The Modern Day Spot Monkey Whose Stuff Looks Fake

[JNLister]

A 1988 letter to the Observer exposes that wrestler who everyone thinks is great because of all his flashy moves, but he wouldn't have flourished back in the good old days when they tried to make it real.

 

[Lion_of_the_Midlands]

I can't imagine that person still reads the Observer. He will have had a heart attack and died at some point in the early 90s. 

[davertfnewman]

I was one degree of separation away because I was thinking it was Owen that the letter was about.

[Snitsky's back acne]

It seems like "It was better back in my day" has always been a common complaint.

I wonder what the fans of twenty years from now will be like.

"In my day they actually had real people going through three burning tables covered in thumbtacks. Now it's all CGI. It just doesn't feel real anymore". 

[davertfnewman]

People from a generation before thought Harley Race was doing too much.

[BomberPat]

Obviously very funny who has been named as the fake and flashy new wrestler but, yes, it has always gone this way. I have read books written in the 1930s which bemoan that modern wrestling is too concerned with being flashy and eye-catching compared to the wrestlers of a generation earlier.

People thought Harley Race and Ric Flair took too many bumps to be credible, yet they became the standard-bearers when it was Shawn Michaels they wanted to rag on as unrealistic and too flashy, and so on and so forth. It always amuses me when I see people talk about how wrestling today is less "realistic" than what they grew up with, only to find that they grew up on the WWF of the early '90s. 

It's interesting to see the logic of why Bret is singled out - the writer's idea of credibility and realism in wrestling is based on the idea of heat, that a more "believable" wrestler is one who can rile up a crowd and convince you that they really hate their opponent, but Bret's brand of credibility is built on treating wrestling as a logical sport, and if it were a sport, you wouldn't viscerally hate every single person you ever wrestled, because they are organised sporting contests, not unhinged street fights. Same goes for a lot of criticism of wrestlers and wrestling today being less realistic, or the wrestlers being less tough or able to handle themselves in a fight, which ignores that most wrestlers today have come up in an era with at least some awareness of MMA, while the Brawl For All showed up so many of the "tough guys" of the past as big uncoordinated lugs. 

[davertfnewman]

Corny in one of his shoot interviews from decades ago challenged the idea that old wrestling was scientific and sitting in a headlock for three hours and that new wresting was a high speed car chase when in actual fact there had been both in the old days as well as plenty of good and plenty of bad.

Axl Rotten in his interview with Raven cited someone like Buddy Wayne (Ken's dad, not Nick's dad) as a guy who thought wrestling went to shit when guys no longer came out of a corner, raised their arm when they were announced, and returned to their corner and didn't know any more how to "grab a hold".

[LaGoosh]

35 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

Same goes for a lot of criticism of wrestlers and wrestling today being less realistic, or the wrestlers being less tough or able to handle themselves in a fight, which ignores that most wrestlers today have come up in an era with at least some awareness of MMA, while the Brawl For All showed up so many of the "tough guys" of the past as big uncoordinated lugs. 

That's all a perception thing I suppose. I think a lot of wrestlers today definitely don't look tough or carry themselves in a way where you believe they could handle themselves - even though I'm sure most wrestlers are pretty handy and would do better in a fight than the vast majority of people would.

It definitely doesn't help that wrestlers are generally smaller and much younger looking than in the past.

[Carbomb]

2 minutes ago, LaGoosh said:

That's all a perception thing I suppose. I think a lot of wrestlers today definitely don't look tough or carry themselves in a way where you believe they could handle themselves - even though I'm sure most wrestlers are pretty handy and would do better in a fight than the vast majority of people would.

It definitely doesn't help that wrestlers are generally smaller and much younger looking than in the past.

Tangentially, I would venture to guess that MMA has actually helped erode the traditional perceptions of what a tough guy looks like, partly because of the lower weight classes like flyweight and bantamweight.

An extreme example, because he's often cited as being the least fightery-looking guy in MMA, but this is lightweight Chase Hooper:

Amongst his victories he's beaten (an albeit end-of-career) Clay Guida, noted wild man:

If these guys were wrestlers, there's no doubt whom the bookers would have going over.

[FUM]

1 hour ago, Snitsky's back acne said:

It seems like "It was better back in my day" has always been a common complaint.

I wonder what the fans of twenty years from now will be like.

"In my day they actually had real people going through three burning tables covered in thumbtacks. Now it's all CGI. It just doesn't feel real anymore". 

It’s not exclusive to wrestling. There’s a dopamine release from good memories that our minds conflate and block out the negative aspects from the time. It’s why the ruthless aggression era is now considered worthy of praise in some quarters. 

Nostalgia used to be treated as a genuine mental health condition as it should be again one day when people start telling us how good it was getting to watch a Hogan documentary along with WrestleMania.

[davertfnewman]

 

[Chico Torres]

I’ve studied a lot of wrestling history. In terms of stylistic changes and spot monkeys, people were up in arms nearly 100 years ago when Gus Somnenberg introduced the “flying tackle” in 1928 which had a dramatic effect on the sport. People were moaning that it wasn’t like the old days of the (also fake) Gotch and Hackenschmidt era in the early 1900s
 

In terms of fakery, let’s go back nearly 150 years ago to this article from 1877 in The Brooklyn Eagle newspaper:
 

SO CALLED CHAMPIONSHIP CONTESTS. – There is probably no sport before the public – not even excepting professional billiard playing – in which there has been so much regular “hippodroming” and crookedness practiced as in the wrestling arena within the past two or thee years. There has scarcely been an important contest in which the result has not been known beforehand. A system of humbug has been carried on in the form of creating a supposed bitter rivalry between prominent wrestlers, in order to get up an excitement, and matches have been arranged which have been alleged to be for thousands of dollars a side, when not a dollar has been put up on either side, the contest being one for the gate money alone, and that is equally divided, the betting deciding as to which party should win. The men have been found guilty of it and in one case the knavery was publicly exposed out West. But still the people are being galled by these so-called championship wrestling matches. The latest contest in the wrestling arena was that between Miller and Bauer at Boston last night, in which Miller was defeated Bauer winning in one fall. The usual $1,000 challenge followed, and another profitable gate money match will be arranged. Pools were sold at Boston on the match, in which Miller was the favorite with those not behind the scores, he being the strongest man and the best wrestler. The fact is nothing has been such a blight on honest sports as the curse of the pool box. It has almost killed professional billiards in the Metropolis; has broken into the healthy life of base ball; driven professional oarsmen out of the arena, and brought odium upon every sport with which it has been connected. Bur for the pool rooms of Chicago and St. Louis – encouraged by the local press there – there would have been no such crookedness in the Western base ball nines, which recent developments have disclosed.

[RedTwoster]

@Chico Torres - tremendous post, that’s absolutely fascinating. 

[BomberPat]

something I realised when writing a book that's basically all about this idea is that there's a difference between fixing and faking. So stories like that one from 1877 are often held up as examples of how long wrestling has been "fake" for, but it doesn't really tell you that, it tells you that wrestling matches were fixed. But so were horse races, so were baseball games, so were boxing matches, so, judging from how readily the example is used in that article, was billiards. Basically, that was sport before governing bodies came in and at least made a pretence of cleaning them up, and the intention was (usually) to play the odds and make a ton of gambling money.

Wrestling is fairly unique in that it stayed "fixed", and became more "fake", once that impetus to fix fights was gone - wrestlers were faking fights, while telling the public that their sport could be trust, because unlike all the others, there was no gambling involved any more, so what possible reason could they have to fix the results? I think it's still a bit of an open question how many of Gotch and Hackenschmidt's fights were faked, and to what extent - there's not just a binary "yes/no"; you can have a competitive bout but one where there's an agreement to stretch things out for entertainment purposes, or to allow or disallow certain techniques, so it's not quite fixed, it's not faked, but it's not totally on the level either. I think about the Harlem Globetrotters as an analogy - the Washington Generals are, ostensibly, playing to win, but with the understanding that fans are there to see the Globetrotters, and with an agreement that they will never interrupt when the Globetrotters are doing a routine or a bit of schtick. 

Basically, wrestling has, since at least the First World War, existed on something of a continuum where it has to balance the right amount of "realism" and the right amount of artifice, and it's done it so well for so long that people don't really know one from the other any more. People will complain about someone getting thrown off a ladder through a table and popping right back up without selling it because it's not "realistic", but actually, it's the selling that is artificial, the bump happened and we all saw it, so if someone could pop back up straight away then that by definition is realistic - you're not asking for realism, you're asking for more artifice. 

Wrestling will never get that balance exactly right, because it's always in flux. Anyone making a case for a specific time and place when wrestling got it exactly right is kidding themselves - and it usually coincides with when they first got into wrestling, they just think that their baseline is the correct way.

[AshC]

As long as there's core, consistent logic, it's fine, whether it's Ospreay or Hackensmidt.