Jim’s WrestleMania post yesterday noted that “fans have been hoping that [John] Cena will turn heel since 2005″ and he isn’t wrong about that. Well, mostly not wrong. I was perfectly content to have Cena be a face; he works as a face, after all, there’s no question about that. He drives ratings, sells merch, inflates ticket sales and generally gets the job done as top face in the promotion, even though half of the fans love to boo him (which he cheerfully acknowledges).

As late as last year, I was still of the opinion that Cena should have remained a face. Certainly when Cena was playing the principled face opponent to the surging CM Punk in 2011, he was doing it note-perfectly. But my opinion changed at about WrestleMania 28, because the Cena/Rock match was set up for Cena to be the de facto face (playing the “I’ve been here all along and the Rock takes off and goes and makes movies” card, which worked to make Rock a heel in his last major WWE run) and it did not work. Maybe it could have worked if the Rock/Cena feud last year had been done in anything more than the most perfunctory and slapdash way, but it didn’t.

Since then, Cena’s character has gotten more hypocritical and smug as the year progressed: openly bullying heels, calling out CM Punk (who was turned heel because, well, someone had to be the promotion’s top heel, and he’s good at that, and they weren’t going to turn Cena) in totally bullshit ways, whining about his “terrible year” where he main-evented ten of twelve PPVs despite not holding any titles. The boos have gotten louder and louder, and I don’t think they haven’t noticed that. I think, in fact, they were very delicately testing the waters for a heel run for Cena.

But there are more pragmatic reasons to turn John Cena heel at this time that did not previously exist. For one: John Cena is nearly 36, and the past year has shown that, despite nigh-magical advances in sports medicine and care on the WWE’s part to reduce injuries as time has progressed, that even Cena -legendarily an ironman performer – is starting to show the rigors of age. He is no longer in his prime. This is not to say he is bad or even lessened; he is simply more vulnerable, and that makes a difference. And it will keep on making a difference as time progresses. Assuming that Cena is wise enough to not pursue the Ric Flair route of “wrestle until you are dead because you blew all your money multiple times over” – which he most likely is – he’s probably got about five good years left in him.

That means the time to start finding the Next John Cena is now. Fans like to bandy about the usual set of names, but most of these names are wrong simply because they are too old to take over as top dog when Cena’s day is done. Alberto Del Rio is 35, Sheamus is 36, Dolph Ziggler 32, Randy Orton 33, CM Punk 34, Ryback and Daniel Bryan both 31. In five years’ time, they will all be somewhere along the pathway to retirement, or at least to part-time Undertaker-like status where they only wrestle rarely at WrestleManias and the like. That’s also most of the top half of the WWE roster. There are a few prominent names in their mid-to-late twenties – most notably Cody Rhodes and the three members of the Shield – but they are a distinct minority on the current roster.

This isn’t necessarily a problem – after all, John Cena took about three or four years to become JOHN CENA (although he started on the main roster at a relatively young age). But if you want to build a top face, you can’t have two of them. (The WWE tried to deal with this with their “split the RAW and Smackdown brands” idea, which never really worked in practice.) And this is the second reason to turn Cena heel: while he’s a face, building the next big face is more difficult.

But there’s also the third reason, which is that from a storytelling standpoint, John Cena is effectively out of storylines as a face. He’s literally done all of them. He can’t play the underdog role because he’s not the underdog and can’t ever be one again; he’s had his dominant championship runs; he’s feuded with the company, with top heels, with bottom heels, done stupid romance storylines, all of them. They weren’t all good, but he’s done them all. He is one year away from tying Hulk Hogan for “longest run as a top face” and there are no other companies to which he can realistically go to stay fresh because the WWE killed the last major opposition over ten years ago. (TNA does not count. Sorry, folks, it doesn’t.) And Hogan was staler than Cena was at the equivalent point in his face run. It was a large reason he turned heel, after all.

At this point, a heel run for Cena will give him new stories, allow breathing room for new top faces and would, I think, be enthusiastically welcomed by fans (who may boo him, but generally respect his abilities even if they don’t like the character). Even last year it might not have been the right time; now, I think it is. Of course, none of the factors that would make a heel turn click at this point are hard rules and Cena can stay a face forever and it won’t hurt business particularly. But there’s a solid case to be made that he shouldn’t.

Say this for World Wrestling Entertainment–by booking their schedule around big names who only appear a few times a year, they’ve turned Wrestlemania into a star-studded spectacle AND a show you can watch without knowing anything that’s been going on since the last Wrestlemania.  That might work out for them if they ever get going with their plan to move the rest of their shows to a proposed wrestling cable network.  Although, at $69.99 for the HD broadcast, they’d better hope the Rock and Undertaker don’t retire until they’re seventy.

THE ROCK vs. JOHN CENA

After Rock beat Cena at last year’s Wrestlemania, he vowed to win the WWE championship.  Which he did, so naturally Cena ended up becoming #1 contender.  This match only exists so Rock can give Cena his win back, so it’ll be big on spectacle and short on unexpected twists or innovations on the first match.  Keep an eye on crowd reaction for this match, because the internet has largely declared they didn’t need to see this again, and I’m curious whether the live crowd feels the same way.

Cena has done some interesting promos suggesting he’s gone Captain Ahab about losing last year, so many fans are hoping he’ll somehow turn heel.  However, fans have been hoping Cena will turn heel since 2005 to no avail, so I wouldn’t hold my breath.

TRIPLE H vs. BROCK LESNAR

I was underwhelmed by their previous match at Summerslam, until I realized they were probably holding back to save something for this, the rematch.  The stipulation is that if HHH loses he will be forced to retire, but he was already sort of retired so that’s really a non-issue.

This is a classic example of a fake wrestling match being intriguing because the real writers are painted into a corner.  They’re paying Brock a lot of money–too much money to have him lose all the time–but Hunter is one of their most protected stars and it feels like it’s time for him to get his revenge on the bad guy.  I’m hoping this match will be a wild brawl that keeps me guessing as to the winner.

THE UNDERTAKER vs. CM PUNK

Undertaker spent the last four Wrestlemanias having match of the year candidates with Shawn Michaels and Triple H, so the pressure is on Punk to prove he can deliver similar results. Unfortunately, the storytelling headed into this match hasn’t been on par with Taker’s last four programs.  WWE ran “somebody steals Undertaker’s magic urn” into the ground about eighteen Wrestlemanias ago, so I am less than enthused about seeing it CM Punk do it.

Punk wants to break Taker’s undefeated streak the cheap way, by agitating him into a making a mistake or getting disqualified.  Undertaker wants to hurt Punk so badly that he’s stopped giving a shit about preserving the streak.  So the psychology of this match is going to be critical, in that each man is trying to make the other blink, which is fitting since both of them look like they have never slept in their lives.

ALBERTO DEL RIO vs. JACK SWAGGER

Del Rio is the World champion.  (See, Rock is the WWE champion of the world, and Del Rio is the World champion of WWE, or something like that.  It’s better than the BCS, so shut up.)  WWE really wants to have a heroic Mexcian wrestler to appeal to Latino markets, so they hired Del Rio and…booked him as a bad guy for three years.  But now he’s a good guy.  Yay!  Also Jack Swagger is an evil Know-Nothing who hates Mexcians.  Boo!

To give you an idea of how little fans care about this match or its participants, the main intrigue is whether the winner will immediately be challenged by Dolph Ziggler.  See, Ziggler has a magic briefcase that says he can wrestle the champion whenever he wants, without warning.  (Still better than the BCS!)  He has until July to use the thing, but if he doesn’t want to win the world title at Wrestlemania he has to be the stupidest character in wrestling since Kamala, the wrestling cannibal who didn’t know you’re supposed to pin people face-up.  So ultimately Del Rio vs. Swagger is mostly about whether Dolph Ziggler is an idiot.

RANDY ORTON & SHEAMUS & THE BIG SHOW vs. THE SHIELD

The Shield is the team of Dean Ambrose, Seth Rollins, and Roman Reigns, who exploded out of developmental last year to debut as a trio of badass ass-kickers who ambush and destroy anybody they want.  WWE’s new policy of introducing new wrestlers as actually being awesome has really paid off with these guys.  So they’re fighting the three tippy-toppest guys that didn’t make it into the main events, and I favor the Shield to win.

The psychology of the Shield’s matches is that they like to outnumber their opponents, but even when it’s three-on-three their superior teamwork overwhelms the other team.  The new factor this time is Big Show, so it’s more like three-on-three-and-seven-eighths.  Look for the Shield to prove that won’t help by doing some impressive triple-team attacks on the giant.

Fans have been speculating that Randy Orton will turn heel during this match, but fans have been expecting Randy Orton to turn heel since 2011, so I wouldn’t hold my breath.  (Fans sort of want everybody to turn heel for some reason.)

MARK HENRY vs. RYBACK

Mark Henry is my favorite wrestler right now, because he’s a big mean man who looks like Action Hank if he ate Clubber Lang and absorbed his super powers.  Ryback is the biggest, meanest man in WWE who is not currently a bad guy, so it made sense for these guys to have a short, explosive fight at this show.  I keep hearing that they’ve been wrestling each other on tour and reviews are not good, but the kind of nerds who review house show matches are not the kind of people who appreciate a good Mark Henry match, so screw that.

CHRIS JERICHO vs. FANDANGO

Fandango is a new wrestler who gets mad when people don’t say his name right.  And he dances.  That is his entire character.  Chris Jericho used to mispronounce his opponents’ names all the time, so I suppose these two are logical enemies.  I can’t shake the feeling that Jericho will win in thirty seconds to kill off the character, but I’m sure I’m in the minority on that.

DANIEL BRYAN & KANE vs. DOLPH ZIGGLER & BIG E LANGSTON

Last year Daniel Bryan and Kane both dated AJ Lee, and then after she dumped them both they went to therapy and became a goofy, dysfunctional tag team.  Now AJ is dating Dolph so he has to fight her exes.  Think of it as a fanfic as written by the WWE shippers on Tumblr.  Langston is involved mainly so the tag team championship can be at stake, and so we can call them “Ziggy and Big E.”  I don’t know who will win, but I’m hoping AJ splits with Dolph because she’d be better off dating Langston.  I call my pairing “AJ+E=<3,” in case you were wondering.

BRODUS CLAY & TENSAI & NAOMI & CAMERON vs. CODY RHODES & DAMIEN SANDOW & BRIE BELLA & NIKKI BELLA

Brodus’s team (the good guys) is two chubby guys and their hot cheerleaders, and Cody’s team (the bad guys) is two guys with weird facial hair and their bland interchangeable girlfriends.  When a match at Wrestlemania has more than six people in it, it tends to be a short, throwaway affair, so I’m not expecting anything out of this.  I wouldn’t be surprised if this gets bumped down to the pre-show.

WADE BARRETT vs. THE MIZ

This is already set for the pre-show.  They’ll be wrestling for Barrett’s intercontinental championship, which is such a prestigious accolade that the other twenty-six men on this show are all more important than it.  Essentially they’re both jobbers fighting to determine which of them is the King of the Jobbers, and is worthy enough to lose to Randy Orton on Smackdown every week.

Are here, for your reading pleasure.

Are now up for your viewing pleasure here. The “best of” awards, which will generally be more positive and friendly and cuddly and encourage us all to be better, will be up tomorrow.

Today is the last day to vote in the 2012 Rec.sport.pro-wrestling Awards! So if you started a vote and did not finish it, or if you haven’t voted at all (and this assumes that you like pro wrestling, of course), get on that, because there are a number of races right now that are very close and a couple more where a last-minute strong showing by one candidate could cause a major upset. DRAMA!

(Also, we have received very few voter submissions for comments, so you all still have the opportunity to have your opinions IMMORTALIZED ON THE INTERNET along those of such luminaries as myself, Chris Sims, Brandon Stroud of Best and Worst of Raw, and Danielle Matheson of Best and Worst of Impact. Anything I find particularly insightful or funny about your votes I will probably use, so send them along to this email.)

So for those of you who do not follow wrestling: the Rock is back, and he is feuding with CM Punk. For some net.savvy wrestling fans, this is sort of problematic, because normally when INTARNET FAVRIT CM Punk is feuding with another wrestler, it is usually someone the internet does not like so much, like John Cena or Ryback. But the internet wrestling fandom is fond of the Rock, because the Rock, back in the day, was quite a fun wrestler before he went off to make movies. So this leads internet wrestling writers to write things like this if they do not like the Rock, or at least if they like CM Punk much better than the Rock. (Which people generally should. See this famous 2011 promo. Or this one from last week, now that he is a bad guy again, which is arguably even better.)

Last night on Raw, the Rock did his Rock Concert. Which is a nice way of saying that the Rock came out with his guitar and sung songs that were full of third-grade-level insults. It was a real “oh man nobody come into the room and see me watching wrestling right now” sort of moment, of the sort I normally only experience whenever Jerry Lawler opens his stupid fucking mouth to babble about pretty girls or make lame ethnic jokes.¹ At first, I thought the worst bit would be when the Rock started making fat jokes about Paul Heyman, but then Rock decided to sing about how Vickie Guerrero is an ugly bitch whore. (No, quite literally.)

It is 2013. There is just no excuse for this crap any more. Not when you can see men and women wrestling against one another like equals:

(Seriously, watch the whole thing, it’s fucking awesome.)

But the worst bit of it is that the Rock should know better. He’s not a stupid man, nor is he particularly Neanderthalic in his social attitudes (as his role choices, candid interviews and general public persona have made apparent over the years). You don’t need to call Vickie Guerrero an ugly bitch whore when you can point out that she (well, her character, but you get the point) is selfish, conniving, egotistical, hypocritical and just plain mean. You don’t need to call Paul Heyman “Twinkle Tits” (which, coming from the Rock, who famously had pectoral surgery to get rid of his man-boobs early in his career, is a little… okayyyyyy) when you can point out that he is two-faced, dishonest, and always looks out for Number One above all else. You can mock people like a grownup.

1. Seriously, I am glad Jerry Lawler did not die from his heart attack. You know what he should do now? Take it easy on his heart and fucking retire forever. [↩]

Voting is now open for the 2012 rec.sport.pro-wrestling awards.

Following the nominations period, we have compiled all of the nominations into pulldown menus to make voting faster and easier (since the pulldown menus should include most, if not all, of the most popular candidates for each award), while still allowing for write-in votes for those who don’t see their favorite choices as nominees. (Write-in votes are equal in value to nominated votes, for those wondering.) We’ve also used TECHNOLOGY to let you save your ballot and return to it later, if need be. We’ve also given fans the opportunity to include their own commentary on their voting choices for each award or just The State of Wrestling in General in 2012, if you like: those comments can be sent to rspw@mightygodking.com.

(Also we did images because it is 2013 and maybe we should have pictures on our internet, how about that.)

The deadline for getting votes in is January 23, 2013. We’ll hope to have the results up before the end of January.

All thanks are due to :

• James “The MGKDotCom Tech Guy” Young for helping set this up
• Justin Henry and Mad Conservative Crimefighter for keeping the RSPW Awards alive as well as helping us set up the nominations process this year
• Herb Kunze, Christopher Robin Zimmerman, and everybody else who ran the Awards in previous years
• Scott Keith, Brandon Stroud, Chris Sims, Pudie from Wreddit, and everybody else who was eager to assist in getting the word out on this year’s Awards
• and you! Because you’re special.

Pleased to announce that mgkdotcom is now the sort-of-official tabulation site for the 2012 rec.sport.pro-wrestling Awards, the oldest and awesomest wrestling fan-awards tradition going on the internet.

Nominations have started now and we are open for business there; voting begins January 1.

DECEMBER 8 UPDATE: Due to overwhelming response, we are publishing the first iteration of the current nominations list ahead of schedule! You can see it here. (Now please, stop nominating CM Punk for Best Wrestler. We’ve got it covered. Believe us.)

To start off, I want to make a quick plug for Pro Wrestling X, a video game that’s been in development for over ten years, whose developers are doing a Kickstarter fundraiser to for the money needed to complete the project.  I don’t know if they’re gonna get up to 75 grand by next week, but I believe in what they’re trying to do, and I hope they someday address some of the issues I’m about to list.

Anyway, like many wrestling fans I’ve spent the past month playing WWE ’13, and it’s been a lot of fun.   Still, I can’t help but notice that my “wish list” for features in the next game is virtually unchanged from last year, and the dozen or so years before that.  The progress from Wrestlemania Challenge to War Zone to No Mercy has stagnated, and fans are left to basically buy the same game every year with a new roster.  I could probably be okay with that, if not for the following thirteen sticking points:

13) I need new foreign objects, and a cup of soda isn’t good enough.  Steel chairs, kendo sticks, and sledgehammers are fine, but it seems like we could add in some new stuff one of these days.  It’s been years since I’ve been able to waffle a guy with a fire extinguisher, let alone spray it all over him.  Other weapons that would be awesome: chains, baseball bats, thumbtacks, and Mad Dog Vachon’s artificial leg.

12) Apparently midgets and giant fat guys are too unrealistic for pro wrestling.  I haven’t yet tried to make Giant Haystacks, but past experience suggests I won’t be able to get him any bigger than Husky Harris.  The minimum height for a create-a-wrestler is around 5’2″, which is a bit silly since the game is based on a property that heavily features a little person playing an insane leprechaun.  I realize allowing extreme sizes plays hob with the grappling animations, but since those haven’t changed much in 15 years you’d think the developers could experiment a little.

11) I guess nobody at THQ has ever seen facial hair.  There are dozens of bears, mustaches, and sideburns available in the game, and most of them look like your wrestler’s face was dusted for fingerprints.  If you’re trying to make “The Boogie Woogie Man” Jimmy Valiant he’s gonna end up looking more like one of the Fabulous Ones.

10) Why can’t I walk to the ring with my title belt hanging out of my pants like a penis?  Credit where credit’s due, WWE ’13 has a very nice interface for creating your entrance in exacting detail.  You can customize the lighting, the music, the pyro…but if you’ve won a championship, you can’t see any of that stuff.  Instead you walk out with one of a dozen fairly bland entrances that allow a belt to be rendered on your waist.  Actually, the belts float in the air in a circle five inches wider than your waist.  Yeah.

9) Minigames.  I hate these.  If you want to kick out of a pin, refuse to say “I quit,” or answer a ten-count, you have to get your timing just perfect and press the X button at the right time.  Either I can always get the timing right (meaning I could survive being hit by a car) or I never can (meaning I could get beaten with one armdrag).  It’s stupid because the experience in no way simulates the feeling of overcoming adversity to keep fighting.  On the other hand, the submission hold minigame–which as near as I can tell involves frantically mashing buttons–feels very much like I am struggling to survive, and I’m a big fan of that.

8) There are more championships than wrestlers.  THQ is very fan-friendly when it comes to providing alternatives to the current championship belts in WWE.  If you don’t like the WWE title with the spinning logo, you can use Steve Austin’s custom belt, or the old school ’80s version–or you can make your own belt with a lavender strap like the Ultimate Warrior did.  The only problem is that now you’ve got fifteen world champions.  What they should have done is set it up where there’s exactly one WWE championship, but the champion can wear one of fifteen belts.  They actually did it that way a few years ago, so I have no idea why they screwed it up this time.

7) Demolition isn’t in every game, but Jack Swagger is.  This is more a beef with the sorry state of wrestling than with wrestling video games.  Every new game has the current roster in it, and that used to be a selling point because the latest roster tended to be the best roster.  Nowadays, though, WWE ’13′s biggest selling point is that half the roster is made up of legends from 1998.  Which is great, except that it makes you wonder why the other half of the roster can’t be all-stars too.  Who the hell is buying these games to play as David Otunga, or John Laurinaitis, or Santino Marella?

6) The commentary sucks and you can’t turn it off.  There are sound options in the game, and I immediately turned “voice volume” down to 0.  Doesn’t help.  You still hear the same robotic lines that Michael Cole and Jerry Lawler have been reciting for years.

5) “AS GOD AS MY WITNESS, HE IS BROKEN IN–and he’s back up!”  Nobody stays down.  Ever.  You can be wrestling frigging Hunico, hit him with your finisher, throw him off the top of Hell in a Cell, and do a Superfly splash onto him from 20 feet in the air…and he will still be back on his feet within thirty seconds.  There’s no room to breathe in these matches–you have to stay on the offensive constantly to stay alive–and that makes it overly difficult to do any really fun spots.  I’ve always wanted to beat down my opponent, throw him onto the announce desk, and then do a crazy dive on him from a ladder set up in the ring.  But I’ve never been able to do that because as soon as I set up the ladder he’s knocking it down, and as soon as I get him on the desk he’s coming around to jump back off.

4) They still can’t do group entrances right!  You can set up Road Dogg and Billy Gunn as a team in the New Age Outlaws, but you can’t set up the New Age Outlaws as a part of D-Generation X.  Of course, if you could do that, Road Dogg and Billy would do their team entrance acting like Triple H and Shawn Michaels, because DX can only do one team entrance regardless of which two guys are entering.  The game has a few custom entrances designed for a male tag team and their female valet, but those only work if they’re all wrestling.  This is kind of a nitpicky thing, but it baffles me that after all these years and all these souped-up consoles, they still couldn’t do Randy Savage and Elizabeth’s entrance right if they tried.

3) It is entirely too hard to write “DUSTY SUCKS EGGS” on a T-shirt.  All right, so my brother broke his leg last month, and I came down for Thanksgiving to play WWE ’13 with him.  So being the loving sibling that I am, I wanted to make my create-a-wrestler a shirt that says “I BROKE BUTTDAWG’S LEG,” in the tradition of Greg Valentine’s feud with Wahoo McDaniel.  So I go in to edit the shirt, and I add lettering.  “I…” nuts, I can’t make a space, I have to stop and make the next word a separate layer.  “B-R-O-K-E…” this is so tedious.  “B-U-T-T-D-A-W-G-,-S…”  Wait, I can’t even make a damn apostrophe?  I’m not even getting into the hassle of resizing the text to fit in the shirt.  Suffice to say it would almost be easier to go to the mall in the ’80s and make an actual tacky custom shirt.

2) At no point do I feel like I am in a real fake wrestling match.  WWE ’13 has some real improvements in chain wrestling and reversing holds, but it still feels nothing like wrestling a match, in the fake world of WWE.  My finishing move never finishes the match.  Big dramatic high spots are exactly as effective as doing a simple suplex.  Nobody taps out to the anklelock–you have to do it nine times before the other guy even starts to sell his leg.  Ladder matches never see crazy stacked-up-ladder spots, because the ladders always get knocked down before that can happen.  If I hit a guy with a steel chair, he always gets right back up, and the ref always sees it.  I read the game has a special referee mode, and if you’re the referee and you don’t follow the rules, you’re ejected from the match, which has happened approximately zero times in the history of special referee matches.  In many ways THQ’s wrestling games have done a fair job simulating a real combat sport, but since this is pro wrestling, that kind of misses the point.

1) It’s two-thousand twelve and I can’t get seven people on the screen at the same time.  I don’t mean to be unfair–I realize that there are technical limitations that cause the program to slow down when too many guys are moving around in the ring.  Thing is, I realized that in 2001, when it was a technical limitation on the Playstation Two.  You’d think at some point somebody would invent some awesome graphics chip that would let you do a ten-man Survivor Series match, or at least do a six-man with an actual referee in the ring.  I’m pretty sure other sports games would not be content to settle–I don’t hear about Madden NFL featuring only two offensive linemen because it’d be too difficult to render all eleven players in a team.  And yet THQ seriously wants me to believe I can get by with just Three Horsemen.

My friend Jonathan Balofsky wanted to comment on something re: the internet and WWE, and it ties into a longer post I’ve been wanting to write, so take it away, Jon:

Recently, New York Post sportswriter Phil Mushnick once again took aim at the WWE and Vince McMahon over the large number of wrestlers to have died before the age of 45, in an attack on the organization on the eve of RAW 1000. Mushnick has argued in various articles that even though some performers died after leaving WWE, WWE was a large contributor to their deaths (calling the company a death mill), citing among others, Brian Pillman.

This took me ten minutes on Google to research with some assistance from the commenters at wrestlinginc. Maybe it’s time for journalists to do more serious research before they make disrespectful accusations.

Saying that a sportswriter is a hack is kind of a truism: most sportswriters are hacks, after all, and the list¹ is in many ways stupid and frivolous, as demonstrated above. However, the list is a bit self-serving.

I don’t buy the “partially responsible” argument with respect to steroid deaths like Curt Hennig or Davey Boy Smith, though, by saying “well, they wrestled other places too!”². Here is the simple truth: Vince McMahon is a bodybuilder. He always has been, and he wants his wrestlers to be muscular guys, which is why for decades he turned a blind eye to drug use by practically everybody’s admission (and, depending on who you believe, did far more than turn a blind eye). Before the WWF’s rise to prominence, professional wrestlers were not nearly so muscular, ripped and toned – and then they were everywhere because Vince set the national standard and the matching set of expectations as to what wrestlers were supposed to look like. (Eddie Guerrero went from being a slim, muscular man in WCW to a ripped, much bigger man in the WWF.) There is just no way that Vince (and by extension the WWE) does not bear some ethical and moral responsibility for that. Even if they have gone a long way to try and make amends for it by putting together a more coherent testing regime – well, there’s a reason you make amends in the first place.

But the real reason Vince bears responsibility for all those deaths is simple: Vince McMahon has always, always been controlling of the wrestlers he employs, and never missed a chance to exploit them. This recent interview says it more simply than I ever could:

MCMAHON: Our talent is taught not to be prima donnas, to be on time and know their lines. And quite frankly, people in Hollywood, once they see what we do, they are amazed. Our talent doesn’t demand the biggest trailer or a certain amount of grape juice or whatever the hell it is. Our talent is extremely flexible and knows how to act, so it’s a logical extension for them.

Vince McMahon: always willing to explain why it’s a good thing when your employees – whose effort and, yes, pain you have spent a lifetime profiting from – know not to get uppity.

But seriously, the WWE’s attitude towards its employees has gotten better only insofar as Vince is willing to avoid having them die young. Which is not to say he is an inhuman monster who revels in his wrestlers’ suffering, because that would be stupid; I am quite sure that Vince genuinely wishes his employees to be as happy and healthy as possible. But the key word here is “possible,” and the WWE’s well-wishing doesn’t extend to actually employing the wrestlers directly (since that would increase the company’s liability) or directly providing them with health insurance (too expensive). It’s quite true that most wrestlers will say quite willingly that Vince always treated them well and the WWE was a great place to work, and I would imagine most of them are being honest about that – but then again, how would we know? Because every wrestler who doesn’t want to burn bridges with the largest employer in wrestling isn’t going to trash-talk them.³ The WWE hires wrestlers long-term, gives older and semi-retired wrestlers jobs as trainers, road agents, producers – and there are of course the “legends contracts” where retired wrestlers are effectively paid to be retired wrestlers. They all know what happened to the wrestlers who did burn bridges; every few years there’s another cautionary tale, and most of them don’t end up on their feet like Jesse Ventura did.

People who know me know that I generally tend to side with labour when it comes to labour/management disputes, and nowhere else is this more the case than in pro sports, where the labour is the entire reason the product exists even moreso than anywhere else. Pro wrestling isn’t quite as pure in this regard because of its scripted nature, but even so: it is quite obviously the case that the wrestlers drive the product. Regardless of how much credit you want to give Vince for the success of the WWE⁴ the fact remains that nobody is gonna pay money just to watch the McMahon family soap opera without there being wrestling to drive the product.

Vince’s attitude, though, isn’t unique to him (unfortunately). It’s another example of what Dave Lartigue recently discussed in his excellent post yesterday: management wins when the argument that labour has no inherent worth is conceded. Of course Vince is going to celebrate that his talent isn’t “prima donnas” who don’t want to be treated specially like other actors: anything that diminishes the value of labour and accepts, as a given, that workers aren’t going to assert their equality of value to management is going to be celebrated in management culture. And that’s a problem, because the Vince-as-god belief system has become inherent to wrestling (with people mostly forgetting the 1993-1995 period when the company was at least within the danger zone of going under), and so long as the management/labour relationship is that unbalanced, there’s always going to be problems no matter how beneficient a dictator the manager may be.

At least nowadays the problems mostly aren’t people dying, and that’s certainly a good thing. But it’s setting an awfully low bar to pass, isn’t it?

1. Which appears to be a compilation of wrestler deaths that Mushnick has complained about over the years, and which I won’t bother reproducing or linking – go find a dirtsheet site if you like. [↩]
2. Which is one Vince McMahon has made a few times in an attempt to mitigate PR damage. [↩]
3. At least, not anywhere it will get reported back. [↩]
4. And he deserves credit – despite the failure of the World Bodybuilding Federation. And ICOPRO. And the XFL. And his various attempts to build separate wrestling brands. I suspect we’ll add Tout to this list in a few years. [↩]