Petty Annoyances

[Carbomb]

25 minutes ago, Untouchable said:

Huge AEW fan but i am sickkkkk of seeing blood every week. Huge fan of Moxley too, but again, too much blood too often. Cut it out. 

Maybe not the best choice of words

[Vamp]

When referees do a quick tap of the wrists and boots before matches. It's one of those wrestling shorthands where it's been sped up so much it no longer has a purpose. 

If you want to have a presentation where a referee checks for oil on arms or international objects in boots that's fine. If you want to just skip it because it doesn't fit your presentation then that's fine. It's the weird half arsed "this has to happen so let's get it out of the way as quickly as possible" that irritates me. It only makes sense in the context of knowing what it used to be.

[The Gaffer]

That annoying college kid behind the commentary table who chants"Comeeeeon Terry! Terry Funk. Terry Funk." out of time when Mankind is being stretchered away at King of the Ring. 

[adjarrell]

Probably been said countless times before, but Big Show using a closed fist punch as a finisher? Used to wind me up so so so much. Instant DQ, why was this allowed? Negates every forearm and open handed palm strike. I know we obviously suspend disbelief, but got to be within the confines of wrestling 'rules'. 

[Merzbow]

The chokeslam looked so good, too. It was always weird whenever he tried to get a new finisher over when his original was pretty much the ultimate one.

[BomberPat]

WWE stopped treating closed fist punches as illegal shortly before Show started using one as his finish, but that doesn't make it any less stupid. Presumably he started doing it after his brief attempt to become a boxer, yet they never really mentioned that, as far as I can remember. 

The main thing for me is that it's a finisher with no build to it. I suppose you could say the same thing about things like the Superkick, but if you can win a match just by punching someone really hard in the face, why would you bother doing anything else? Why isn't he just constantly swinging for the fences?

[air_raid]

1 hour ago, adjarrell said:

Used to wind me up so so so much. Instant DQ, why was this allowed? Negates every forearm and open handed palm strike. I know we obviously suspend disbelief, but got to be within the confines of wrestling 'rules'. 

 

14 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

WWE stopped treating closed fist punches as illegal shortly before Show started using one as his finish, but that doesn't make it any less stupid.

I'll be honest, I found the treatment of "closed fist" to be either inconsistent or just plain bollocks for.... well, always. Wrestlers punched each other all the time without issue in literally every match I ever saw, and only from time to time a heel commentator would make a comment about "that looks like a closed fist to me" in a Hogan match or someone else they were having an issue with, and 95% of the time it was "Big right hand! And another!" without any indication there was anything illegal going on. Pretending they're illegal is just weird because it makes every babyface ever into a cheater.

[BomberPat]

2 minutes ago, air_raid said:

 

I'll be honest, I found the treatment of "closed fist" to be either inconsistent or just plain bollocks for.... well, always. Wrestlers punched each other all the time without issue in literally every match I ever saw, and only from time to time a heel commentator would make a comment about "that looks like a closed fist to me" in a Hogan match or someone else they were having an issue with, and 95% of the time it was "Big right hand! And another!" without any indication there was anything illegal going on. Pretending they're illegal is just weird because it makes every babyface ever into a cheater.

that was a massive criticism of Hogan among older wrestlers when he was first on top - that a babyface shouldn't be the first person in a match to throw a punch, he should only start punching once the heel has thrown the first strike. But it's been decades since it's been something worth enforcing as a rule, as much as I'd like to see it go back that way. 

[air_raid]

15 hours ago, BomberPat said:

that was a massive criticism of Hogan among older wrestlers when he was first on top - that a babyface shouldn't be the first person in a match to throw a punch, he should only start punching once the heel has thrown the first strike.

It’s a very old school mindset where what happens between the ropes is supposed to tell the story of heroism or villainy and not, you know, actually having the hero or villains character tell you what they are. Reminds me of watching World Of Sport - “Oh no, he followed up that snapmare with a knee drop instead of allowing his opponent up!! BOOOOO!” Even by Hogans time that was looking daft. People tuning in to the WWF even before the Hulk certainly didn’t watch Rocky Johnson & Tony Atlas vs The Wild Samoans and need to see who threw the first punch to know who the baddies were, and even further back, the first WWWF Champion sure let you know he was the heel before the bell rang, and if the face punched him first you wouldn’t cry foul, you’d be delighted.

Edited July 22, 2022 by air_raid

[BomberPat]

4 hours ago, air_raid said:

It’s a very old school mindset where what happens between the ropes is supposed to tell the story of heroism or villainy and not, you know, actually having the hero or villains character tell you what they are. Reminds me of watching World Of Sport - “Oh no, he followed up that snapmare with a knee drop instead of allowing his opponent up!! BOOOOO!” Even by Hogans time that was looking daft. People tuning in to the WWF even before the Hulk certainly didn’t watch Rocky Johnson & Tony Atlas vs The Wild Samoans and need to see who threw the first punch to know who the baddies were, and even further back, the first WWWF Champion sure let you know he was the heel before the bell rang, and if the face punched him first you wouldn’t cry foul, you’d be delighted.

I don't disagree, but I think these things can work, if the rules are enforced consistently and made an important part of the structure of a match. There's a brilliant World of Sport match between Colin Joynson and Spiros Arion, where the crowd are at near-riot because Arion isn't following the rules properly. Doing things "wrong" isn't what gets heat, transgression is, and mostly it's the feeling that someone is doing something wrong and getting away with it - if the referee just stands there like a lemon and never enforces the rules, and the commentators don't admonish someone for breaking them, then there's actually no consequence, and no reason for the crowd to care when a heel cheats. The same is true in any walk of life - someone breaking the rules is always irritating, but it's them breaking the rules and getting away with it that really incenses people; you see that in other sports, you see it at work, you see it in politics.

There's apparently a Jack Brisco/Dory Funk Jr match in Texas where Brisco effectively turns heel by using the ropes to escape a pin rather than kicking out, because that used to be seen as a villainous coward's way out, while babyfaces would kick out, showing that they still had fight left in them.  I would love for the fine details of wrestling, and the rules of wrestling, to still mean so much to audiences that people would pay attention to that sort of thing.

The WWF had long been more of a "punch kick" territory than all that, though. I once went to a seminar on tag team wrestling, where as part of the tape study portion we watched The Rockers vs. The Brainbusters, and were told how Shawn Michaels had explained that long-haired pretty boy babyface teams, which were a staple attraction pretty much all over the South, were never accepted in New York, who wanted their babyfaces to have a bit more grit to them, so they specifically worked spots in the match where the Rockers would get in a cheeky punch, or bend the rules a little, just to show that they weren't the kind of rule-abiding goodie-goodie tag team that they would have been anywhere else.

 

Like anything else, wrestling changes and evolves, but I do think that it would be better with more rules and better enforcement of those rules that do exist than what we have now, and what we've had for years. The end-point of punches not being seen as either illegal or, from a heel, a cheap shot or shortcut, or, from a babyface, a point of comeuppance only when the heel has already gone too far, is where we're at in WWE now where a babyface will win by grabbing the tights because "turnabout is fair play", or how in matches that aren't explicitly No DQ but basically are (something like a Triple Threat, where the No DQ element isn't the selling point), a heel will break the rules while Michael Cole gleefully shouts "it's all legal!" rather than still pointing out that it's a nasty thing to do. Rules should provide the structure for every story wrestling tells.

The other thing with closed fist punches is something that Alex Shane wrote about in FSM years ago - they're the first thing a sceptical viewer is going to look at to try and find signs of fakery, because everyone has a pretty good idea of how you throw a fake punch, and they're also a "move" that everyone in the audience has a pretty good idea of how it would feel; if they've not actually been punched in the face, they still have a reasonable sense of what it feels like. So seeing someone get hit repeatedly in the face and shrug it off looks very fake, while nobody in the crowd really knows what a Suplex or a Powerbomb feels like, so it's harder to criticise. Like everything in wrestling, punching should be reduced to only being done by the people who can do it well, and done sparingly - I'd rather see one good, impactful punch thrown, than rubbish flurries of punches used to bridge spots together.

[air_raid]

Plus of course, that those of us who’ve been punched once with a decent connection (guilty) will walk around with a black eye for days, whereas Steve Austin probably punched a heel twenty times during a main event and they’d turn up on Raw the next night without a mark on them.

The lack of effective cheating or differentiation between how faces and heels behave in WWE is stark and a lot of it is to do with the watering down of the style to usually just impacts and running the ropes with an occasional rest hold in the middle. I’d kill for an old fashioned “babyface breaks clean in the corner then heel does a cheap shot in the same position” exchange every now and again. But there’s barely any lock up to speak of these days.

[BomberPat]

WWE actively don't allow their heels to cheat any more, unless it's the finish. So you get none of those nice little bits of business now, and the drama of the match suffers massively as a consequence. 

[Carbomb]

To be honest, I'm not sure why the whole closed fist debate is coming up in 2022. When you consider that, back in 2002 (or was it 2003?), they did an angle between Flair and Stone Cold where Flair stipulated they were going to have an "old school wrestling match" meaning no closed fists were allowed, that's a pretty clear confirmation by WWE. When they're making an actual storyline point about "how is Stone Cold going to fare in a match against one of the best ever when he's prevented from using his main weapon?", it's pretty cut-and-dried.

And let's face it: we don't even have to go as late as Stone Cold, because Jerry Lawler did the same thing. Apart from his piledriver finish, and the odd bodyslam or suplex, most of his matches were nothing but punches - and, as Butch pointed out a while back, he was particularly creative with it, by varying between jabs, crosses, straights, uppercuts, haymakers, etc.

My main issue with Big Show's WMD is that theoretically he could hit it any time in the match, so there was no build. 

BUT: the logic that makes it work is the simple recognition that he's a big, slow fucker - almost everyone else he faces is smaller and quicker, and will most likely dodge everything he throws at them, so he needs to wear them down enough to get a clear shot to finish them off. And if they're giants like him, they won't go down to it straight away, so he still needs to wear them down.

Edited July 22, 2022 by Carbomb

[BomberPat]

6 minutes ago, Carbomb said:

To be honest, I'm not sure why the whole closed fist debate is coming up in 2022. When you consider that, back in 2002 (or was it 2003?), they did an angle between Flair and Stone Cold where Flair stipulated they were going to have an "old school wrestling match" meaning no closed fists were allowed, that's a pretty clear confirmation by WWE. When they're making an actual storyline point about "how is Stone Cold going to fare in a match against one of the best ever when he's prevented from using his main weapon?", it's pretty cut-and-dried.

And let's face it: we don't even have to go as late as Stone Cold, because Jerry Lawler did the same thing. Apart from his piledriver finish, and the odd bodyslam or suplex, most of his matches were nothing but punches - and, as Butch pointed out a while back, he was particularly creative with it, by varying between jabs, crosses, straights, uppercuts, haymakers, etc.

Lawler actually had a very similar stipulation match to that Austin/Flair one - him and Bockwinkel had a match where Bockwinkel said Lawler was a brawler, not a wrestler, and relied on his fists, so wanted a match where Lawler would be fined $500 for every punch thrown. It's a great angle, though no one would buy a financial incentive stipulation these days.

The main thing for me isn't around punches themselves being the problem - if someone can do them well, like Lawler, then by all means take advantage of that - as just a broader dilution of the rules in general, and given Big Show's finish kickstarted the discussion around punches, it was a good starting point. Lawler's an interesting one, because the Piledriver itself was an illegal move for a large part of his prime - his first match with Andy Kaufman, Lawler gets DQ'd for using it.

The crucial part is that the move being illegal didn't mean Jerry Lawler stopped doing it, it meant they got a little more creative about how, when and where. 

 

I'm a firm believer that placing restrictions upon something is how you get genuinely great work, in any creative discipline - if you have a completely blank canvas, and all options available to you, you're never going to do your best work, because there's nothing forcing you to stop and think. In wrestling terms, the rules should provide some of those restrictions, and that only works if the rules are established and enforced properly, from the top down, to the referees, and to the announce team.

[Carbomb]

4 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

Lawler actually had a very similar stipulation match to that Austin/Flair one - him and Bockwinkel had a match where Bockwinkel said Lawler was a brawler, not a wrestler, and relied on his fists, so wanted a match where Lawler would be fined $500 for every punch thrown. It's a great angle, though no one would buy a financial incentive stipulation these days.

The main thing for me isn't around punches themselves being the problem - if someone can do them well, like Lawler, then by all means take advantage of that - as just a broader dilution of the rules in general, and given Big Show's finish kickstarted the discussion around punches, it was a good starting point. Lawler's an interesting one, because the Piledriver itself was an illegal move for a large part of his prime - his first match with Andy Kaufman, Lawler gets DQ'd for using it.

The crucial part is that the move being illegal didn't mean Jerry Lawler stopped doing it, it meant they got a little more creative about how, when and where. 

 

I'm a firm believer that placing restrictions upon something is how you get genuinely great work, in any creative discipline - if you have a completely blank canvas, and all options available to you, you're never going to do your best work, because there's nothing forcing you to stop and think. In wrestling terms, the rules should provide some of those restrictions, and that only works if the rules are established and enforced properly, from the top down, to the referees, and to the announce team.

That's true, but one of the things I dislike about having rules is when somebody breaks them as a matter of almost-continual routine - I don't mean as a heel always doing it, but specifically doing it in the same way, right in front of the ref - it just seems a bit crap. We don't even have to go to sports logic ("anyone doing that on the regular would be banned by now!"), we just have to go to internal wrestling logic. Being DQed for a piledriver or a martinete is one thing - they're big moves that require a lot of set-up - but for constantly doing punches? I just think, after a while, there's only so creative you can get for something that frequent an occurrence. Eventually, you either have to change the rules, or the wrestler.

I absolutely agree with restrictions producing great work - one of the things I was looking forward to (and was ultimately disappointed by) Sony's productions of the Spider-Man films was that they were heavily limited, in that there was a much wider Marvel universe they couldn't draw on. I was hoping they might either come up with some new characters of their own (like they did with the Rise Of The Imperfects game), or that they might mess with minor characters they did have access to.

That said, I don't think wrestling bookers work with the restrictions they do have all that well. I've never seen, for example, a young wrestler getting DQed for holding someone on the ropes for slightly too long past the five-count, perhaps as part of showing how inexperienced he is. Or someone being DQed for repeating things he's previously been warned about by a previously irate ref - in American wrestling, that is. It's one aspect of the UK's style that I did like - Public Warnings (or, in the FWA's case, yellow and red cards). It's a great little restriction that places the onus on the heel having to get really creative with distracting the ref, or, even, having to pull his best game out of his/her arse to beat the face. Or it's a great way to highlight just how pissed-off and vengeful the blue-eye is.