A funny thing happened the other day. Well, I say it was funny. It wasn’t really. It wasn’t the ‘ha-ha’ kind of funny. It was the ‘that was unexpected and a little bit lame’ kind of funny. Also, it didn’t actually happen to me. It happened to someone else, thanks to something I wrote. Yep, as far as convoluted and uninteresting introduction paragraphs go, this one is right up there. Let me try and explain what I’m on about before you all drift off.
You guys all know Grant Cook. If you don’t, shame on you. Grant writes here and I know him from his interactions with MFX as he’s a regular contributor to the show. He’s someone I consider an internet buddy. I’m sure Grant can now live out the rest of his life in blissful happiness because I class him as an internet buddy…
So what has Grant got to do with this ‘funny thing’ that happened? Well, last week I wrote an article entitled “CM Punk, Daniel Bryan and embarrassing wrestling fans”. It wasn’t a life changer or anything, just me commenting on two topics I found interesting and venting some frustration at the behaviour of some wrestling fans that leave us all tarred with the same retarded brush.
For those of you who don’t know, SLTD have set up a Twitter programme that most of the people who write here have – apart from me because I’m too technologically backward to work it – which automatically sends out a tweet from your account when a new article is posted here.
The tweet usually just contains the title and maybe the first couple of words of the body of the article. My article went up and out went all the usual tweets, including from Grant’s account.
The ‘funny thing’ happened when Grant got a tweet from a ‘professional wrestler’ (a term I use in the loosest possible sense – ‘part time weekend warrior’ would be more accurate). I can’t remember his name and I can’t be arsed to look it up. He’s not actually all that important to this story – it’s his attitude that caught my attention.
He had this stunningly insightful assessment that he just had to share with Grant:
“If you write about wrestling and your surname isn’t Meltzer, you’re an embarrassing wrestling fan”
A ground-breaking and astute piece of observation, I’m sure you’ll agree. As far I understood it, this charming little laddie was trying to say that if you’re not at the top of your profession, you’re an embarrassment. Or maybe not, it was hard to tell. In all honesty, I think he confused himself while trying to sound smart.
I initially thought he was trying to make the old classic point of ‘unless you’re involved in wrestling, you don’t know anything about it’, but the more I thought about it, I realised that wasn’t what he was doing. He was just flexing his ‘smart’ muscles at Grant in an attempt to talk down to him.
In the end, I didn’t need to get involved in any resulting argument because Grant served the future face of the WWE with this:
“Unless your surname is Pulitzer, you can’t comment on an article…”
Or something to that effect. Whatever turn of phrase Grant used, it shut the guy up. It was the perfect end to another pointless exchange on Twitter between fan and (alleged) wrestler.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not bitching because someone said something negative about an article I’ve written. If you write on the internet and ask strangers to read your work, you better be ready for the good, bad and fucked up to come out of the woodwork and generally abuse you for having an opinion. As long as they read the article, I can accept that.
The problem I have is with people who don’t read an article and just want to look like a big man by having a pop at someone like Grant on Twitter. If the guy had read the article, he’d have known Grant didn’t actually write it. I wouldn’t have minded if he redirected his jab at me, at least it’d be justified because I wrote the damn thing.
This situation is everything I hate about wrestlers and wrestling fans using social media. It’s all one big “I’m smarter than you” competition, mixed in with stupid mark comments and a sense of superiority from everyone involved that is usually completely unwarranted.
I don’t kid myself. I know I’m not a journalist just because I write here. I don’t call myself a broadcaster because I do a podcast on wrestling. I’m not an expert on wrestling. I don’t consider myself to be anything more than a fan who takes his interest in wrestling to a level that other fans don’t.
Which is EXACTLY what most wrestlers do when they start out. I’m sure the majority of them are big time fans who decide they want to go that extra mile and actually become a wrestler.
So why is there this hostility? Why are some wrestlers so keen to show how much smarter they are than the fans? Conversely, why are some fans so keen to do the exact same thing to other fans and wrestlers?
In the days before social media and everyone getting ‘smart’, people used to believe in their heroes and hate the villains. There was a mystique and a separation between wrestler and fan that benefitted both sides. It didn’t matter what the wrestler was like in real life because people weren’t interested in that. They were interested in what the wrestler did on TV and at the live shows.
Sure, they maybe wanted to find out a wrestler’s real name, but the level of interest in them away from the show wasn’t as high as it is these days and the wrestler’s certainly weren’t as instantly accessible as they are today.
The invention of Twitter has really put wrestlers in the firing line and maybe that’s why there is an underlying hostility towards fans. I’ve seen wrestlers hounded day and night, being bombarded with random questions or pleas for retweets or birthday shout outs and then getting a ton of abuse when they don’t respond to the creepy requests.
I can understand why some wrestlers would feel hostility towards those kinds of fans. The famous wrestlers I mean, not the nobodies like the dude who tweeted to Grant.
As a side note, I saw a dude the other day on Twitter who had tweeted Mick Foley about 50 times in the space of a day. The purpose of his tweets? To ask Mick to reply to him because he was in hospital – like a Tweet from Mick Foley was the only way this guy was getting out of hospital alive.
When Mick didn’t reply, the guy freaked out and then repeatedly tweeted Mick to tell him he was going to burn all the Foley merchandise he had purchased in the past. It was a grand gesture that highlighted the absolutely weird, twisted and desperate cries for attention that pollute Twitter on a daily basis.
The relationship between fan and wrestler has changed so much since the invention of social media and with the curtain being pulled back on the inner workings of wrestling. It used to be that people tuned in to wrestling to be entertained. It used to be that for a couple of hours, you could unplug your brain from the real world and immerse yourself in a fictional world of combat, emotion, entertainment and spectacle.
There was an unspoken understanding that what was being presented wasn’t 100% legit, but it was presented in a way that allowed the viewer to take what they were watching seriously. That presentation and the divide between fan and wrestler used to result in some of the most intense and passionate crowd reactions in any sport or form of entertainment.
I was listening to a podcast with Jim Cornette recently and he was talking about the way some fans, back in the day, used to get so into what they were seeing that they would physically attack the heels.
He talked about one woman going into labour at the Mid-South Coliseum and how she wouldn’t leave for the hospital until she found out who won the main event between Jerry Lawler and Bill Dundee. One guy, an escaped prisoner on the run, went to the matches and got so caught up in what he was seeing that he hit the ring, got arrested, and ended up back in jail!
That was the kind of passion and real emotion that wrestling could generate. These days, everyone is so fucking cool and ‘smart’ that they only thing people get passionate and emotional about is chanting for something they know management doesn’t want them to chant about.
That’s not the fans fault. If wrestling is presented as a throw away joke (which the bulk of matches and angles are in WWE and TNA), then the fans will react accordingly. You can’t blame people for messing around and entertaining themselves if what they’re watching is boring and repetitive.
It’s not the wrestlers fault either. Most of those who work in WWE and TNA are hamstrung by so many different outside factors it’s a miracle half of them can even be bothered to continue doing what they do. I’m surprised it took CM Punk this long to crack.
Away from the arena, there’s a weird half-way house that exists at the moment when it comes to the relationship between fans and wrestlers, especially on Twitter.
Some wrestlers understand the importance of social media. They realise that it can be used for free promotion, forwarding a feud or building their character. They work Twitter in just the same way wrestlers would work the fans at the Mid-South Coliseum back in the day.
Rockstar Spud in TNA is one of the best examples of using his character on Twitter and generating real heat and emotion from people.
Others want to belittle and talk down to the ‘marks’ and show how much smarter they are than the fans they’re interacting with. I don’t think anyone really wins in that scenario. Although some of the exchanges can be highly entertaining. I know most of what he does is in character, but I’ve never been more entertained by Ryback than when he’s on Twitter talking shit.
Then there are the fans who want to try and outsmart the wrestlers. They want to show that even though they haven’t laced a pair of boots, they know just as much as someone who has. Unfortunately, in most cases, they actually have less insight and knowledge into wrestling than the actual laces of those boots.
So what’s the point of all this? Who actually wins in the end? Why does everyone have to try to one-up each other?
Is it because some fans can’t tell the difference between Magnus sending a Tweet in character and Nick Aldis tweeting about a movie he enjoyed? Is it because the business has been exposed to such a degree, that some wrestlers struggle to actually ‘work’ fans on Twitter and just end up insulting them or coming across as bigger marks than the fans they’re interacting with?
Or is this all just part of the new fake social media society we’re a part of? Let’s be honest, we all play a role on Twitter. None of us are actually our real selves. We all play up certain characteristics on Twitter for effect. We can be anyone we want to be in 140 characters or less. We love to get retweets, interactions and follows. You can sit there and protest all you want, but you know you get that little buzz too. It’s why you stay on Twitter. Who the hell wants to talk when no one is listening?
So if we’re all playing a role and so are the wrestlers, and we’re all trying to outsmart each other all the time, is it any wonder Twitter turns into such a minefield? Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fun minefield, but it’s a minefield nonetheless.
Helpfully, I don’t have any answers to this work/shoot/wrestler/fan conundrum that exists on Twitter. All I will say is no matter who you are, be it fan, professional, weekend warrior, blogger, we’re all here because of one thing – our love of professional wrestling.
It might be worth keeping that in mind before you start another round of ‘who is smarter’ because in the end, we’re all marks and none of us are quite as smart as we think we are.
For proof of that, you can follow me on Twitter @MFXDuckman or tune in twice a week to the MFX Podcast. Each week myself and my buddy – Sir Ian Trumps – take a satirical, alternative and sideways look at the week in WWE and TNA. In other words, it’s a smarky podcast, packed full of laughs, impressions and some nuggets of insight.
At MFX we pride ourselves on raising the bar and lowering the tone. Why not tune in to hear just how high the bar can be raised and just how low the tone can go? Just check out the MFX page here or go to www.mfxpodcast.com where you can find our most recent and all our past shows.
As always, thanks for reading and keep supporting SLTD and all the great contributors here.
Until next time…
Peace
Duckman
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