Payment Denied

The maxim in wrestling is that before you become a star, you need to pay your dues. In my rage last night over the way RAW was booked, I said here and at A1 that paying dues is overrated and implied it was an antiquated practice. I still somewhat feel that way, but in retrospect, it's something that I advocate on here all the time. A guy pays his dues when he's in the midcard or in the tag division. He pays his dues by appearing in classic hierarchical matches against established main eventers, like the ones you used to see on Superstars and Wrestling Challenge back in the day, when Rad Radford would take on Shawn Michaels, or even recently, when Primo Colon wrestled Randy Orton. A wrestler needs to go through that growth period where he loses from time to time in order to become centered and grounded. The two biggest examples of guys who forewent the growth process were Goldberg and Brock Lesnar. Goldberg became a pain in the ass backstage with a huge ego, and Lesnar thought he should have had the world handed to him and eventually left the business.

So when you talk about a guy who debuts as a low-carder, gets wins over jobbers, bursts into the midcard and has success, but then starts losing matches, either in hierarchical matches against main eventers or against guys his equal in the midcard, before getting his big push into the main event (should that guy be a main event talent in the first place... not everyone is cut to move past the midcard and is perfectly fine as an entertaining midcarder for life a la Goldust) as paying dues, okay, yeah, I can see that argument and even agree with it.

However, when you talk about a guy getting a rocket up his ass into the main event and having to lose match after match once he gets there, or a guy who wins a title unexpectedly and then is made to look like a buffoon at every turn until he anti-climactically loses the title a month later, or when you're talking about the guy who doesn't need protection getting protection and the guy who absolutely needs protection not getting it as paying dues, then that's where I tell you to shut the fuck up because you're on crack. What happened last night was not Jack Swagger paying dues. It was Jack Swagger being buried.

Of course, it's hard to fault the WWE writers. No, wait, it isn't hard to fault them because it's their fault that they have to resort to this kind of ham-handed, backwards-thinking, Hogan-cutting-a-shoot-promo-on-the-New-Blood-for-not-drawing-minded booking because over the last decade, they've systematically eliminated the midcard and the tag team division as we know them and as they have worked for decades because they don't know how to budget time or prioritize what needs to get over. If there's no midcard for Jack Swagger to learn how to lose without losing the elasticity on his heat, then how is he supposed to deal with losing when he reaches the main event? If there's no midcard for the audience to really start taking Jack Swagger seriously by seeing him win matches against other people who get exposure, then how the hell are they going to take him seriously when he's jobbing to everyone who's worth a damn in the main event?

While the smark maxim of "fuck the old guys, push the new guys" is a deeply flawed one, it really does ring true when they unexpectedly put the World Championship on one of the new guys. While there are people in the business and in the stands that see the title belts as trinkets, I'm going to bet that the majority of the fanbase at least wants to view the Championship as something important. That's why it's a terrible idea to start making a guy "pay dues" after he's won the title, especially a guy who's done nothing BUT "pay dues" since coming over to RAW. The belt and the holder of the belt NEED to look strong, or else there's no reason to watch. We all know the sport is staged, but the suspension of disbelief, that magic that makes us believe for just one second that maybe what they're doing is real, needs to be there, and when the best wrestlers in the company aren't competing for the Championship and it's treated as just a prop to try and get a guy over whom they're clearly not treating as the equal, then you start to make the fanbase wonder why the fuck they're fighting, or more accurately, pretending to fight anyway.

The point is, Champions don't pay dues. Champions compete, Champions set the standard, Champions win. If the WWE was not prepared to let Jack Swagger run with the title as a true Champion, then the WWE should not have strapped him. It's as simple as that.

Photo Credit: WWE.com

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