Monday, April 12, 2021

If Everyone Else Is Running Marathons, Sprint to Stand Out

Omega is at the vanguard of the marathon matches; should other companies follow his opposite?

The best way to be noticed in wrestling, or in any medium of entertainment, is to stand out from the crowd. If everyone is zigging right, you zag to the left. It's common sense that isn't so common given how much copycat bullshit goes on in the wrestling business nowadays. Whether it's copying from yourself or shamelessly biting of some other promotion's ideas, matches, angles, moves, characters, or commentary tropes, there are few fresh ideas roaming around in the scene today, at least in America. While WWE is historically the biggest offender, that company has been stagnating for two decades and has still bilked several media outlets out of billions of dollars for broadcast rights. Where I think this pattern of malaise is most damaging is below the mainstream surface, below WWE and even All Elite Wrestling.

Sub-corporate national promotions and independent companies are in a crunch right now. They all book the same marquee wrestlers as each other as their local talent may or may not struggle to stand out. The same King's Road-plus-New Japan '90s Junior Heavyweight-plus-Brazilian Jiu Jitsu hybrid aggregate working style is employed by nearly every wrestler who makes the towns. Part of this stagnation is absolutely WWE's fault, and to a lesser extent, AEW's. While the latter promotion does recognize their wrestlers' independent contractor status, the grind of going hard every weekend in bingo halls and armories, especially during a pandemic, doesn't seem as alluring when you're catching a livable paycheck. They also vacuum up far fewer talent than WWE, who, even after dumping some wrestlers they considered to be bilge water last year, still sucks up as much name players as they can, whether or not they can fit them on television in a given week. Still, when everyone else has to be in Jacksonville every Wednesday or is, in Vince McMahon's mind, "his" property, it can be hard to find bodies to fill up shows.

Given that the scene is thinned out as it is, each different show around the country that uses the same main event guys to pop numbers has diluted a once vibrant scene. This was true even before COVID-19 struck, as the WWE vacuum cleaner has been sucking up wrestlers en masse for nearly a decade. If you're going to see the same wrestlers work in the same style of matches on every show, picking up an IWTV sub or buying multiple shows a month on FITE TV for promotions not in that streaming service can get majorly unappealing in an instant.

There's a reason why boutique shows during WrestleMania weekend rise to the top of the barrel like cream from raw milk. There's a reason why deathmatch wrestling remains the kind of draw that excites people, even if it's removed substantially from the John Zandig/Necro Butcher-led peaks of the mid-Aughts. They are fundamentally different from other shows in style and structure. They're also shows that lend themselves to special event status due to either wear and tear on the wrestlers' bodies or the fact that they might wear their welcomes out quickly if promoted to full-time status. I mean, if a promotion out there did want to do a one-show-a-month shoot-style promotion in 2021, well, 2021 might not be the year to try it. However, 2022 might be a little bit better given the outlook for a fuller recovery from the pandemic landing there rather than this year. I wouldn't proselytize against it, but I wouldn't have the highest hopes for it lasting longer than a year either.

There's a term that was introduced to me at least in the novel Moneyball called a "market inefficiency" that is used in sports to describe areas of a game where a tactical advantage could be gained over the other team that few other franchises were utilizing at the time. The market inefficiency in Moneyball that was described was putting a premium on generating runs by getting on base no matter what way (i.e. destigmatizing the walk and putting it on the same level as the base hit) and preventing runs from occurring on defense by finding guys whose range or ability to "pick" balls out of the dirt were able to prevent the other team from getting on base. In the National Football League today, the Tennessee Titans exploit a market inefficiency in other teams' run defense by being one of the few teams to go with a power rushing attack.

The market inefficiency in wrestling that a burgeoning promotion can use to their advantage in 2021 involves match length. If you asked the average wrestling fan, they might say matches are too long. They might be right unless they passionately defend the idea of having everyone try to stretch ten minutes into 17, 15 minutes into 20, and 20 minutes into 40. Granted, my sample size is small because I generally only watch AEW nowadays, but even when my purview included the indies and New Japan, most of the matches on each card, even the ones I liked, could have stood to have shed a few minutes off the runtime. I can think of maybe one match that was given forever and deserved it, and it was the Britt Baker vs. Thunder Rosa lights out match last month on Dynamite. You can agree or disagree with me whether those wars of attrition are too long or just right, but the fact is when match times trend up, the best way to stand out is to trend down, right?

I blame in part the rise of New Japan as the critical darling promotion of most people outside of the core of the wrestling tastemakers. Those inside the core have moved past the need for Nooj, instead moving onto the satellite "big" Japanese promotions and lucha libre as their north stars. Still, New Japan was at such critical mass for awhile, and it might still be, that the effects are still unfolding in America, where trends like these ripple outward from the epicenter. Every major match outside of various Brock Lesnar matches (and even he's fallen into traps of going past the freshness time) has seemed to tack on minutes because it was the thing you did to get critical praise. Given how much WWE and AEW have embedded the vocabulary of critical excellence into their narratives, with AEW giving specific validation to Dave Meltzer himself, the effects of trending longer on matches is tangible. It stems from the wars Kenny Omega and Kazuchika Okada had with each other. I don't necessarily blame those two or the company that promoted their matches as much as I do the lack of foresight that tells promoters from Scumbag McFucknuts promoting a show in Saginaw, MI to three fans in healthy times to McMahon himself to ape what's successful instead of finding a vein to strike that's their own. Capitalism almost rewards cowardice, because it's better to make diminishing returns on a spent well than it is to dig a new one and find no water at all.

What if someone dug a well over a reservoir they used predictive means of which to know the location? It doesn't take a genius to log onto Twitter Dot Com, see the tweets from thousands of people who consistently make the critiques that various matches could have benefited from editing and not think that reinventing the wheel might work. You can even bake that desire into the story. Every match in your burgeoning new promotion has a strict ten-minute time limit. As an aside, this paradigm is baked into lucha libre as the "lightning match." Anyway, you have to try to win the match in that time allotted or else you don't move up in the standings towards getting a title shot. You force wrestlers to prioritize working sprint matches and streamlining their psychology. Every match becomes that much more taut. The one argument is that not everyone can work a tight sprint, but at the same time, I think the consensus is that a bad short match is far preferable to a terrible match that never seems to end. I was there the infamous Ricochet/Johnny Gargano EVOLVE 10 match that might still be going on in a pocket dimension, and I have been in attendance for many a short Chikara match featuring green and underpaid Wrestle Factory trainees or grads who get in, fuck up, and get out in five minutes flat. I will take the latter a billion times over the former. I know that's anecdotal to an extreme degree of a sample size of one, but I get the feeling that is the case among a lot of people who are still somewhere in the orbit of pro wrestling now, who haven't been chased away by McMahon or Speaking Out or some other awful demon that wrestling promoters and the boys themselves seem to be all too comfortable to have hanging around.

There are ancillary benefits to having shorter matches too. You can fit more matches on a show and give more paydays out to deserving wrestlers, although I bet for promoters working on margins and looking for ways to cut costs, this is more an artistic or fan-friendly mark in the plus column rather than an operational one. Shorter shows are a plus too, because you can fit them in at odder times around the day and still have extra time left over to go out, do chores around the house without your partner or, for those still living at home, parents getting on your case, or partake in some other leisure activity. These shows might be more appealing to new fans because they don't seem as daunting a task to watch, and if the matches hit like they should, they probably leave a stronger imprint on the viewer. Few people will recall specific portions of the feeling out process in a match, even if those portions of matches over time leave residual effects for formation of opinions in the more discerning match watcher. However, the stuff that people gif, that shit pops off the screen. If you can cultivate an environment where the former stuff is more sparing (and thus means more) and the latter stuff has less chaff surrounding it, the experience can become that much more explosive to the average viewer. Congratulations, you have just found a way to stand out in a sea where promoters allow the wrestlers to give into their most indulgent impulses.

I'm not saying the wholesale tendencies towards epic matches will go away overnight, nor should it. Wrestling is at its best when you have a buffet of options from which to choose. A sea change in business in New Japan's future seems to be the only thing that might cause them to go to shorter average matches, and as long as the Japanophiles continue to promote them as the mainstream creative pinnacle, the indies will continue to trend in that direction (as will AEW and WWE). However, it only takes one promotion to go the shorter route and do so in a way that maximizes emotional effect to shock the system. Wrestling is boring when any among the parts of the structure are uniform anyway. Prioritizing short matches will make existing wrestlers better, and it might create a whole new crop of buzz wrestlers who show they can fill a market inefficiency that the current crop of guys going out and doing Passion of the Ospreay every time they work are ignoring. Variety only hurts when you half-ass it and then decide the lack of profits from that one awful effort means a total failure. It's another reason why wrestling is in love with an economic system that clearly does not love it back, but that's shouting in the void I need to do in another post.