Was recently surfing the interwebs and saw people arguing about CM Punk’s claim in a 2013 promo that he wrestled more often and harder than the legendary Bruno Sammartino, so he was a greater champion than Sammartino. Obviously, this was a promo, and as such Punk clearly wasn’t making a serious argument about his superiority. (Punk actually greeted Sammartino when the latter was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame; Sammartino was reportedly impressed by Punk’s straight-edge refusal to drink or do drugs.)
Now, due to fans being entitled (as fans are) and the controversial nature of Punk’s departure from WWE (and the allegations he has made about WWE’s treatment of him), a lot of wrestling fans have over the last couple of years decided that they think Punk is a spoiled baby. Such is the nature of fandom, I suppose. (See also: comics fanboys who get upset when creators or creators’ estates sue Marvel or DC for what they believe to be their fair share of profits from characters they created – because god forbid anything interrupt those characters’ regular publishing schedule.) As a result, Punk’s claim has been called into question.
Here is the thing: it is not hard, at all, to figure out that Punk’s claim re: Sammartino is true. We can verify it quite easily via Cagematch, the online wrestling database.
During his initial eight-year reign as WWWF Champion from 1963 to 1971 – the time Sammartino was wrestling most frequently – he wrestled in 519 matches. That’s 519 matches over approximately seven years and eight months. Comparatively, working backwards from CM Punk’s final match at the Royal Rumble, his final 519 matches of his career began on August 28, 2010 – 519 matches over approximately three years and five months. In their most active periods, Punk wrestled more than twice as often as Sammartino.
But wait! That’s not all we know! We also know that Punk wrestled 1612 times over approximately 14 years, an average of 114 matches per year, versus Sammartino wrestling 913 times over 25 years, an average of 36.5 matches per year. Bruno’s heaviest year was actually 1963; in that year he wrestled 135 matches, which was a major outlier for him (his second heaviest year was 1968, when he wrestled 70 matches). During his peak years Bruno typically wrestled 55-65 matches per year. While Punk was employed by WWE, from 2006 to 2013 – not counting 2014 as a full year since he quit wrestling in January – there were only three years where Punk wrestled fewer than 135 matches – and these years happened to coincide with Punk’s major injuries and his first, not quite-a-full-year with the company.
On top of that, it is quite clear that modern wrestlers wrestle a harder, higher-impact style than wrestlers of the past did. There are plenty of Sammartino matches on Youtube – here, for example, is a 1975 match against Superstar Billy Graham as a sample – and Sammartino used a lot of chinlocks, armbars and other moves that nowadays are “rest holds” in order to catch one’s breath in between high-impact moves. This is not a criticism of Sammartino; styles evolve. But modern wrestling is much harder on the body than classic pro wrestling was, and that is before one considers the impact of additional weaponry being used in matches (chairs, tables, ladders, the inevitable kendo sticks that are always inexplicably beneath a WWE ring for some reason).
The stats don’t lie, and Punk was, objectively speaking, entirely correct to say that he wrestled harder than Sammartino. Of course, whether that makes him a better WWE Champion is like arguing whether Superman can beat Thor in a fight, because “CM Punk” and “Bruno Sammartino” as wrestlers are also semifictional characters and if you’re trying to judge whether a wrestling promo is “right” then you’re watching wrestling wrong. But Punk wasn’t whining. He was stating an obvious fact.
(ASIDE #1: Since I was curious and since he’s another good comparison figure: during his initial four-year reign as WWF champion from 1984 to 1988, Hulk Hogan wrestled 586 times – so more than peak Sammartino but less than prime Punk. As a general rule, current active WWE wrestlers, barring injury, will generally wrestle on average between 145 and 160 times per year, so Hogan during his peak years barely equalled what an average wrestler in the WWE does now.)
(ASIDE #2: John Cena, since 2003 – his first full year as a regular wrestler for WWE – averages 147 matches per year, counting 2008 when he was out of action for more than half the year.)
(ASIDE #3: Of course all of these numbers only apply to WWE wrestlers. “Star” level independent wrestlers generally work around 60-70 dates per year at most, as do most wrestlers contracted to TNA or Ring of Honor, most Japanese wrestlers working in smaller promotions and most luchadors wrestling for AAA or CMLL. Japanese wrestlers working for New Japan tend to wrestle slightly more, in the 80-100 matches per year area.)
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Not only do they work longer and harder than they used to, but I’d say they work longer and harder than they should.
I know how sore you can get just from working out without giving your body time to rest. I can only imagine how bad it is to not only exert yourself night after night, but also to take bumps.
WWE workers need a much lighter schedule. So fucking WHAT if the company makes less money, I’m worried about more wrestlers dying young.
I for one do not blame Punk one bit for quitting. I’m amazed he was able to last as long as he did since him being straight edge meant he couldn’t take anything for the pain and couldn’t take anything to make himself heal faster, like so many others do. (I suppose it’s possible that Punk’s lying about being straight edge and it’s always just been a gimmick, but I highly doubt it.)
I think a lot of people don’t realize how strenuous wrestling in general is to the competitors, they naively shrug it off as fake, when these guys have terrible morbidity and mortality as a result.
The tougher schedule for the WWE guys isn’t just hard on their bodies, it’s arguably hurting the business too. People may not be so sick of Cena if he wasn’t there all the time. Guys like Taker, Brock, etc have a much better reaction in part because they are used sparingly.
It sucks for a guy like Daniel Bryan, who worked so hard to become the most popular wrestler in WWE only for the injuries to catch up to him and send him on hiatus twice. I’m sure some of that can be blamed on the indies, but working 160 matches a year with a very physical style didn’t do him any favors. WWE really should cut to like 80 shows a year like the NBA or the NHL. They are a multimedia company, and their performers are brand names. You don’t need to risk those performers for selling two thousand tickets in some medium sized town at house shows.
Also, Punk was the man, and crybaby fans need to stop acting like they never quit a job before or that Punk owes them something.
The biggest part of WWE’s problem is that they’ve got a lack of roster depth (as compared with the 1990’s era WWE and WCW). Wikipedia lists 58 active male wrestlers, 13 of those aren’t week to week performers either due to injury or otherwise (people like HHH, Lesnar, The Undertaker, and The Rock who only wrestle on TV before their BIG matches and Jericho who mostly wrestles dark shows). Of those remaining 45, 19 of those are tag teams (silly New Day) and 2 more are novelties (El Torito and Hornswaggle, although why he’s on the active list I have no idea). That leaves you with 26 active singles. Yeah yeah, NXT. But they don’t regularly appear on Raw or Smackdown. What they need to do to take some of the heat off of the main roster is hire some jobbers again. And for gods sake let them fight over the US Championship instead of giving it to Cena. Note, not a Cena hater, he just doesn’t need the belt and it doesn’t need the shine of him holding it if it’s going to be the C level belt (the B being the Intercontinental Title). Then with the expanded roster and title picture maybe your top guys don’t have to wrestle twice a week plus dark shows week in and week out and they can have a career measured in decades rather than years.
@Wolfthomas: Yeah, it all depends on a number of things. I’ll explain those for the people who dismiss it as fake…
It depends on what move you’re doing; a sleeper hold doesn’t hurt at all since the guy isn’t actually putting any pressure on you, but if you do something like a superplex then even if you fall exactly how you’re supposed to it will still hurt.
The surface of the ring itself isn’t exactly soft. I read one person describe it as “not like landing on air, but not like landing on cement either.” I know how the very edge of a wrestling ring feels, and I’d say it has more or less the same amount of give as a lawn. Apparently the middle of the ring doesn’t hurt as much to land on, but seeing wrestlers land on the edge (or as it’s called in wrestling parlance, the “apron” of the ring) is more and more common these days, both in WWE and out.
It also depends on who you’re working with. This was illustrated very well in an episode of OSW Review, where the lads were describing a match between the Natural Disasters and the Legion Of Doom. One of them said that Earthquake gave his opponent a very safe power slam on the outside, and if you watch it you can see that he’s trying to do the move as gently as he possibly can without making it look bad. They then say that Hawk (I think it was Hawk, but it might have been Animal) gave a really HARD slam to one of his opponents, like he just fucking picked that guy up and threw him down full-force. So some guys will be careful with you (Bret Hart, for example, has said on many occasions that he never once injured an opponent for real and that he’s proud of that) and others will do stuff to you that really hurts because they want it to look as real as possible or because they want to haze new guys by inflicting pain on them or because they legitimately don’t like you or a number of other reasons.
If you watch a match where one wrestler chops another in the chest hard enough to make a loud noise, usually they are really hitting the guy very hard. You can tell because after a certain number of chops you’ll see welts on the chest of the recipient, and you can’t fake that.
The thing is that the guy getting chopped is in pain, but he exaggerates how much pain he’s in. He’s probably thinking “Ow, fuck!” But he is reacting like “OH MY GOD I AM PARALYZED BY AGONY AND ALL I CAN DO AFTER THAT CHOP IS WRITHE IN PAIN!”
On the other hand, a guy taking a superkick (that’s a martial arts type side kick to the head) is probably not going to be in any pain if the move is done properly. You’ll usually hear a loud noise when somebody does a superkick, but that’s because the guy delivering the move will slap his thigh as exactly the same time his foot gets close to the other dude’s face. Of course, that’s very tricky to do: throwing a kick that almost makes contact and gets close enough that there’s a convincing illusion of a guy getting his face kicked in, but doesn’t actually hit him. Sometimes people fuck up when doing a superkick and legit kick their opponent in the face. And yes, that hurts, and presents a concussion risk.
The one constant is that in matches today, you will see wrestlers falling onto the surface they wrestle on a lot. Even if the guy taking the superkick didn’t really get kicked in the face, he still needs to respond by falling down.
Every time Hulk Hogan did his leg drop, he was literally landing on his ass, and today his hips and spine are really fucked up because of that. Every time a wrestler does something like that, it hurts. If they do it four or five nights a week–which they have to do in WWE if they want to keep their jobs–it takes a big toll.
@The Bad Ry: You may be onto something there. John Cena and Brock Lesnar are both guys who win most of their matches, and usually when they lose it’s because of cheating or other shenanigans. (See Brock’s last loss to Taker.)
The difference is that Cena is winning every week, whereas Brock wins every three months or so. The result is that lots of people are tired of Cena (even with him expanding his move set this year) while those same people still think Brock is awesome.
@El Acordeonachi: They could make plenty of new stars if they wanted to, but it won’t happen as long as Vince is still in charge.
For example, Kevin Owens. Owens was red-hot when he made his debut on Raw and called out John Cena. People fucking LOVED Kevin Owens, and they loved him even more when he did something that very few people have been able to do: defeated John Cena clean, just by being the better wrestler that night.
If they had ended things there and had both Owens and Cena move on to other things, then Owens might be in the main event picture right now. He could have been ten times as over as he currently is.
HOWEVER, following Cena’s loss to Owens, Vince noticed that people were suddenly not buying as much Cena merch as they had been. He panicked.
Now, he could have tried to sell Kevin Owens merch to make up for that, and he could have kept making Owens look strong to create demand for K.O.’s t-shirts and stuff.
But no, what he did instead was to have Owens face Cena again, and get beaten. And then, to prove once and for all that Cena was great and try to get everybody to buy his stupid shirts again, they had a third match which ended with Cena beating Owens again, via submission.
Cena should be putting everybody over at this point in his career, instead of going over everybody.
I think that with the death of kayfabe, and the general acceptance of pro wrestling as a performance, many people assume that the effort displayed is as unreal as the combat (when, as several people have said better than I could, the effort needed to make a fake fight look good is substantial), and so when one of these “fake” athletes voices legitimate complaints about the very real effort and very real injuries that are a part of their daily job, the fans dismiss them as whining over something “fake.”
“Cena should be putting everybody over at this point in his career, instead of going over everybody.”
If Cena puts over everybody, it eventually means nothing. That’s what has happened with Jericho, and even Orton to a lesser extent.
Cena should lose about as often as he currently does (1-3 clean losses a year), but:
1. When someone like Owens beats him, don’t do immediate rematches where Cena wins.
2. Don’t have him face and beat the actual Champ.
3. Don’t have him face and beat the guys you want to push huge. Save the match to give the other guy that final rub.
This is basically exactly how they handled Punk and Bryan, and their wins over Cena put them into the stratosphere.
@William O’Brien: Well, I don’t mean Cena should literally job to everybody, or even the majority of the WWE roster.
But when you reach a certain age, you ought to help create the next crop of stars by putting them over instead of staying in the spotlight yourself. Terry Funk did that. I know that Funk was significantly older than Cena when he did, but Cena is still past his prime and we have no idea how much longer he can keep going. The smart thing to do is to give younger stars some wins over him while he’s still able to wrestle.
Actually in the case of New Japan, the number is closer to 125-150 matche a year, not counting certain guys being loaned out ot other companies for big events or inter-promotional tournaments (which can up that number to the 175-200 nights a year).
MGK, I agree with your general argument, but I think you have bad data with regards to Sammartino vs. Punk.
I don’t consult the Cagematch database often, but I believe it’s lacking a lot of data. None of them are perfect, but the most complete and accurate (as far as I can tell) is wrestlingdata.com, which I use all the time. It’s really useful any time you get so fascinated with some aspect of wrestling that you want to examine the conventional wisdom vis a vis the available data.
For an 11-year stretch, Bruno Sammartino wrestled over 100 and sometimes over 200 matches a year; he averaged 163 matches per year from 1960 to 1970. From 2006 to 2013, Punk worked an average of 150 matches per year during that 8-year period (and I chose that range to inflate Punk’s average).
However, setting aside that Punk mentioned him in a promo, Bruno makes for a particularly harsh comparison—a legendarily popular and active champion, so popular that the reason his match totals drop off after 1970 is that he wanted to retire, but Vince Sr. needed him back and negotiated a much lighter schedule focused on larger venues.
Not only is there a world of difference between the style that Bruno worked and the style Punk worked, the expectations for wrestlers are different. Punk himself was a particularly lean WWE wrestler, but as a general rule WWE wrestlers are expected to have bodybuilder physiques (not to mention the tanning and body hair grooming that goes with it). I’m sure that wrestlers in Bruno’s day were hard-pressed to maintain an athletic physique while working many dates and traveling from venue to venue by car, but they weren’t expected to look like Image Comics characters from the 90s, and steroids were not ubiquitous.
I’m thrilled to live in a world where an online wrestling database exists.