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| WrestleCircus should be a wakeup call to everyone who doesn't know their worth |
I'm not going to spend more time bashing the guys behind this promotion, because other promoters are doing that enough. I don't need to join that dogpile. That being said, this is not the first time that the people behind this company flaked out on wrestlers and fans alike. I don't want to tell anyone "I told you so" because when a promoter comes to you with a figure that looks too good to be true, you gotta take it, no matter what the reputation is. That's the life for an indie wrestler. You live on the margins to hit your dream, so you make potentially bad decisions because the money is good. And promoters know you can take them, because they have the leverage. Again, indie wrestling lives on the margins for the most part, but that doesn't stop the average promoter from trying to be a dollar store Vince McMahon.
Someone on Twitter said that the revenue split in WWE is 92 percent vs. 8 percent in favor of capital (read, McMahon, his kids, and Paul Levesque). I haven't cross-referenced it yet, but I mean, with how much money WWE brings in, even with paying Brock Lesnar eight figures, they can still pillage the roster's pay to enrich themselves if that figure is true. Indie promoters have the same mentality with a less lucrative pot. Profitable companies exist as-is with no apparent problems, even if "the boys" get gypped. Unprofitable ones, well, the ethical ones operate fine, but the unethical ones pull this kind of shit or worse.
The knives only really come out for the latter scenarios, but it's understandable given the fiscally conservative-leaning nature of locker rooms that they'd trust capital. For as woke as companies are getting regarding social issues, few wrestlers truly adopt ideas that put them at odds with the structural dynamics of payment, and almost none of them really do anything too rebellious. Zack Sabre, Jr. still cashes his checks from Bushiroad, and David Starr gladly takes envelopes from anyone who'll have him. Wrestling is too ingrained in its ways to where any one person can make a difference by themselves.
That being said, WrestleCircus didn't issue its statement until after there was an uproar not only from workers and fans, but from other promoters. If I had to guess, the main guy in charge would've let everything go without saying a word if he could, but direct action, even if that action was pressing the "Tweet" button, worked. Imagine how much wrestlers could change the world if they banded together in some kind of union and took their grievances to every promoter, from Swindle McBullshit running the local VFW with 19 greenhorns and Tatanka to Vince McMahon himself.
Ultimately, the decision to prevent shit like WrestleCircus from happening again is making sure wrestlers have real power from which to draw. Sadly, the barriers are harder to overcome than one might perceive. Again, wrestling locker rooms being havens for financially libertarian thought give many of the workers the idea that unions would kill the business, which is a falsehood, but a widely held one. Additionally, many wrestlers have strong feelings of loyalty to certain promoters. Some are outright friends of promoters. Hell, some of "the boys" ARE promoters. Look at Ethan Page with Alpha-1 Wrestling or even Cody, the Young Bucks, and Kenny Omega with All Elite Wrestling. I don't care how much you believe in a cause, or how you think people who don't employ good praxis are cowards. Human nature dictates that interpersonal interactions most often will triumph over ideological ones.
So how does one climb over that wall? The depressing answer is that it's a gradual process that often involves wrestling moving at the pace or slower than society at-large. The fact that wrestlers like Sabre and Starr exist to be conscious of these things helps. Of course, Sabre mostly working in Japan and Starr being obnoxious bordering on gross turns people off. But the thing about being on the right side of history is that you're going to see a lot of pushback from things that don't really matter, or that should be dealt with aside from the extraneous bullshit. Things like jumping on WrestleCircus are good signs that the tide might be changing. Hopefully, things like these start turning on lightbulbs in people's heads about their own worth. Someday, it's going to happen, but everytime Someday gets put off, well, more wrestlers suffer from it. It's hard, but it has to happen sooner rather than later, before Vince McMahon chokes the life out of the industry at-large, or even worse, before climate change chokes the Earth past the point of inhabitation.
