue both eyes. I couldn’t surf or tweet or fold laundry at the same time—I had to just watch. This confirmed a theory I had in the original article:

Over time (during the 20th century, before everyone had more than 5 channels at home), radio broadcasts of sports events, audio plays, and the like became quite popular, and in many circles still are. There are still people out there who prefer their entertainment to be audio-only. Perhaps its just habit, but I like to think it’s because an audio broadcast sparks imagination in a similar way that reading does: by providing only part of a thing, your brain has to paint in the rest.

By eliminating the audio, I had to imagine the crowd noise and imagine the commentary. And, just to spoil my next point, my imagined commentary was always better than the reality. I can confirm the opposite of this, as well. To test this theory, I went back and listened to some Gordon Solie, Gorilla Monsoon, and Bobby Heenan commentary. Based only on their words, I was able to paint a pretty great picture of an imagined match.

2) I do not miss Michael Cole, Jerry Lawler, Booker T, Josh Matthews, or any wrestler’s voice.

So, I figured I’d enjoy a respite from Michael Cole. But what I didn’t exactly expect was that I wouldn’t really miss any announcing voice. What were they going to tell me that I didn’t already know? I know which moves are which (not that they really call moves that often anyway). I know what’s coming when Randy starts pounding the mat. I know that an injustice has been done when Daniel Bryan steals another victory on Smackdown. I don’t need their help or explanations or hand-holding. The wrestlers are performing in front of 20,000 people who can’t hear the audience, and they have to communicate what they’re doing to the back row. Surely, the zoomed-in camera is picking up their intentions.

Without them, I also didn’t feel any shame in watching wrestling. Michael Cole especially makes the audience feel like they should feel guilty about this guilty pleasure. Nobody feels good about this. Without him, without any of them, I could watch wrestling in peace. I could think about it without being reminded what’s happening later in the main event. It was really nice.

Another thing I didn’t expect was that I wouldn’t really miss the promos. As I just explained, the wrestlers are playing to the back of the room even when they’re talking, so I could figure out what was going on. If Jericho coming back and not saying a word was genius, no wrestlers ever talking would be a revolution.

3) Language is not essential for a great performance.

Watching wrestling with no sound heightens the art of it by an order of magnitude. Without commentary, I have absolutely no choice but to pay attention to the individual wrestling moves, stack them up in my head, and figure out the rhythm and build.

If you haven’t seen The Artist yet, please go do that. It’s a wildly good move that is entirely without audible language. One of the points the movie makes is that silent actors have to ham it up in order to communicate their feelings. This supports wrestling as a visual artform, says Roland Barthes:

“Each sign in wrestling is therefore endowed with an absolute clarity, since one must always understand everything on the spot. As soon as the adversaries are in the ring, the public is overwhelmed with the obviousness of the roles.”

The movie suggests that films with sound would so easily trounce silent films because actors could be more realistic with their emotions. But wrestlers have microphones and announcers and they’re still overacting. The Artist flips this throughout, showing both the up and downsides to audio. It highlights a lovely point: there is room for all kinds. It’s a point you can see almost anywhere, because there are so many art forms that work like this. To see how a great overacted performance can be received, take Daniel-Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood. As Andy Friedman of Esquire reminds us:

For roughly the first 15 minutes of Paul Thomas Anderson’s magnificent oil-baron epic… Daniel Day-Lewis doesn’t speak a single intelligible word. There’s a fair bit of grunting, hissing, and moaning — his character, name of Plainview, is just a journeyman prospector at this point, physically engaged in the grimy nuts and bolts of digging wells — but no actual dialogue.

It’s not just films. Ballet dancers will communicate epic love stories with no voices. Cirque du Soliel performances often have no speaking roles. And, of course, there are the mimes. We must never forget the mimes.

And yes, very few of these mediums work with no sound whatsoever. Music often accompanies them to heighten moments and keep the audience engaged. Do not misread this argument: I’m not saying we need absolute silence. I would love a live audience option on my remote. I would be delighted to hear that a wrestling company hired an orchestra.² But I do not need the announcers.

As it stands, I don’t really feel any great desire to turn the volume back up. I’m enjoying wrestling more. If I miss a funny line, undoubtedly I see it embedded on Tumblr somewhere. Almost every wrestling plot boils down to “let’s wrestle” or “let’s wrestle later,” and I can piece together who’s feuding with who. It is really not that difficult. And as a nice perk, I don’t wake up my girlfriend as I catch up with Raw on Thursdays. I might just keep doing this.

I was not surprised to hear that in the episode of Wrestlespective Radio where Jason Mann and Alex Torres talk about Christopher Daniels vs AJ Styles from last years’ Destination X PPV, they get into the topic of dueling chants. They think it’s a self-indulgent thing an audience does that takes away from the match. TH disagrees, saying that self-indulgence has little to do with it. He instead claims that the chant is a side-effect of how different the independent scene is from the big-times:

It might not be traditional, but that’s what’s great about indie wrestling; it often promotes the non-traditional and gives it a platform so that it might gain traction on higher levels. If the future of pro wrestling is less about monolithic heel and face roles and more about guys getting fan followings, then it’s got to start somewhere.

Chants in general are a pretty interesting thing to discuss, but I like this very specific nook, because chants are weird.

Let’s take a step back from chants to overall crowd noise, and ask ourselves: why are we making any noise at all? If you’re sitting alone watching wrestling on television, it’s not likely you’re making much noise. Perhaps you are if there are people around you. The likelihood goes way up if you’re in the arena, but even then, some crowds are famously silent.¹ I’ve been criticized by people I’ve attended wrestling shows with for being too quiet, because I don’t really chant or cheer or whatever. I watch, and I watch intently. I find it really difficult to lose myself and join the masses, and because I find it so difficult, I find it really interesting.

Sometimes you cheer because there’s a guy in the ring you want to win, and him winning will make you happy. Sometimes you cheer because you know that crowd reaction is the accepted barometer for a wrestlers’ popularity, and the more he gets, the more we’ll get out of him. Sometimes you boo for the same reason: You love watching a heel do heelish things, and so booing helps that continue. Sometimes you yell things that make sense in the context of a match, and sometimes you don’t. Sometimes it makes sense, and sometimes it doesn’t, and when it doesn’t, it really does sound super self-indulgent to the rest of the audience and/or the people at home.

But I’d like to suggest that all crowd noise is self-indulgent. It may have an effect, but there’s no quantifiable result of that, only a loose aggregation.² You may feel like you’re part of the show, but in reality, you are an extra, there to make the evening look more important to those who are not there, and you paid for the privilege. To sum up: You are cheering because it makes you feel good, or part of the show, or whatever. But nobody asked you to cheer (well, nobody forced you to) and nobody is going to get hired, fired, promoted, or demoted because you did or didn’t. These things only happen in the communal and even then only if you’re lucky.

It’s a curious thought, this idea that cheering in wrestling can help a guy win more. It’s curious because it’s probably more correct in wrestling than in sports, where a players’ ability is 99.9% the reason anything happens. But in wrestling, crowd reaction take a much bigger piece of the pie. In wrestling, crowd reaction can change finishes, alter scene and match times, and change careers and long-term planning. So it’s not crazy to think that your voice matters, and to make that voice loud and passionate.

Jason has made this argument on a few podcasts (one or two with me), that he’s not a fan of dueling chants. I think the root of his disapproval is that they seem far more self-indulgent than most, far more than simple cheering and booing. The dueling chant does come across as the crowd trying to add a layer onto the match, but it also sounds like they don’t know what to do with themselves. There are chants that favour one character over another, and there are also chants that communicate how well the entire match or show is going. But unlike chants of overall approval (“This is awesome/This is wrestling”, as snarky as they can even be at times), or chants of overall disapproval (“Boring” comes to mind as the clearest), the dueling chant is tough to shake out value. I guess the crowd likes or hates both wrestlers equally, but does that mean the show has failed in some way?

TH mentions that, no, wait, this is actually a sign of approval:

While the promotions end up pushing people as the alignment they want them as, sometimes, the fans just don’t accept it. They have favorites, and they vociferously cheer them, not as a way to get themselves over, but as a way to show that wrestler he’s/she’s supported.

I’ll extend that idea: if I hear a “Let’s go Daniels/Let’s go AJ” chant, I interpret it as not so much an approval of the two characters, but of the prospective performance they’re about to give. It’s sort of the best way a wrestling audience knows how to communicate this idea: “We know you are trying to entertain us, and we approve of this pairing based on past performances either together or with other dance partners.” It’s a chant built for the age where a wrestling fan is looking less for a winner or a loser (and, by extension, a hero or a villain), and looking more for a great wrestling match.

That does not mean I think it’s the best route to go, though. Because I had to take the time to unpack the chant, the chant is a failure. Crowd noise should be obvious. If the crowd wants to make known its approval or disapproval of a wrestler, a match, or even the prospective possibility of quality, then that chant should be crystal clear. The dueling chant is a tacked-on approach and not a proper re-thinking of what the audience is supposed to like and dislike, and it absolutely does come across as confusing. TH is probably right that it’s a side-effect of being in a small crowd where the rules are different, but that doesn’t help the guy watching the DVD, and it doesn’t help the promoter trying to figure out who to highlight for the next show.³

So, what to replace it with? I’d love to hear from people with ideas. I have a few of my own: for overall approval of a scene, why not just a round of standing applause? It’s classy, loud, respectful, and looks great on television. For disapproval? Vegetables. Throw tomatoes and lettuce and other salad items at the shitty wrestlers. If Shakespearean dandy’s can handle it, surely tough guy fake fighters can.

K Sawyer Paul is an author and publisher living in Toronto. He tweets and tumbls. In the wrestling world he is known for This is Sports Entertainment and International Object. 

Edited by TH.

The Battlebowls at Starrcades 1991 and 1992 are discussed by Jason Mann and K Sawyer Paul n this marathon episode. They discuss the merits and flaws of the Battlebowl concept, how Starrcade often moved away from being WCW’s biggest show, how Sting did a poor job of making friends, the greatness of Rick Rude, thoughts on Vader, Barry Windham, Great Muta, Lex Luger, and much more.

Download this episode of Wrestlespective Radio (right click and save link as).

There’s a canyon of difference between “wrestling sucks right now” and “I don’t like wrestling right now.” It’s a sort of mature difference, because saying the first one instead of the second means you look only at the product. That’s fine; you can totally just look at the product, but doing so means you’re leaving a lot out. It means you’re not taking current market trends in mind, current economics, and future projections. It also means you’re not really looking at yourself, where you are in your life, and if wrestling is a thing you should really be watching right now.

Wrestling is a fairly evergreen product with a mature audience and a well-defined market. As it stands right now, pro wrestling is about as popular as its going to be without a heavy rebranding effort. Returning wrestlers like the Rock won’t change that much, because nostalgia by definition only satiates the current audience, and has little to no effect on growing business.¹ And without a new company, a new direction, or a huge reason to change, wrestling will pretty much be like it is for the next while. This is easy to predict, because wrestling has been basically the same thing since television showed up. Bad guys win too often, good guys are always overtly lame, corruption exists at every level of political power, and the show is run lazily for maximum profit. Any sense of “vision” is enacted on the smallest of independent scale, and only the really great (read: profitable) ideas get to the big times, where they are coated with vanilla and served cold.

This is cynical, but only to the point of wrestlings obvious deficiencies. And for each one of those, it has an equal or greater number of obvious positives. Professional Wrestling at its absolute worst is more entertaining than 90% of all of television, because it is not afraid to be silly and have fun and trip over its own logic and laugh at itself and do things no other medium can get away with. It is a circus of blood and paint and everyone—literally everyone— is doing their job to the best of their ability to make sure the audience has a great time. Even the worst pro wrestlers in the world are shooting for that. Even Chyna is shooting for that. No, Raw isn’t a great venue for solid wrestling matches or simple story telling, but it’s has never been like that. Monday night Raw has never been that great at the things traditional wrestling fans want, and you’d think after 18 years people would get it through their head not to expect 20 minutes out of Beth Phoenix.

WWE says this themselves. You want long matches? Go to a house show or buy a PPV. That’s their actual statement on the matter. You can criticize WWE all day long about tons of legitimate things, but you cannot say they don’t manage expectations perfectly well. If you watch the goddamn program, you know what to expect, and what not to. Since the brand split, Smackdown has been the show with the slower pace and often better wrestlers. Heat/Superstars/ECW/NXT has been the show for rookies and old guys. PPV has been the place where the wrestling fan is serviced to the best of the rosters’ ability. If you’re not happy with this arrangement, tough. This is what WWE thinks will entertain most of the people most of the time, and that’s really totally good enough for them.²

Let me repeat what I said earlier: “wrestling sucks” and “I don’t like wrestling” are two very different things. WWE is fine with this. TNA is fine with this. TNA is a company absolutely secure in what they want to be. They’ve produced 9 years of recorded television, and from day 1 you could see how this was gonna go. Various regime changes and management restructuring have done literally nothing to change the course of that ship. The same goes for Ring of Honor, Chikara, and any other wrestling company built on a certain angle or belief. They know what they are doing, and they could care less if you disagree with that notion. They’re sorry to lose you as a customer, but they don’t have an active suggestion box. I could make a career out of bitching about wrestling, and wrestling would never once care about that I thought, because what’s the point of making us happy when we tune in anyway, because even bad wrestling is pretty good television?

I.

Could.

Make.

A.

Living.

Bitching.

About.

Wrestling.

Did a light just go off in your head? Did something just kind of come together for you? It sure did for me. A few years ago, when it became utterly apparent to me just how cynical and sad the 24 hour news cycle had become, I began to notice similar patterns in wrestling journalism.³ The sad pay walls. The up-to-the-minute disappointment and I-know-better tirades. The “if they don’t turn this around right now, the whole things going tits up” rants. The terrible web design built to hit you with pop ups and spam to take tenths of pennies, because these people would rather have tiny dividends off shitty ads than respect your time and attention. The copy and paste sites, the places that take a paragraph from the observer and call it an exclusive. The thieves. The whores. The hypocrites who kiss Eric Bischoff’s ass when he grants them an interview but calls him the devil the rest of the year. These people make a living making you unhappy about a thing you used to love. And you let them. For a long time, I let them. What’s worse, for a long time I let them dictate what I did and didn’t expect out of wrestling. And that tension made me hate it.

When you let someone who is paid to hate something help form your opinion, you’re never going to be happy. This applies to a lot, and you can take that idea and let run over your entire online existence.

The worst part of it is that because we believe these people are the professionals, we begin to emulate them. We, the independent amateurs who began writing about wrestling believing that we could do it too, eventually slid into the same shitty habits our predecessors profit from. I’m not saying don’t put ads on your site. I’m not saying don’t charge for your content. I’m not saying don’t split your article into a bunch of pages. I am saying cut it out with the pop ups, because nobody likes that garbage. These are decisions you have to make, and every time you turn one of these things on, you’re implicitly suggesting how little you care about your audience, and how your content is perceived. I am saying its easy to fall into these habits, to fall into cynicism, and to entirely blame the product. But when all the product does is all is be itself and not apologize, sometimes I have to wonder if the product isn’t the problem.

When every wrestler who leaves the WWE says negative things in a shoot interview, when every old guy thinks wrestling was better in his era, when every 25 year old thinks wrestling was great when he was 16, and when we was nostalgic over an event we hated at the time, the problem isn’t wrestling. In these cases, wrestling doesn’t suck. The problem is that we don’t like wrestling anymore, and that’s not wrestlings fault. We have outgrown it, or our tastes have changed, or whatever, but wrestling is the same it’s ever been.

I’m going to go back to the Nintendo argument here: if you like Mario, someday you won’t like Mario. Someday, You’ll think Mario was better when you were a fan. Someday, you’ll see a new Nintendo console, and think that you’d never buy it because it isn’t as mind blowing as the SNES, or the N64, or whatever your console was when you were young, and you’ll completely forget that every single Nintendo console in history has been comparatively underpowered and initially unimpressive, especially the one you really loved once.

One day, you’ll reminisce over Survivor Series 2011 and forget that the Rock and Cena match was built on a terribly shaky premise with hours of lame scenes. You’ll do this in the same way people reminisce over Savage and Steamboat.⁴ Okay, maybe not Savage and Steamboat, but you get my point.

I get sad when I look over at online groups for tv shows like community, and how that connection can turn a fan into an evangelist. And then I look over at the IWC, and see that connection turn a fan into a cynic. It’s a poisonous, contagious environment full of jackals and hokum-salesmen, the worst of journalism and sometimes the worst of the Internet. Wrestling is worse for their contribution. But despite them, wrestling will go on being wrestling. Fans will go on liking it and then then not liking it. Kids will cheer John Cena, and then grow up and look at the new version of that guy and not like him as much. Really old guys will look back and reminisce on how they liked it more when they thought it was real, as if being successfully duped is a form of praise. It’s amazing how memory works, how fandom works, and how deplorable we can get when we don’t get what we think we want.

K Sawyer Paul is an author and publisher living in Toronto. He tweets and tumbls. In the wrestling world he is known for This is Sports Entertainment and The Footnotes of Wrestling. 

Edited by TH.

(Source: internationalobject)

TNA has been around since 2002, but the company didn’t actually get its own belt until 2007. During the first five years of existence, TNA used the NWA title, appending their own initials after a colon. Because of that, TNA wasn’t 100% in control of the direction of the title, at least in terms of how it was presented. With the NWA title, you have 60-some-odd years of history, and it’s tied to several companies, eras, and audience expectations. The problem with a belt like that is it comes with a pre-defined notion as to what it means. With the new TNA World Title, first hoisted by Kurt Angle at Slammiversary 2007, the company had a chance to define a title in its own way. They did so by taking Kurt Angle, who had so far played relatively fair in his 8 months in the company, and turned him into their top villain. The first noun attached to the title was weapon, as Angle clocked Samoa Joe with it. Many other terms have become attached to the belt over the years: power, suffering, and, for a small time, hideous. I’m going to append my own term to it: cursed. The TNA World Heavyweight title is cursed. It ruins men.

The TNA World Title is cursed in two ways. First, it turns its owner evil. If you were a good guy while chasing the belt, you’ll be a bad guy defending it. Secondly, winning the belt signifies ascension to the top of TNA, a place where the owner will seemingly work forever. In a feat almost no pro wrestling organization can claim, almost every single TNA World Champion still works for TNA, and none are better off having heeded the siren song.

Only 10 men have held this title, and all 10 share the curse. 

1. Kurt Angle: Angle turned evil the second he touched the belt, and would continue his villainy until he lost it for good in mid 2009. He would become a sort of hero again in 2010, battling the man who stole his wife and family through 2011. But when he got a chance to win the title again, he turned again, joining Hulk Hogan’s Immortal. Kurt Angle has never held the TNA title has a hero.

2. Samoa Joe: TNA pushed Joe as their No. 1 hero through 2007 and into his win at Lockdown 2008. His turn was subtle and subjective, as he would regularly “go too far” to defend his belt throughout the summer. After losing the title to Sting, he never returned to the same heroic character, playing a mercenary and victim to circumstance. In the fall of 2011, he still doesn’t like Sting very much.

3. Sting: Sting had held the belt a few times without turning, and could have spoiled my theory if not for his run as a respect-motivated psychopath in 2008-09. And though he was technically a good guy during his title reign in 2011, his motives weren’t clear, he “spoke cryptically,” and he started wearing his facepaint like Heath Ledger’s Joker.

4. Mick Foley: Foley beat Sting for the belt and almost immediately let the power go to his head, threatening to only defend the belt once a year. His villainous turn was due entirely to holding the title, as he would return to his good guy nature immediately following. Foley is the only wrestler to hold the belt that has actually left the company.

5. AJ Styles: AJ had played a villain before, but it wasn’t until a few months into his respectably lengthy reign that he joined Ric Flair and turned, becoming another guy in a big faction (something that’s plagued his career). 

6. Rob Van Dam: Here’s where it gets tricky. Rob held the title for several months without being a bad guy, and he still isn’t. But let’s look at TNA through its own logical lens for a minute. Who hoisted Rob up as champion in the first place? Hulk Hogan and Eric Bischoff. If, as they claim, they were never there for benevolent purposes, you have to link their push of Rob as part of their “plan” all along, which makes Rob both a pawn of evil and a putz. Plus, his main feud was against Sting, who was actually right about all the deception stuff.⁠¹ 

7. Ken Anderson: Anderson didn’t hold the belt for very long, which is strange. He also straddled the line between hero and villain during the winter of 2010-11, so it only sort of fits. Technically, Anderson isn’t cursed in the same way as the others, but in fact far worse. Anderson’s story was about the concussion Jeff Hardy gave him, and how he was never really cleared to wrestle, but he did anyway because of “the title, the title, the title!” This is another part of the curse: those who’ve tasted it always want it, even though it’s not good for them. WWE’s “Night of Champions” 2010 main event featured a very poetic vignette that implied the desire to hold gold in wrestling as chasing a siren’s song. They weren’t talking about Ken Anderson, but they were totally talking about Ken Anderson. 

8. Jeff Hardy: I honestly believe that TNA had never considered its prominent title a cursed item until they decided to give it to Jeff Hardy. They positioned Hardy as champion amidst court dates, drug charges, unprofessional conduct, and increasingly poor performances. First off, the title turned him evil, as he joined up with Bischoff and Hogan to reveal ‘they’ at Bound for Glory 2010. His transformation was far more bad cowboy than the other champions, as his dress and attitude shifted into the dark. Because Hardy and the TNA title were really made for one another, the belt was trashed and replaced with a purple faceplate. Finally, the belt resembled not an item of glory but avarice, a real cursed item, something to be sealed away to protect the hearts of corruptible men. Hardy’s run ended in the shortest and most disappointing main event in recent history (and, maybe, history). Sting felled Hardy with no effort, and then Hardy was sent home. He returned six months later, having attended rehab and a short prison sentence. He is a hero again, possibly being groomed for another championship run. Obviously, there is no actual correlation between the TNA Title and Hardy’s behaviour and self-harm, though you can certainly wonder out loud about a company that would enable and encourage a beleagured man. TNA’s cursed title is, if anything, indicative of an overall attitude with the company. Bestowment of metaphorical glory in place of a real thing can still make good men do bad things.⁠²

9. James Storm: You can absolutely argue that James Storm has done nothing villainous, and his entire championship reign contained no traces of the curse. But I will argue that a) Storm’s reign was two weeks, and only contained two matches, and b) one of those matches lasted three minutes, where he hit one move. That second match is the clincher: if James and Bobby are such good friends, why would Storm take the match in the first place? The whole thing had a very WrestleMania IX feel to it, where Hogan took Bret Hart’s place to defeat Yokozuna, a moment I’ve argued is when Hogan really turned evil. It highlights a feature of the curse many others suffered from but never as clearly: opportunism. Also, I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that Storm will be a proper villain within three months.

10. Bobby Roode: Roode is my favourite kind of villain. He’s a good man, pushed by society into a corner, and made a choice to stick up for himself. TNA went out of its way over the summer to paint Roode as a family man who tries really hard. He was clearly and absolutely screwed by Kurt Angle during their match at Bound for Glory, and you really had to feel for him as he cheered on his best friend defeated Angle with really no effort. He got a chance to fight his best friend for the title, which is something they both said would be fantastic. They agreed to put on a great match, and they delivered. And then, Bobby Roode saw the beer bottle, and put together that the ref wouldn’t see it if he smashed it over Storm’s head. He could win, and in that moment, winning a bastard title was more important than retaining a friendship.

Thus is wrestling, defined by Barthes:

Conversely, foul play exists only in its excessive signs: administering a big kick to one’s beaten opponent, taking refuge behind the ropes while ostensibly invoking a purely formal right, refusing to shake hands with one’s opponent before or after the fight, taking advantage of the end of the round to rush treacherously at theadversary from behind, fouling him while the referee is not looking (a move which obviously only has any value or function because in fact half the audience can see it and get indignant about it). Since Evil is the natural climate of wrestling, a fair fight has chiefly the value of being an exception. It surprises the aficionado, who greets it when he sees it as an anachronism and a rather sentimental throwback to the sporting tradition (‘Aren’t they playing fair, those two’); he feels suddenly moved at the sight of the general kindness of the world, but would probably die of boredom and indifference if wrestlers did not quickly return to the orgy of evil which alone makes good wrestling.

TNA has made conscious decision after conscious decision to make its champion a bastard villain, and over and over again they still tout the importance of the belt as a desired treasure. They have never mentioned that the belt does any good things, and its only real defined quality is power, which Zelda fans know isn’t the triforce you want. It’s somewhat like the one ring, too, except far chinsier and way less desired.

K Sawyer Paul is an author and publisher living in Toronto. He tweets and tumbls. In the wrestling world he is known for This is Sports Entertainment and The Footnotes of Wrestling. 

Edited by Jason Mann.

1.  Which helps explain a bit why Fake Vince loves the guy. ↩

2.  TNA re-re-redesigned the World title for Sting, and it looks like a regular old belt again. It’s unfortunate, because the new design is less glorious looking than the title Eric Young currently lugs around, and has far less character than Hardy’s. It looks cheap, like it’s made of the cheapest boxing-belt material they could find. ↩