Wrestling Is for Wrestling Fans

Pictured: a dinosaur

Professional wrestling has its roots firmly planted in carnivals of yore. Even today, carnival games are based on deception. They let you play games that you think you have a shot of winning, but the hoop you shoot your basketball through is bent, or the ring material bounces too hard off the bottle. Those big stuffed animals atop the stand? They've been there for years, man. While carnivals predate basketball, their proclivity to deceive is at their bedrock. In post-Civil War America, carnivals would put on worked wrestling contests and pass them off as shoots. While wrestling has outgrown the secrecy, the people running it haven't. Promoters today, especially older ones, still have the mentality that they have to swindle as much money out of as many people as possible rather than present what they're promoting as some kind of hybrid between sport and theater and thus building a consumer base.

The most successful wrestling companies are ones that embrace the fact that they have fans who come to every show. It shouldn't be surprising that one person who doesn't get where the paradigms have shifted is Vince Russo. Well, it is surprising that he has a following still, given that every single venture he took on after he first left WWE was a failure and that he was only ever employed over the long-term because Dixie Carter for whatever inexplicable reason liked him. His success in the business came at a time of great largesse for the company that employed him, so that paints his viewpoint. He was around for a load of casual fans tuning into the show weekly and inflating ratings, so of course, success to him means people who aren't wrestling fans checking the show out. Of course, he misses the greater reason behind why casual fans took a liking to RAW and Nitro, but that's not surprising for a guy whose critical reasoning skills range somewhere between a goldfish and a drone ant. He sees WWE bringing in Tyson Fury presumably to go over Braun Strowman, and says it's a good call because it theoretically brings in non-wrestling fans to watch the terrible Saudi Fuck Money show.

The reason why the Attitude Era and the Monday Night Wars-era Nitro had a ton of viewers is because they put on a great wrestling show, or at least one that seemed great to a great number of wrestling fans. Those fans were not embarrassed to admit they watched wrestling, and their buzz caused other people to pop in and watch to see what all the hullabaloo was about. Some stuck around for the long haul. Others bailed at any time between the end of the first show they watched to sometime around 2002 when it became apparent that WWE wasn't interested in doing anything but lining up people to pay tribute to Triple H. Whether or not the post-Invasion shows were better than the Attitude Era ones or not is immaterial. They less served what those wrestling fans wanted, and not only did the casual fans go away, the core fans started to leave too. When WWE started to serve the interests of what wrestling fans wanted, the following grew.

That reason is why people have flocked to All Elite Wrestling's Dynamite. It is run by wrestlers who revel in fan interaction and who know that that loyalty is built to a wrestling show by catering to wrestling fans first. Russo doesn't understand that because he's a carny grifter who learned under the tree of the biggest carny grifter of them all, Vince McMahon. Of course he thinks that AEW ratings are going to crater because they don't "cater to casual fans." The point of AEW was that it was going to be wrestling for wrestling fans, an alternative to the company that continues to cater to people who don't watch wrestling.

Of course, Russo's argument might hold water in alternate universe where logic was backwards. WWE's MO in the last decade has shown that logic in fact works in this universe the way it should. WWE had in 2011 the beginnings of an organic movement for wrestling fans with a wrestler's wrestler in CM Punk. They decided to book that story in the direction of giving its semiretired Chief Operating Officer the rub. They welcomed Brock Lesnar back in and booked him in a way that lets him dominate the narrative in ways he couldn't before he left for UFC BECAUSE he became world famous in UFC. Guest appearances from celebrities that are supposed to enhance the wrestlers, like Sheamus yukking it up with Beaker from The Muppets or Kevin Owens powerbombing Machine Gun Kelly off the stage, are fewer and further between compared to ones that demean wrestlers, like Flo Rida continually getting over on guys like Heath Slater and Bo Dallas, or Hugh Jackman owning Damien Mizdow. You might think that it doesn't matter when the victims are usually low card guys, but celebrities are to the low card what the part-timers are to the high card. The consequence from that pandering to non-wrestling fans and old fans who dropped off is saying that the people who are there day-in and day-out mean nothing, and when the bait leaves, so do the casual viewers.

WWE has seen diminishing returns on barometers of healthy business like attendance and ratings for two decades now, but they've been able to hide it due to massive returns on television deals and taking blood money from a genocidal authoritarian kingdom. They're not getting bumps in casual viewership organically, so those bumps go away and then people like Russo and especially McMahon take them the wrong way. That's the thing. The problem isn't Russo cheerleading this bullshit, it's that McMahon is the guy who keeps doing it and decreasing interest in his company, trying to recruit people who might tune in for a little bit and who won't stick around at the expense of fans who spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars year on tickets, Network subs, shirts, replica title belts, plane tickets and accomodations for WrestleMania, and other ancillary expenses they put out for a wrestling fandom that if it's with WWE does not pay them back in kind. Fans of Floyd Mayweather or Machine Gun Kelly or Flo Rida or whoever don't stay with wrestling unless they also like wrestling. Why the fuck should you cater to those people anyway?

If WWE created a product with good buzz from its base, it would get casual viewers. AEW is creating a good product with buzz, and people are talking about it without shame or trepidation. Time will tell whether the ratings crater or not, as three weeks are too little to judge accurately. That being said, they're in a good position. The wrestlers on the show who are being pushed feel important. There are stakes. It's a show that leans on wrestling fans, and those fans are responding well for the most part. That idea is foreign to a hack like Russo because he only ever had one idea that he kept humping, and that's to break kayfabe. The National Football League doesn't tailor its game to cater to non-fans. If it did, the rulebook wouldn't be arcane. Twin Peaks didn't dumb its wit down to appeal to those who don't get it or aren't interested in its weirdness. Why should wrestling do it for those who don't like wrestling? Smart promoters aren't trying to fool people anymore. They're trying to hold their attention and give them what they want (or at least make them want what they're being given). The game has changed. Arenas aren't carnival tents anymore. The only way that things change is if McMahon and his hangers-on like Russo realize that.