Tuesday, June 1, 2021

On Big Spots, Consent, and Safety Policing The Indies

MV Young, above, putting Harlow O'Hara through a table off the apron was cool as hell, nerds
Photo Credit: MV Young/@THEOnlyMVYoung 

One of the most ill-advised wrestling spots ever took place June 28, 1998. During a Hell in the Cell match at King of the Ring, Undertaker threw Mick Foley from the top of the cell to the floor. It is one of the most memorable spots in wrestling history, but it could have been one of the most damaging had Foley not landed on the designated fall-breaking apparatus, in this case the announce table. I am not aware of any discourse around this spot today, but I imagine if social media were around at the time, there might have been uproar around it. I'm sure there was in AOL chatrooms and on message boards, where WWF vs. WCW partisanship made the WWE vs. The World chatter today look like gentle ribbing. However, for as "unsafe" as it might have seemed then, it was a perfectly viable and acceptable spot. Half of it has to do with the planning, which regrettably and infuriatingly was not there when Vince McMahon did everything but physically shove Owen Hart to his death in another controversial and entirely objective ill-advised, unsafe stunt a year later. The other half is that Foley himself came up with the idea and eagerly took the plunge to help put himself and his opponent over huge.

Granted, Foley's soundness of mind could come under question, as he also consented to allowing The Rock crack him in the head with a steel chair multiple times while he had his hands cuffed behind his back. No one ever said wrestlers were a smart breed, but I still cannot stress enough that the most dangerous thing a wrestler does on a regular basis is allow themselves to be slammed, back-first, onto the canvas multiple times a night anywhere between 100 and 300 times a year, depending upon what level they're wrestling. A stupid person can still consent or refuse said consent. Foley consented. He did what he did with full cooperation.

Harlow O'Hara also took this powerbomb with full cooperation and consent:

MV Young powerbombed her off the apron onto that rig of boards and chair at the Battle Club Pro show Saturday afternoon. The first person to react to it was some dipshit who writes for Barstool, the wire-mesh drain cover of the Internet, who blasted them for doing a "dangerous" spot in front of 30 people. A lot of other self-ordained members of the Safety Patrol jumped on, including wrestler-turned-Q-Anon buffoon Austin Aries using a burner account came out to blast this spot as if it was the most patently unsafe thing they've ever seen. Forget the fact that Young and O'Hara both have come out to defend it. O'Hara even exposed the business to show how she was okay, which is ludicrous that she'd have to come to those lengths to defend  a spot that was 100 percent safer than a WWE producer ordering someone to do a dive with Mike Mizanin catching them. Do you think wrestlers after years of seeing Miz try to catch opponents with the same effort of Orange Cassidy sticking his hands in his pockets want to do a tope con hilo or tope suicida in a match against him? That consent is manufactured straight from the top down through McMahon's producers, because if it wasn't, Miz matches wouldn't have had people diving into him sometime after he got the call-up from ECW.

I don't know how many times I need to write that "wrestling is inherently not a safe business," but the same idiots that willingly give money to Vince Russo or Jim Cornette so they can be told there is a "safe" way to wrestle will never shut up as long as they participate in the corniest and most boring version of findom possible. The most important thing is that the wrestlers themselves must be allowed to consent to the spots they take until the point where they start taking risks so extreme that maybe they aren't in sound enough mind to make that consent. Was the Young/O'Hara powerbomb spot stupid? I would say it's no more stupid than taking five German suplexes a match from Kurt Angle his highest. Again, O'Hara explained it, and the execution saw her land exactly where she needed to land.

If you're that concerned over safety in wrestling, then what you want is regulation, but the dirty little secret is that the people at the top are the ones resisting that regulation. So if you think indie wrestlers doing cool-looking spots is a problem, you have McMahon and to a lesser extent Dixie Carter, Eric Bischoff, Paul Heyman, and Tony Khan to thank for that. Oddly enough, I've found in my experience that the lower levels of wrestling, the independent circuit and such in America at least, that the best regulation is self-regulation. Wrestlers do not want to end up dying in the ring, so with a few exceptions, they try to take care of each other as best as possible. Again, this maxim isn't necessarily able to be proven in any way but anecdotally, but I circle back to how few real, lasting incidents happen in deathmatch wrestling compared to how awful its reputation is. It's always "almost," where the real incidents have happened in mainstream promotions in the big wrestling culture countries.

In short, I am not entirely sure how this discourse does anything but serve to denigrate wrestling that doesn't happen under Titan Sports' banner. All Elite Wrestling suffers from this badgering from down bad WWE fans who don't enjoy what they consume for 10 hours or so a week, so they have to lash out at other promotions doing cool stuff whose fans are thriving mostly. AEW can survive it easily because they have a cable deal, a billionaire owner, and a network that loves what they're doing to the point of throwing television time at them. Indie promotions, however, don't have any of those luxuries. Vince McMahon's narrative that "wrestling existed in smoky backrooms" before he took over is a gigantic lie, but enough people believe it that indie wrestling is already behind an eight-ball. But having useful idiots like the shitbag from Barstool or Cornette heavily police anything that isn't WWE does more to hurt the perception of wrestling on the whole than any shitty thing McMahon does, and that depresses me more than anything else in this industry outside of the number of abusers, rapists, and fringe extreme right-wing operatives who are continued to be accepted within its confines.

It shouldn't matter if O'Hara and Young do cool shit in front of "30 people" like that's some kind of slam. If wrestling is art like some people claim (like I used to claim), then they aren't doing cool shit like that for anyone but themselves. If it isn't art, then one might think doing that awesome spot would get 30 people talking about it and then maybe attracting 30 more people to Battle Club Pro. If what you want is boring asshole shit in wrestling, then by all means keep yelling about these spots when all you are is a spectator, or in better, more pointed and accurate parlance to the industry, a mark. Then you're doing McMahon's work for free and allowing him to steal those spots from the indies, do them in grossly sanitized ways with wrestlers who don't have to worry about self-regulation, and choke the industry from the top. Then, when all the cool indies have been choked out of existence, and the only ones left are what he's bought, you'll have nothing left to neg, and McMahon will have nothing left to steal. But wrestling is already the most capitalist of capitalist ventures anyway. That's always been the endgame. If it wasn't, WCW would still be around.

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