Calinger: McMahon risks making WWE irrelevant by ignoring fans
By J.W. CALINGER
ISL Correspondent
The last week has not been kind to Vince McMahon. On Monday night, he was forced to postpone a live card due to a blizzard in the Northeast, and the day before, he saw so many fans cancel their WWE Network subscriptions in disgust over the Royal Rumble match that his site ended up crashing, and the hashtag #CancelWWENetwork was trending number one worldwide.
I haven’t canceled my subscription yet. I think I can hold out until WrestleMania and hope that either McMahon will make something decent happen after all, or that Triple H can talk a little sense into him. Still, I’m pretty close, as I’m sure some other members of the WWE Universe are.
After a Survivor Series main event in which underdog Dolph Ziggler had not only a push, but a shove, then a Royal Rumble championship match that featured John Cena, Brock Lesnar and Seth Rollins and STILL managed to be worth watching, things appeared to be looking up for the Royal Rumble match. Instead, the Royal Rumble itself ended in the most dull and predictable possible manner. McMahon wanted to make it clear that fan favorite Daniel Bryan was not going to win; Bryan lasted about 15 minutes, and was eliminated in the middle of the match. With the last five wrestlers in the match, it was pretty obvious who was going to win – I don’t think Kane or the Big Show was going to snag a title shot at this point in their careers. And so, Kane and Show tossed wrestler after wrestler over the top rope like rag dolls, and Roman Reigns, in an obvious attempt by McMahon to promote him as another Superman, was allowed to eliminate the two of them at the same time.
The aftermath of that was even more laughable. Kane and Show tried to come in and pummel Reigns, but his cousin, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, came down to the ring and layeth the smacketh down, blah blah, after which Rusev remembered he was never actually thrown over the top rope, and came back in to be properly eliminated. The Philadelphia crowd, never a bunch to accept being told whom to support, couldn’t even sustain a cheer for The Rock. They were upset enough that according to some reports, they blocked some of the wrestlers’ cars from leaving the arena, a move I don’t support, but one that Mr McMahon should have anticipated in Philly.
One can argue that the purchase of World Championship Wrestling was the worst thing to happen to McMahon. To be fair, other factors have contributed to his recent decline. The economy has made people cut down on entertainment, and the popularity of pro wrestling goes up and down as much as anything can. Still, it’s hard to deny that with World Wrestling Entertainment holding a near-monopoly on pro wrestling, McMahon has had a lot more latitude to turn his promotion into a vanity project instead of doing what works. In the 90s and early aughts, when he had to compete with Ted Turner and to head off a massive steroid scandal, we had champions who either were a little smaller and quicker but with heart or spunk, or who were big but unbelievably charismatic. We had the likes of Bret Hart, Shawn Michaels, Steve Austin, The Rock, and Chris Jericho wear the belt.
In recent years, aside from CM Punk reigning despite every effort not to promote him, and from Edge, the WWE mainly has fed us a steady diet of John Cena, Triple H, Batista, and now Lesnar and Reigns. Meanwhile, men like Bryan, whom the fans absolutely love, are tossed out of the equation at the earliest opportunity. To be fair, I can respect Cena and Triple H for their devotion to the business and their work ethic, and from what I hear, the latter actually is a good booker for NXT. Still, the principle remains that the musclebound generally prevail, and the one time McMahon threw the fans a huge bone, booking Punk, Bryan, and Zack Ryder to win belts on the same night, he made sure that came apart as quickly as possible, possibly as a way of flipping the bird to the fans who demanded a push for those three.
For a long time, McMahon got away with all of this because the fans had few other options. Unlike days past, when the size of the National Wrestling Alliance and, later on, the size of the bank account that funded WCW gave many fans a decent choice of promotions, a pro wrestling fan who doesn’t like the WWE has only Impact Wrestling, formerly known as TNA, or Ring of Honor and other smaller promotions. Wrestlers have an even more poignant choice, to be booked horribly in WWE or to work for a lot less money in the other promotions.
The time may have come, though, when fans are starting to think it’s better not to watch pro wrestling at all, or to look for whatever we can find on the Internet, than to put up with McMahon’s shenanigans. We have a World Champion, Lesnar, who wrestles so rarely that he makes Hulk Hogan look like a hard worker, and who still dresses as an MMA fighter in the ring. We have secondary champions who are mid-carders at best, and who probably will never be in any sort of contention for the World title. The female wrestlers are more famous for being on a reality show than for competing. Most importantly, the storylines are not only predictable, which isn’t a bad thing in and of itself, but so poorly conceived that my buddy Rick actually comes up with better scenarios over coffee at Denny’s than what highly-paid full-time employees can conceive.
I have to give credit to Rick, on an aside, for comparing McMahon to George Lucas, in that both men are so filthy rich and powerful that no one is willing to tell either one that their ideas stink.
Anyway, the storylines have been so crummy that I’ve stopped watching “Raw,” let alone “SmackDown” or any of the other WWE offerings. I DVR “Raw”, and I’ll watch the episodes before pay-per-views, but that’s about it. I still have some T-shirts, for Bryan, Jericho, and Punk – one reason for my buying a Punk T-shirt was his being one of the few men who told McMahon, “Shove off, I don’t need you!” – but I can’t think of one other wrestler whose shirt I really want to wear in public, and the shirts I have, I either bought years ago, or bought off the clearance rack at Hot Topic. I dearly love pro wrestling, and because I do, I’m less and less willing to watch a half-baked version thereof. All of the fans who have canceled their subscriptions have led me to think I should do the same. I wonder if McMahon, who prides himself on being a survivor, can defeat his own vanity and hubris by the time WrestleMania rolls around.
