Booking 101

[JNLister]

Should probably mention the best booked pro wrestling show of the last 20 years, Cobra Kai.

[RancidPunx]

Reading “Wrestling at the Chase” at the moment by the late Larry Mataysik about the St Louis wrestling scene of the 60’s , 70’s and 80’s.

The focus of the book is around booker Sam Muchnick and his logical approach to match making and how he ran his business and treated his wrestlers and fans with respect and dignity.

 

So far the book is great .

Edited March 23, 2021 by RancidPunx

[jazzygeofferz]

@Chris B I remember reading or hearing somewhere how Hogan-era WWF was a babyface company where the story of the match was "How will Hogan overcome this threat?" as relates to his current feud, while during Flair's time on top the NWA/WCW tended to be more of a heel company where the story tended to be more "What will Flair do to retain the title this time?" I guess it's about the chase Vs the conquering hero. 

Edited March 23, 2021 by jazzygeofferz

[CL Punk]

10 hours ago, kieranjennings said:

Has to be Bill Watt's Mid South. Everything had logic and was thought out to great detail. I used to get tapes of the UWF stuff and have started watching from 82 onwards on the Network and if Watts is on commentary then he really takes you through the storytelling in each big angle 

On The Legends of The Mid South blu-ray, there was a squash match between Ted DiBiase and a young up and comer called Shawn Michaels where in this barely three minute match, the new babyface gets over but the heel still wins.

[air_raid]

15 hours ago, Chris B said:

Why is it different if a face submits than a heel?

I’d like to address this one ; there’s a great fallacy in wrestling that your babyface characters should never lose by submission because it makes them “quitters” which is a negative trait that you shouldn’t associate with your “hero” characters, but I think it’s total bollocks and depends entirely on the booking of both wrestlers and their storyline, where each stands in terms of status on the card, and how the match is laid out. Here are a couple of examples of where it was completely fine, and one where it was not;

1-2-3 Kid goes up against Owen Hart in the semi-finals of King of the Ring in 1994. He’s been beaten up by Jeff Jarrett after his quarter final so is knackered before he even gets to the ring, compounded by Hart obliterating him with a brutal dropkick through the ropes to the floor before the bell. He puts up a game fight but is mercilessly ragdolled by his fresher opponent between sporadic bursts of desperation offense but ultimately ends up powerbombed then wrapped up in the Sharpshooter. Beaten beyond hope of recovery and with nowhere to go, the Kid submits. Nobody ends up talking about what a quitter Kid is, only what guts he displayed getting to the ring and giving the display he did in the condition he was in.

Secondly ; Chris Benoit challenges Kurt Angle for the WWE title at the Rumble 2003, which was my favourite match for years. Anyone with half a clue knows that the obvious winner of the Rumble is Brock Lesnar and so it’s crystal clear he’ll wrestle Angle at Mania, so transparent has the storyline on TV been. Angle and Benoit have an excellent match based on each trying to get the submission with their trademark hold. Benoit ends up in the ankle lock several times but always manages to endure, reverse or reach the ropes. At the end, Benoit gets Angle in a final Crippler Crossface. The match has been executed so well that at this point, in spite of myself, I’m convinced Benoit is about to win the WWE title and judging by the swelling of noise from the live crowd, they start to expect Angle to tap out. He doesn’t, and manages to reverse into the ankle lock again. Benoit again stubbornly refuses to give up until eventually Kurt does something we’ve never seen him have to do, dropping to the mat and grapevining the leg, so The Crippler has got nowhere to go, and Benoit eventually taps. For extending Angle the way he did, restoring the suspension of disbelief of the fans wise to the booking plans and delivering such a compelling effort, he gets a standing ovation from the live crowd. Nobody thinks he’s a quitter, he’s looked better in defeat than a lot of guys in victory.

Finally ; Sasha Banks and Charlotte have an Iron Man match for the women’s title after a 50/50 booked feud for the belt where it’s changed multiple times. Banks, the babyface, has twice won the title from Charlotte but never held it longer than a couple of weeks and twice dropped it back to Charlotte, the heel, at the next PPV including the historic Hell In A Cell match and has proven incapable of beating her enemy on PPV. Leading on falls into the final seconds of regulation time, Banks ends up in the Figure 8 and even though there are only seconds left to survive, taps out. Into overtime, Sasha is made to tap out clean AGAIN, losing the belt. Already booked inferior to the heel as a loser and a choke artist before the match, now she’s a quitter too. Senseless.

In my opinion, like a lot of things in wrestling, “babyface submitting” depends on context.

Edited March 24, 2021 by air_raid

[Big'Olympic_Hero'Pete]

For me it boils down to just a few key points:

 

Believability- Treat the audience with respect and use your talent to their strengths and character.

 

Unbelievability - Keep the suspension of disbelief but also keep it within the realms of realism.

 

Logic - keep it logical to keep the audience invested in what you're doing.

 

Back Up - Always have a back up, just in case.....

[HarmonicGenerator]

Does anyone remember Alex Shane's columns in Fighting Spirit magazine? I'm sure some of those were about booking but all I can recall clearly is the one about Triple H being in the Illuminati.

[CavemanLynn]

2 hours ago, air_raid said:

1-2-3 Kid goes up against Owen Hart in the semi-finals of King of the Ring in 1994. He’s been beaten up by Jeff Jarrett after his quarter final so is knackered before he even gets to the ring, compounded by Hart obliterating him with a brutal dropkick through the ropes to the floor before the bell. He puts up a game fight but is mercilessly ragdolled by his fresher opponent between sporadic bursts of desperation offense but ultimately ends up powerbombed then wrapped up in the Sharpshooter. Beaten beyond hope of recovery and with nowhere to go, the Kid submits. Nobody ends up talking about what a quitter Kid is, only what guts he displayed getting to the ring and giving the display he did in the condition he was in.

This is a great example of something I think is missing in most current wrestling, not just feud to feud but week to week and match to match - consequences. Too often, it feels like any kind of progress is simply a talent sitting at a spot on the card, grinding for XP, until he beats some level boss (usually just a reskinned cheaper version of someone they've already beaten) then moving up to the next tier. We're at the stage where "oh he's wearing trunks now" constitutes a push up the card. Injuries, wear and tear, gruelling feuds, should all take their toll and be used to garner sympathy for your face or increasing desperation and underhandedness from your heels. As hammy as he's playing it, it's refreshing to see Moxley still at death's door a fortnight after his death match. He did this previously with was-it-Jericho? when he had a bad shoulder and was 'blind' in one eye. Coming into matches held together by tape and willpower got him even more massively over. This current post-deathmatch run gives both him and the booker a dozen options for writing him out and bringing him back, and that's not even getting into the options afforded by this angle in the context of the relationships with the other characters involved (Omega and Kingston, especially).

It's easy to see how played-out gimmick matches are these days when you can have a murderous stunt fest on a PPV but everyone's back with nary a scratch on Monday night. What toll can that place on a face's mindset if they go through that and still fail? It doesn't need to be a 10-minute exposipromo. Weeks of storytelling out of glances, expressions, uncharacteristic reactions, etc.

[BomberPat]

WWE's logic is that anyone paying to see a WWE show deserves to see WWE Superstars™ at their best, because that's what they buy a ticket to see. What that means is that nothing has any long-term consequence, because everyone stops selling once the match is over - it  doesn't matter how beat up you are on Sunday, you'll be right as rain on Monday night.

I understand the logic from a marketing perspective, even if I don't agree with it. The problem is that it extends beyond just the physical toll of the match - nothing has any consequence. It became a bit of a running joke that someone would beat John Cena, only for Cena to come out laughing and smiling the next night, put them down in a promo and tell them that the win didn't matter. At the other end of the spectrum, you have The Miz - who hadn't won a singles match in months - winning the World Championship, or Jinder Mahal before him. Or people losing a championship and then just shuffling off into other stories like they don't care - Kofi Kingston hasn't had any concerted effort to win back a WWE Title that he fought his whole career for, seemingly happy to have just lost it and got on with his life. 

The advantage wrestling has over real sport is that it's stage managed. Nothing should ever happen on a wrestling show unless it's for a reason. Every match, angle and segment should be moving some issue or storyline forward, or getting a character over. If it isn't, why is it there? In WWE, nothing seems to have that kind of forward momentum, people are just shuffled into main event storylines when required and then dropped back down to the midcard and neither their characters nor the production of the show suggest that they have a problem with that. So whatever momentum anyone has is always finite - it leads to a specific match, or series of matches, and then they're forgotten about. Most egregious of all, you get stuff like the Survivor Series inter-brand stuff, where wrestlers who had been feuding a matter of weeks earlier completely forget all that because they're wearing the same colour T-shirts. It's just playing mix and match with wrestlers regardless of characters, rather than looking at the characters and their history first and asking how they would reasonably be expected to interact.