Shut Up and Call the F'n Match

The original terrible announcer,
 although he wasn't always bad
Photo Credit: Online World of Wrestling

I was watching Viva La Raza: The Life and Times of Eddie Guerrero on Friday. I got through the first disc, which chronicled most of his ECW and WCW travails. There was a lot of good action on there. It included a match against Shinjiro Ohtani, a couple against Dean Malenko and even one from Hog Wild '96 where Eddie challenged Ric Flair for the US Championship. The action itself was really good, but as the disc progressed, the quality in the announcing declined. It went from Joey Styles, whom I hold in very high regard, to Tony Schiavone and his various partners in WCW.

The quality of those WCW announcers varied with the era. In the matches from mid-1996 and before, the announcing was good. Schiavone used to be a good play-by-play man, if you can believe it. When he was running point and calling the action in the ring, he added to the match. This is noticeable most in the Ohtani match, as he along with Dusty Rhodes and Bobby Heenan had a really nice interplay among each other. However, once the nWo angle started in full force, well, things changed.

Later on in the DVD, there were two matches in particular that featured Eddie wrestling Chris Jericho and then Dean Malenko. If you want to know how much the Schiavone-led announce team mentioned the goings-on in the match during the match? My impression was that you could count it on a single hand. Throughout both matches, it was nothing but "nWo" this and "Sting" that and "Hulk Hogan" this and "Kevin Nash" that. Seriously, if you tuned into Nitro/PPV/wherever the match took place and had no idea what the story was behind it, you'd come out of it knowing even less. At least for the Jericho match, it showed that the crowd at home was conditioned to care as much about the match as the announcers seemed to do. The crowd was so dead during the match that Jericho said on the DVD that it was the most defeated he'd ever felt after performing. Seriously, you had these cruiserweights, Jericho, both Guerreros (Eddie and Chavito), Malenko, Rey Mysterio, Juventud Guerrera, Psicosis and Ultimo Dragon, guys who were doing things that were not seen in the American mainstream before, and the crowd sat on its collective hands. Unbelievable.

Looking back at the wreckage of WCW, this is one of the huge reasons why it failed as a company. The announcing didn't do anything to get the product over, it was always hyping the main event, which more often than not didn't deliver. I mean, if you listen to any other sport's commentary, you always hear some focus on the action at hand. Yes, there is a lot of downtime in football and baseball, and announcers might go to any other subject but the game, especially if Brett Favre did something stupid that week. In a game such as hockey or basketball, the action is almost non-stop, so you get commentary accordingly. A Jericho/Guerrero match would be closer to the back-and-forth of a hockey game than to the ebb-and-flow of a football game, so you'd think that the announcers would sell the action. Nope, it's like they were holding court on their own analysis show with the action in the ring as background noise. That's how NOT to call a match.

Of course, an announcer doesn't revert from being a good announcer to being awfully awful by accident. There had to have been an edict from Eric Bischoff or someone else in the WCW brass to put the nWo angle over at all costs. Yeah, good idea dipshits. Of course, Eric Bischoff is part of the four-headed Hydra of WrestleCrap in charge in TNA, and surprise-surprise, Mike Tenay and Taz often stray from the match at hand to sell something coming up later. Granted, it isn't "all main angle, all the time", and they do a better job than Schiavone and Co. at concentrating on the match. It's just their terribleness is rooted more than in the hype-above-all-else, but the oversell at the action's expense is a problem.

For all the problems I have with every announcer in WWE excepting CM Punk right now, they at least do a good job of calling the action in the ring and holding off on the shilling until between matches or during restholds. Of course, there are guys in the WWE who are over to more than just a Pavlovian crowd that gets into their home arena for free. TNA can't really boast that.

It's all about presentation. If you present something to be important, people will think it's important sooner or later. If you brush over something like it's nothing, people will be trained to forget it. It's amazing that people don't learn from mistakes, but then again, no one ever accused Eric Bischoff of having business savvy, at least not anyone who didn't die before 1998.

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