 |
| Pictured: A guy who had chants piped in for him Photo Credit: WWE.com |
That also isn't to say that all of the criticisms that Ryback is receiving are valid, obviously. While I can see why people would want to lump him in with Bill Goldberg because they're two big guys who lift people up and put them down (violently), a lot of the criticisms of Ryback are using an image of Goldberg drawn from memory and not from a photograph. Mainly, it's when people say "Goldberg was organic" and Ryback isn't.
The biggest proponent of this argument is professional Hawaiian shirt-wearing troll Mark Madden, a guy who hates wrestling because it's not 1999 anymore. Obviously, people are to expect him to do that because "that's what he does." The problem with Madden is that people out there actually either take what he says at face value and agree with him, or they come to similar faulty conclusions on their own, forgetting the fact that Goldberg was indeed as forced a superstar in WCW as Ryback is right now in WWE.
By the very nature of needing a winning streak to get over, Goldberg's rise to prominence wasn't "organic." Rarely, if anything, in wrestling is organic from jump. For every Z! True Long Island Stories getting Zack Ryder a cult following, there are a million WWE pushes of guys they want you to cheer and a thousand of those million that actually work. That's fine though, as there's such a thing as "relatively organic," i.e., a guy who gets over big because of his own natural talents and the things he does in the ring after a totally jump-started-by-the-company push.
By definition of it being "staged," needing to have a guy get popular because he won a lot is the definition of forcing it. There was really nothing Goldberg did at first to get people to like him other than do moves in the ring that may or may not have been stiffer than what the doctor prescribed. Even then, would a guy whose brutality was winning him over fans at a striking rate need to have "Goooooooldberg" chants piped into the building?
This is not a debatable opinion here. WCW piped Goldberg chants into the building at the start of his career and for sometime after, until he ended up getting popular enough on his own. To deny that fact by claiming that Goldberg was "organic" is to rewrite history. Then again, with the biggest tycoon in wrestling right now being Vince McMahon, is there anything more "wrestling" than revisionist history? I guess I can't blame old-school fans or the carnies associated with the business (or in Madden's case, who only THINKS he's associated with it) for keeping that mindset, but it's a dangerous trap of nostalgia comparing two similar guys with stark enough differences to know that Ryback might not be a carbon copy of this Goldberg cat.
Again, this isn't to say that Ryback is good. A lot of times, we can make the mistake of superimposing our values of what's good or not on everyone, and wrestling fandom is about as subjective as they come. Why else would the "LET'S GO CENA!" "CENA SUCKS!" dueling chants exist, for example? AS with many other pleas I've had though, it's not that I want you to like what I like, but that I want people to be honest when criticizing anything in general. Ryback may very well be the worst thing since mold on sliced bread, but let's not go pretending that Bill Goldberg was this shining beacon of grassroots wrestling who got over on his own and didn't need help from an entire support system to become the biggest thing in his company.
