This is the Call for Nominations for the 2016 Theszie Awards.

To nominate candidates for all categories, you may use this form. Nominations are due by December 31, 2016.

To see a list of current nominees, click here.

Finally, to see previous years’ results, click here for 2015, here for 2014, here for 2013, here and here for 2012, and here for most historical awards.

Tonight, a short streetcar ride from my home in downtown Toronto, my boyfriend and I are going to see a live WWE event. I’ve been to a total of two in the past – the first time was in Peterborough, Ontario, sometime in 1989 or 1990, and the second an NXT event in Brooklyn last summer.

The tour stop in Peterborough wasn’t exactly a star-studded event – the headliner that evening was the Honky Tonk Man, and I’m sure I cared more about the possibility of getting a chocolate bar at the concession stand than any actual wrestling. It was very dark and loud inside, and from where we were seated we couldn’t see much. I remember my brother Alex’s disappointment that there weren’t more stars on the card. However it didn’t affect his love of wrestling in the slightest. In the decade and a half that followed, it became the one thing we could talk about. I’m grateful for that.

I don’t quite recall when my brother’s love of professional wrestling began, but by age 6 or so, it was already there, as strong as his love of hockey. He had the figurines, and a replica championship belt. We watched Hulk Hogan’s Rock N’ Wrestling on Saturday afternoons. He used the couch cushions to practice body slams and pile drivers; I allowed him to practice half-nelsons and figure-four leg-locks on me. And, sometimes, on very special occasions, we would go to bed early on Saturday night to be woken up to come downstairs and watch Saturday Night’s Main Event.

We were farm kids, two hours from Toronto; it was a forty-minute drive to the nearest mall. There wasn’t any internet yet, so that meant television, books and magazines were our connection to popular culture and the world at large. In the early 2000s my mom got satellite TV, which meant that pay-per-views could be ordered by phone. This was a huge deal for us and for Alex’ connection to wrestling – before this we had never even had cable. But now Alex could watch RAW, Nitro, Smackdown, and even ECW shows.

By this time I was living in Toronto, studying opera at university. At this point, Alex and I didn’t have very much in common and as a result we didn’t really get along. From the way he spoke to me then, he felt I was a soft and undisciplined dilettante, living it up the big city, spending my student loans on (pfffft) singing. I was in my high-minded early 20s and thought “at least I’m pursuing something specific!” Alex never really found that focus for anything other than wrestling. After high school, he did a year in an agricultural program near Ottawa, and then attended a wrestling school in Cambridge – but he wasn’t built for wrestling. All the guys at the school were big; Alex had less than 10% body fat. He was lean and strong – very strong – from a lifetime of physical farm labour, but it didn’t translate to success in the ring.

I wish it had. I wish he had found a way to make a living in the world he loved so much. I wish he knew that just because he wasn’t cut out to wrestle didn’t mean he wasn’t worthy. He was. But he was in so much pain.

By the mid 2000s, we would end up arguing just about every time I came home to the farm for a weekend or holiday. He was still living at home, working on the farm. The only time we didn’t fight (if we were in the same room) was when wrestling was on. Because I had become a professional performer, I still enjoyed it. (There are more similarities between the opera world and the wrestling world than you might think – although most opera crowds, as a rule, don’t chant at the singers.) I would ask him questions about the wrestlers, about the storylines. We could talk about it and be friendly again, like when we were kids. He’d been reading the wrestling magazines for years and years, but now was reading wrestlers’ autobiographies too, like Mick Foley’s, which I picked up and devoured in a weekend. I hoped we could connect on other levels. There was so much about him I didn’t know, that I hadn’t gotten the chance to learn.

We never got the chance. In April 2007 my brother Alex took his own life. He was twenty-five. We buried him with his championship belt. He was sick and in pain, and chose to end that pain in the only way he thought he could. He left his parents, eight siblings, five nieces and a nephew, and many more he didn’t get to meet. They would have loved him; he would have loved them. He was great with kids: he taught our five year old niece to sing the lyrics from Tom Petty’s “You Don’t Know How It Feels,” and specifically the part where Petty sings “let’s roll another joint,” which made all of us laugh – even Mom, although she pretended to be shocked.

For a few years after his death I felt guilty that we never had the chance to get along better. Did I have the right to grieve when we were always at odds? I felt like he hadn’t liked me since we were kids. He was my brother and I loved him, but I certainly didn’t always like him. We could really be assholes to each other, to be quite honest.

Then, two years ago, I met someone from Twitter for what was technically a blind date. We had a drink at the Imperial Pub near Dundas Square; when I found out that he was a wrestling fan, I ran with it. I name-dropped every 80s wrestler I could, telling him how I remembered Dino Bravo’s baby blue trunks, professing my appreciation for Randy Savage’s use of classical music. To put it mildly, we hit it off great. (He says me name-dropping wrestlers didn’t have that much to do with it, but I think it had to help at least a little.) Eventually I told him about my brother, about how much of a wrestling fan he was, too, and that I hadn’t really paid attention to it since his passing. So he did his best to catch me up. He pulled up a clip of someone named CM Punk cutting a promo that was now wrestling history. And then told me that this guy – his favorite wrestler – was probably not going to come back to the WWE. I missed CM Punk entirely!

In the two years we’ve been dating, I’ve watched more wrestling than in the past fifteen years previous. We went the the NXT event in Brooklyn, which was FANTASTIC. (We bought matching Bayley “I’m A Hugger” T-shirts.) We catch the live broadcasts of PPVs in the theatre or at home on the WWE Network. I still ask a LOT of questions, which Chris seems happy to answer.

This week, with the WWE event that’s happening in Toronto, I’ve been wistful. I’ve been thinking about my brother and how, though they are from vastly different worlds, their shared love of wrestling might have given them a bond. Each time I watch it feel like I’m honouring Alex’s memory in a small way. Tonight when I see Triple H – who was always the wrestler Alex and I could agree we really liked – I will be cheering through tears, wishing we’d had the chance to enjoy it together more – and I’ll be thankful for the man who’s brought it back into my life.

Welcome to the results of the 2015 Theszies / Rec.sport.pro-wrestling Awards.

This year we had 753 voters participating – less than last year, but that was largely because last year we had a large flood of voters from With Spandex and this year WS felt that they didn’t want to campaign overly for the Awards so they limited their linkage to one post. Which meant less voters from them – but more voters coming in from other sites. As always, for next year we encourage all of you wrestling media people to nominate yourselves and your favorites, and try to get your fans out to vote for you. Fair is fair!

As always, thank yous to Justin Henry, Christopher Robin Zimmerman, Herb Kunze and all those who have previously run the Awards and contributed to their legacy; everybody who chipped in to promote the awards; all of you voters, of course; and finally and most importantly an extra-double-sized thanks to mgkdotcom’s Tech Guy, James Young, without whose invaluable assistance these Awards would almost certainly have failed to be anywhere near as successful and user-friendly as they in fact were.

The “Best” Awards can be found here.

The “Worst” Awards can be found here.

And finally, full ballot counts for all Awards can be found here.

Thanks for playing, and we’ll see you next year!

This is the Call for Votes for the 2015 Theszie Awards. You can vote here.

The Theszie Awards are the oldest fan awards in pro wrestling history, going back to 1990 (when Mr. Perfect quite appropriately won Best Wrestler and Junkyard Dog v. Ric Flair at Clash XI won Worst Match). They offer a record of wrestling fan opinion lasting decades, and although we may not agree with some awards in retrospect, what matters is that they offer a snapshot of every year of wrestling as the fans loved it. We think that’s pretty cool.

As usual, 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. We do this strictly to streamline the voting process; this should not be construed as favoritism towards any wrestler for being nominated, as we do not nominate wrestlers ourselves.

(We have edited the nominations to remove some nominations that we thought were inappropriate, mistakes/errors, or unlikely to get enough votes to justify the nomination – for example, someone nominated Adam Rose for Worst Babyface, and whatever one thinks of Adam Rose he turned heel in 2014 and hasn’t been a babyface since – however, this does not mean people cannot vote for those wrestlers in those categories.)

We’ve also used TECHNOLOGY to let you save your ballot and return to it later, if need be. Finally, 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 2014.

A note on category changes: This year, after deliberation, we have removed four categories, three negative and one positive, in order to streamline the voting process further. Most Deteriorated was axed after we decided the category is frankly just depressing; voting for “which wrestler aged the worst” is simply not fun and we don’t need to bother with it. Worst TV/Youtube Show was killed for two reasons: firstly, we killed Worst Promotion in 2013 because we felt it was too generally negative in a broad-brush-tarring sort of way and Worst TV/Youtube Show seemed to have the same problem, and secondly, there really aren’t a lot of truly bad wrestling shows lately so there is insufficient competition.

Finally, we decided to axe Best and Worst Promotional Move. This was the toughest decision since the idea of awards specifically focused on the “business” side of wrestling is appealing. However, in practice, what happens is that most of the time these awards end up being awards for booking decisions and angles, because that’s what common wrestling viewers interact with most regularly. It’s true that a booking decision can be the best possible thing, business-wise, that a promotion does in a given year (for example, pushing Hulk Hogan in 1984 is what turned the WWF into the unstoppable wrestling juggernaut it is today) but these moments are rare, and signing decisions, TV deals, and other things fans don’t have as much familiarity with are, most of the time, more important. Basically, these awards were smark awards in a bad way, so we nuked them. You’re welcome.

The deadline for entering votes is February 7, 2016. Have fun!

This is the Call for Nominations for the 2015 Theszie Awards.

To nominate candidates for all categories, you may use this form. Nominations are due by December 30, 2015.

To see a list of current nominees, click here.

Finally, to see previous years’ results, click here for 2014, here for 2013, here and here for 2012, and here for most historical awards.

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.)

Welcome to the results of the 2014 Theszies / Rec.sport.pro-wrestling Awards.

This year we officially hit 1,000 voters – and I mean exactly 1,000 voters, after we manually eliminated the usual bunch of duplicate/scam voters (seriously, guys, why do you do that, it just makes this all take longer). We came out to exactly one thousand, which is pretty amazing.

For next year, we’re looking at some ways to improve the Awards. We may end up killing some of the “worst” Awards – not all of them, but people are generally less enthusiastic about them, and also it gets boring seeing people use various awards to complain about how much they dislike John Cena (or, presumably, Roman Reigns next year). We’re also looking at ways to streamline the nominations process for at least some of the awards.

Finally, I’d like to thank Justin Henry, Christopher Robin Zimmerman, Herb Kunze and all those who have previously run the Awards and contributed to their legacy; everybody who chipped in to promote the awards; all of you voters, of course; and finally and most importantly an extra-double-sized thanks to mgkdotcom’s Tech Guy, James Young, without whose invaluable assistance these Awards would almost certainly have failed to be anywhere near as successful and user-friendly as they in fact were.

You can find the results for the “Best” Awards HERE.

You can find the results for the “Worst” Awards HERE.

Finally, you can find full ballot counts for all awards HERE.

See you next year!

So last night Triple H appeared on Stone Cold Steve Austin’s wrestling podcast (LIVE ON THE WWE NETWORK ONLY NINE NINETY NINE MAGGLE) and spoke for about an hour, non-kayfabe, about the challenges of booking pro wrestling in an era where everybody who wants to know anything about wrestling can essentially know at least half of everything that goes on backstage. A lot of it was interesting. A lot of it was self-serving, and I don’t mean that in a condemnatory way: Triple H is for all intents and purposes the second-in-command of WWE and protecting himself does, to a certain extent, mean protecting the company as well. (Of course, when asked about CM Punk, HHH did his best to quietly and effectively shift blame back to Punk for the entire situation, and that was mostly crap.)

But what really struck me was when Triple H discussed Chyna, who revolutionized women’s wrestling in the late 90s and who is now effectively stricken from WWE’s history books, more or less, because following her wrestling career she did porn. The question of Chyna was raised because someone wanted Steve Austin to ask about whether she would ever be inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame. Triple H danced verbally around the issue and never said the word “porn” or “adult film” or stated in any way what Chyna did; it was left unspoken or assumed. And he said, more than once, that there wasn’t any issue from WWE’s side and that he wasn’t judging her for her life choices – but what if his eight-year-old kid Googles “Chyna” and finds out about the porn?

This isn’t really about Triple H personally: if you look at how women wrestlers are treated in NXT (which Triple H books and runs) versus how they’re treated on the main roster (which Vince McMahon books and runs), it’s night and day: NXT women are allowed to be full, wide-ranging characters, and prove themselves as wrestlers. RAW Divas are eye candy at worst and at best have a choice of “fun-loving,” “bitch” or “crazy” as their character options, are dismissed or ignored by the announcers and treated as an afterthought, wrestling-wise. Clearly Triple H wants women’s wrestling to be a thing that sells tickets, which is both the progressive option and also the monetarily sensible one, and by any standard he’s clearly the person you want in charge of booking and running women’s wrestling overall in WWE (from the available choices, anyway).

But Triple H also wants it both ways. He wants to say he doesn’t judge Chyna for her “life choices,” but he also wants his ostensibly family-friendly corporation to not extend recognition to a sex worker, which is judging her for her life choices. He’s trying to both be Paul Levesque, who probably feels bad about his ex-girlfriend’s career going south and who probably doesn’t care at all that she decided to do porn (or at least thinks “well, whatever you gotta do, I guess”), and Chief Creative Officer of WWE, who has to care about that a lot.1 It’s a shitty, passive-aggressive way to deal with the issue – and of course we could write an entire essay about the sex/violence double standard with respect to “family entertainment,” and many have, so let’s just say we recognize the cognitive dissonance and move on – and that’s entirely on him. Look: I might not agree with a condemnatory attitude towards sex work, particularly from someone working for a company with a long history of questionable behaviour. But it would have at least been honest to simply say “we can’t celebrate someone who did porn” rather than hedging.

1. Of course, Triple H tries to have it both ways a lot – witness him saying both that wrestlers have to live and breathe the business 24/7, and then right after that say that Bret Hart cares too much about wrestling. Of course, what he really meant is “Bret Hart is a great wrestler, but kind of a humourless dick.” [↩]

So last night the annual WWE Royal Rumble happened and it ended up being an absolute disaster because of the Royal Rumble match – the annual modified battle royale that is one of the most popular events the WWE runs every year, and certainly one of the most anticipated. The short short version is that the wrong guy won the Rumble match and fans were furious. But to reduce it to that level suggests that it’s simply fans throwing a temper tantrum when it’s so much more than that.

Bear with me for a second: for the last month or so, the internet has been Ground Zero for jokes about Mortdecai, the ginormous Johnny Depp flop film. Mortdecai is a wrongheaded move on so many levels: as someone pointed out, it’s essentially a children’s film that happens to have an R rating that’s based on a series of cult British crime thrillers. But Mortdecai is also the product of corporate entertainment culture. Mortdecai is just a symptom of the larger problems with corporate culture taking over the production of entertainment. Lionsgate, when they released Mortdecai, said without irony that they intended for the film to become a franchise. Think about that for a second: they weren’t just hoping for the film to be successful. They were, quite literally, planning for it to be so successful that it could become a staple element of popular culture for decades (at a minimum). They thought they could do this about a wacky movie where the premise is that Johnny Depp wears a stupid moustache.

They did this for the same reason that Disney has three Star Wars films lined up alongside a dozen Marvel movies for the next six years. “Franchises” are more or less reliable, stable revenue generators for movie studios/entertainment companies; they’re the reason that people keep trying to re-start Terminator as a franchise, because you can sell new Terminator movies and TV and whatever with a minimum of explanation. People are familiar with the concept. People will predictably spend money on them. Hollywood wants franchises, because franchises are the definition of cover-your-ass so far as studio executives are concerned; any nimrod in a suit can say “but I had this and this and this and they had always been successful before” when he’s about to get fired, because that gives him the excuse he needs for his next job. That the movies become somewhat more soulless is besides the point.

And if you dislike Mortdecai and make fun of it and it flops – well, from Lionsgate’s perspective that’s not their fault. They tried to create a new franchise, it didn’t work out, these things happen. They’ve still got Hunger Games and most of you will go see Hunger Games movies. Hollywood makes terrible things literally all the time that make tons of money and regardless of people’s complaints about them, they still go. There hasn’t been a single decent Transformers live-action movie; in fact, those movies are legendarily agreed upon to be terrible. Transformers: Age of Extinction got a C grade in Cinemascore (the audience rating thing, the one where any piece of crap can get a B+ without trying hard because audiences will cheerfully say “oh I just turned my brain off and enjoyed the ride”) but it still made over a billion dollars worldwide. So, before we go back to wrestling, let’s make one thing clear: just about everybody spends money on things they suspect they might not enjoy out of a sense of inertia, to some extent.

Okay, now back to wrestling.

WWE went public about fifteen years ago and what we’re seeing the ascension of corporate thought in the most important wrestling company in the world. Brand management is a top priority for this company. Their performers aren’t wrestlers, they’re “Superstars” (or, for the women, “Divas,” because god forbid WWE not be rampantly sexist). It’s not wrestling, it’s “sports entertainment.”1 Individual wrestlers are brands themselves, each successful gimmick providing multiple merchandising and branding opportunities. There is, reliably, a new color of John Cena gear approximately every eight months – new John Cena shirts, new John Cena armbands, new John Cena do-rags, the whole kit and kaboodle, because WWE wants to make sure they maximize the Cena brand. And although not every wrestler can be John Cena, they want every wrestler to perform, merchandising-and-branding-wise, as profitably as possible.

WWE wants wrestlers who will be longterm corporate brands that they can put in video games, cartoons, et cetera. They need John Cena to always be Hustle Loyalty Respect John Cena. But that means they need predictability and stability. And predictability and stability is death to pro wrestling, which is an artform that thrives on chaos. So creating that stability, creating those longstanding stable brands that modern corporate entertainment ideology demands, while still providing the fluidity that pro wrestling fans require to enjoy the form – it’s an intense art. And it’s one WWE simply has not mastered.

For all that I’ve pointed out about John Cena being a brand, it’s worth remembering that, although a lot of hardcore wrestling fans might dislike John Cena – because Cena has been the WWE Top Brand for over a decade, and you get tired of anything after a while, let alone a decade – that his rise to the top was remarkably organic. Certainly WWE wanted Cena to become The Guy: he looks like The Guy should look. But he stumbled through a bad gimmick and then successfully was recast as a comic-relief bad guy. People forget that John Cena’s first real step to becoming SEVENTY BILLION TIME CHAMPION JOHN CENA was a sketch where he dressed up as Vanilla Ice for Halloween.2 In 2005, people wanted John Cena to be the guy. The chants of “John Cena sucks” that you hear today are reactions against the stability and predictability and seemingly endlessly length of John Cena’s reign as Top Guy, rather than against John Cena himself – most wrestling fans who chant “Cena sucks” will readily admit that the guy himself is a fine wrestler who can really work a great match and whose work with Make-A-Wish kids is nothing short of remarkable.

But WWE’s problem is simple: John Cena is turning 38 this year. He’s in the final third of his career now, and WWE needs – or, at least, believes that they need – the next Top Guy, the next predictable, stable brand who can carry their company for the next decade. Enter Roman Reigns.

Now, I don’t want anybody to think I don’t like Roman Reigns. He’s a good wrestler. He has the potential to be a great one. He has The Look, he’s a decent power wrestler who is increasing in skill, he’s shown he can connect with the audience when he needs to, and although his promos are somewhat dreadful at present – to say the least – when he’s given material that isn’t wildly outside his wheelhouse he’s good enough at being a speak-softly-but-carry-a-big-stick total badass. To be frank, if you were going to design a Long Term Wrestling Brand by committee, it would probably look like Roman Reigns: he’s muscular, he’s handsome and sexy, he’s the Rock’s second cousin for god’s sake.

But what WWE did at the Royal Rumble was to pull the wrestling equivalent of releasing Mortdecai.

Because – and this is where we have to go into wrestling arcana for a moment, so bear with me – last year, at the Royal Rumble, everybody who watched wrestling knew it was Daniel Bryan’s year. The WWE had just spent six months writing a great story where Daniel Bryan, the scrappy 5’8″ underdog who just happened to also be the most popular wrestler in the company and also the single best professional wrestler in the world, had been screwed out of the WWE title by the corporate Triple H and Stephanie McMahon for not being, in essence, what they considered a marketable brand. Everybody expected Daniel Bryan to win the Royal Rumble in order to get his title shot at WrestleMania, the biggest show of the year. And instead, what happened is that WWE brought back Batista – who non-wrestling fans might know better as Drax from Guardians of the Galaxy – more or less on the basis that Batista was in movies now so people would love him. Daniel Bryan didn’t even wrestle in the Royal Rumble match.

The fans at last year’s Rumble went apeshit and booed the hell out of the match, out of Batista, and even out of universally beloved babyface Rey Mysterio (on the basis that Rey entered #30, the final slot in the Rumble, and confirmed that Bryan wouldn’t wrestle in the Royal Rumble match.) Ironically, when it came down to Roman Reigns and Batista as the final two in the Rumble match, the fans started cheering intensely for Roman Reigns – who was at the time still a bad guy. Strictly speaking, they weren’t cheering for Reigns. They were condemning the cynical, corporate act of writing a marketable product like Batista to win the Rumble rather than their guy.

Anyway, fans booing the WWE constantly at every arena in the country managed to get them to realize – after only two months! – that MAYBE Daniel Bryan should have been the guy all along, so at the last minute they turned Batista into a corporate heel and inserted Daniel Bryan into the WrestleMania main event, where he won and the crowd went absolutely insane, and WWE managed to turn a massive clusterfuck into what is quite possibly the single best video package the company has ever done.3

Shortly after last year’s WrestleMania, Daniel Bryan got injured and had to spend about eight months in rehab; he came back in time just to announce his entry into the Royal Rumble, and instantly the WWE fanbase knew that they wanted him to win the Rumble again. See, once again there’s a perfect story in place: in the interim since Daniel Bryan got injured and had to vacate the WWE title, Brock Lesnar won it. And nobody can beat Brock Lesnar. So you have the unstoppable monster who’s beat everybody – except the one guy who never lost the title in the first place. On top of that, Brock Lesnar is very likely leaving the WWE after WrestleMania because he’s only in wrestling for the money and he might be able to make more money elsewhere, so you’ve got the storyline that not only can nobody beat Brock, he’s going to take the WWE title with him when he leaves – forcing the evil corporate overlords to have to rely on Daniel Bryan in order to keep the title where it belongs. It practically writes itself.4

But instead of having Daniel Bryan win the Rumble, they eliminated him in a meaningless elimination about halfway through the match. No drama, no build, no story to it. And they did this quite specifically because they had decided that Roman Reigns is a Highly Successful Brand, and they did not want fan anger over Bryan’s elimination to taint the Reigns brand, so they did it as early as possible.

But it didn’t work. Reigns won the Rumble but it didn’t matter because from the time Bryan was eliminated the Philly arena5 absolutely turned on the entire event. They booed everything. They booed Goldust and Stardust turning on each other, they booed Kofi Kingston’s annual stupid elimination spot, and they sure as hell booed Roman Reigns. They booed Roman Reigns so hard that the WWE sent the Rock out to save Roman from a beating and the crowd booed the most popular wrestler in history.

I’m not sure what’s saddest about that GIF – the Rock realizing that the crowd is booing EVEN HIM, or poor Roman Reigns realizing that the plan didn’t work and wrestling fans now hate his guts. Actually, no, it’s Roman, because the Rock has millions and millions of Hollywood dollars, which are better than normal dollars. Roman Reigns, meanwhile, has to deal with the fact that the WWE, after writing an epic storyline where corporate-selected champions were the villains and which trained fans to boo the storyline corporate-selected champions, was so clearly himself a corporate-selected champion that fans had no choice but to boo him.

And that’s why wrestling fans are irate. Wrestling fans, more than any other fan of anything else, prize the idea that they decide who the stars are – which, given the relationship between wrestlers and fans, is not an unreasonable proposition to hold. Last night, in act of pure corporate cynicism, WWE told the fans that their preferences don’t really matter. It’s like if Marvel Studios had released Mortdecai – and then let everybody know that in the next Avengers flick, Mortdecai will join the Avengers and kill Ultron with his moustache. Given that, is it any wonder wrestling fans got pissed?

(A protozoan version of this post originally appeared on Twitter and Storify.)

1. Granted, this phrase was initially a dodge by Vince McMahon to avoid having to satisfy state athletic commission requirements, because if Vince McMahon can find a way to spend less money on keeping his employees safe, he will do that. [↩]
2. Mostly because in the career retrospective videos WWE makes about John Cena these days, they edit that part out, along with how his finisher used to be called the “F-U.” [↩]
3. As an aside: WWE’s video package producers are widely considered to be the gold standard in sports media. They’re ridiculously good at their jobs, especially given the often ludicrous material they have to work with. Take the time to watch that video; it’s amazing work and draws you into the story perfectly. [↩]
4. And here’s one more thing I’m stealing from elsewhere: Daniel Bryan is the ONLY credible challenger to Brock Lesnar. Because you can’t out-brawl Brock Lesnar, you can’t out-MMA Brock Lesnar, you can’t out-power Brock Lesnar, you can’t out-size Brock Lesnar. None of those things work. Historically, the only way you can ever beat Brock Lesnar is to out-professional-wrestle him, to use the tricks of the universe where Irish whips and DDTs are things that actually work – and Daniel Bryan is the best professional wrestler in the world. [↩]
5. It should be noted: Philly fans are some of the most hardcore wrestling fans in the world. [↩]

Voting is now open for the 2014 rec.sport.pro-wrestling Awards – the Theszies! You can vote HERE.

The Theszie Awards are the oldest fan awards in pro wrestling history, going back to 1990 (when Mr. Perfect quite appropriately won Best Wrestler and Junkyard Dog v. Ric Flair at Clash XI won Worst Match). They offer a record of wrestling fan opinion lasting decades, and although we may not agree with some awards in retrospect, what matters is that they offer a snapshot of every year of wrestling as the fans loved it. We think that’s pretty cool.

As usual, 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. We do this strictly to streamline the voting process; this should not be construed as favoritism towards any wrestler for being nominated, as we do not nominate wrestlers ourselves.

(We have edited the nominations to remove some nominations that we thought were inappropriate, mistakes/errors, or unlikely to get enough votes to justify the nomination – for example, someone nominated Aiden English for Best Flyer, and while we might like Aiden English, he’s not exactly a luchador – however, this does not mean people cannot vote for those wrestlers in those categories.)

We have added a new award this year for Best Wrestling Media, to celebrate independent wrestling journalism and commentary. This was done partially because we recognize the importance to the wrestling community of recaps, podcasts and fan reviews, and partially because fan-created media was threatening to completely overwhelm actual wrestling shows produced by wrestling companies in the Best TV/Youtube Show category, and while we’re fans of Botchamania and other shows like it, the work that goes into creating Botchamania is far different than the work that goes into creating a regular original wrestling program. We want fans of these fan-driven shows to be able to celebrate their favorite shows; we just don’t want actual wrestling to be ignored or overlooked in favour of it. Hence the new category.

We’ve also used TECHNOLOGY to let you save your ballot and return to it later, if need be. Finally, 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 2014.

The deadline for entering votes is February 7, 2015. Have fun!

The rec.sport.pro-wrestling Awards are the oldest public-vote wrestling awards on the internet. Dating back to 1990 (when Curt Hennig won Best Wrestler, Scott Steiner’s Frankensteiner won Best Move, and Hulk Hogan versus Earthquake won Worst Feud), the RSPW Awards now span over two decades and are far and away the most comprehensive wrestling awards in wrestling fandom. They are the oldest awards and the best awards. You can see the results of the 2013 Awards (which also contain the entire history of winners in all categories) for the “best of year” awards here and the “worst of year” awards here.

This is the Call to Nominations for the 2014 RSPW Awards. The Nominations phase is not a strict rule of eventual award nominees – if nobody nominates Dean Ambrose for Best Wrestler, for example (let’s say that an apocalypse happens and we’re all too busy for the next month, because that is the only way that will happen on the internet), come time for voting, people can still vote for Dean Ambrose as Best Wrestler. The Nominations are intended, instead, to present voters with a list of suggested candidates to consider when assigning their votes (as voters will vote for a 1st, 2nd and 3rd place in each category).

Maybe when voting for Best Tag Team, you will forget about how great the Young Bucks have been this year (or maybe you don’t watch PWG/RoH/New Japan often enough to know). Maybe you weren’t aware of how much fun CHIKARA is as a promotion, and seeing them nominated causes you to check them out. That’s the point of the nominations: to expose wrestling fans to the wider wrestling universe. Just like the Awards themselves, when you think about it. You can nominate candidates for awards here.

Please note that this year we have added a new category: Best Wrestling Media, for podcasts, websites, magazines, and all other forms of independent pro wrestling-focused journalism.

Nominees are due by December 28, 2014. Awards voting proper will begin on January 1, 2014. A list of current nominees can be found here.

So recently there has been a kerfuffle of sorts, because WWE announced they were bringing the WWE Network to Canada. Now, this should have been a slam dunk, no-miss proposition. Canada has always been a hotbed of wrestling fandom: obvious easy market, obvious profit. Right?

Except that the WWE Network has partnered with Rogers Canada, one of the biggest cable providers in the country, and literally removed every single thing that was good about the Network from the Canadian version. To wit:

I’m not kidding about the lack of back content either. Take a look at this:

(The full list of launch content, incidentally: SummerSlam 1992, 1998, 2000, 2002 and 2005, Great American Bash 1989, Bash at the Beach 1994, 1996 and 1998, ECW Heatwave 1998 and 1999, and ECW One Night Stand 2005.)

So it’s a horrible botch job and Canadians who want the proper WWE Network will just have to not use the American service via a VPN because that would be wrong, but really, we can’t reasonably blame WWE for this, because Rogers owns the TV rights to WWE in Canada and because of that you had to know that, from the get-go, they would come in and ruin the Network for Canadians because it’s Rogers.

See, thanks to the way the Canadian telecommunications industry is regulated and operated, Rogers literally does not have to give a damn. Rogers is one of three companies – the others being Bell and Shaw – that dominates 90% of internet provision in Canada. It is also one of three companies (the others being Bell and Shaw) that dominates television in Canada. Out of the 60 or so channels that make up most “basic premium cable” packages in Canada, the Big Three own thirty-two of them. (Another twelve are American-owned, eight are owned by a corporation called Corus Entertainment, and eight others are either publicly operated or independently owned.) While we’re at it, Bell and Rogers control about 65% of the mobile phone market in Canada (a third company, Telus, controls about another 25%).

These companies don’t have to worry about somebody out-competing them because they have completely regulatory-captured the CRTC (Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission). If you want a mobile phone? There’s no such thing as Bell, Rogers or Telus offering a better rate than the other; down the line, their rates and services are virtually identical. They all have budget carrier brands as well: those match up just the same too. TV services? Barely any measurable difference between the 2-3 options you have anywhere in Canada (usually one of Rogers and Shaw, plus Bell). Internet? Same shit, different day. Most of the “independent” ISPs in Canada are actually re-sellers who buy bandwidth from Bell or Rogers at cost (the big guys are legally forced to offer pipe at cost for resale otherwise they wouldn’t do it) so even if you have an indie ISP like Teksavvy, Bell and Rogers are still getting your money.

The net result of all of this is that internet/TV/wireless in Canada is a bad joke, has been for basically ever, and barring a major sea change in regulatory attitudes it’s never going to change – heck, right now Bell and Rogers are running ads on their own TV and radio stations under the guise of a “consumer advocacy group” that additional competition in their marketplace would “kill Canadian jobs” so they’re loading the deck as we speak. It’s ridiculous and awful and everybody knows it’s ridiculous and awful, but no politician is ever going to campaign on it because did I mention that Bell and Rogers own all those TV channels? Including multiple news channels? Amazing how that works.

So the WWE Network in Canada was always going to suck. Because we can’t have nice things here, not in the telecom sense.

I just recently managed to codify my theory about how pro wrestling is unique as an art form – not just Max Landis’ thingy about why pro wrestling is special, which is notable largely because it is one of the few times where Max Landis is not entirely insufferable, and because it (correctly) connects pro wrestling to performance art. But performance art still exists; pro wrestling is just a commercially successful version of it, and that is not unique.

What is unique about pro wrestling is this: it is the only creative endeavor where the audience affects the work in real time. A long time ago some smart aleck described pro wrestling as “a LARP where the wrestlers are playing athletes and the audience is playing the audience, and everybody’s in on it.” And that’s exactly true. Now, of course, pro wrestling is still a scripted affair and on a case-by-case basis the audience doesn’t usually change the outcome of a story as it happens – although this is something that can happen in retrospect, with the most obvious example being Batista being obviously scripted to be a triumphant returning hero at this year’s Royal Rumble and the crowd instantly turning on him because they had believed they were finally getting the Daniel Bryan push they had demanded – which eventually led to the “Boo-tista” movement, Batista turning into an arrogant heel (because it was the only way to get a crowd reaction they could use) and WWE eventually writing Bryan into the World title match as the fans demanded. But it’s more than just simply cheering for the guys you like and booing the guys you hate; the crowd is an integral part of wrestling now.

Consider, if you will, the Bray Wyatt entrance.

Bray Wyatt is a great character with a great hook, but booing him as a baddy doesn’t exactly work because he’s supposed to be creepy and scary; booing him would, in a way, reduce him, make him something less than the figure of awe he was supposed to be. This tied into his entrance: a slow, creepy walk in darkness, lit by his lantern, with Mark Crozer and the Rels playing in the background. The crowds at first tried to figure out how to properly express their appreciation for this character, because you couldn’t just boo him. An early attempt was slow, measured claps in time with the music, which worked reasonably well but still somehow lacked gravitas. At WrestleMania the company tried to amp up that atmosphere by having Crozer and the Rels perform live, which was certainly a glorious one-off but obviously not replicable on a regular basis.

At some point, though, fans gradually figured out that when their cellphones were on in the darkness during Bray Wyatt’s entrance, they kind of looked like fireflies, and fireflies are nothing if not thematically appropriate for a southern cult leader’s entrance, so they ran with it. And it worked absolutely perfectly – and WWE responded very smartly by rapidly moving to sell very cheap little Bray Wyatt lanterns at their events, so fans would have something to sway with, and so WWE could make a little side money off this phenomenon, and perhaps have light sources which might look a tad more ghostly and spooky on television.

Which led to what we now have every time Bray Wyatt comes out:

This is the thing: no other art form does this. None of them come even close. This is not to say that, say, makers of movies and television and books and comics and every other art form with a narrative bent do not interact with fans, or consider their desires, or even change course if they think they have made a mistake due to fan response. But no other art form engages with its audience at this rate or changes their story and presentation based on fan input in mid-course – not even most other forms of performance art, frankly (a field that can be shockingly static in its presentation and conservative in its refusal to deviate from original intent).

That’s why wrestling is unique, and only one of the reasons it is great.

Here’s your guide to the big show this Sunday. Further brilliant insight and analysis can be found on my wrasslin’ blog.

TRIPLE H VERSUS DANIEL BRYAN – The winner of this match qualifies to be the third participant in the world title match later in the show. It’s an unusual stipulation for WWE–ten years ago they would have just put all the challengers in one match, and twenty years ago they’d have leveled the playing field by making sure all the contenders wrestled twice. It’s unorthodox booking to cap off an unorthodox storyline.

Triple H turned heel on Daniel Bryan seven months ago, helping Randy Orton defeat him for the WWE championship. Since then HHH has played a caricature of an out-of-touch wrestling promoter, droning to the fans about how what they think they want isn’t “best for business.” Daniel Bryan is too small, too funny-looking, too unimpressive to be given a chance to be champion; WWE needs a tall, sleek, tan figure like Orton to be the face of the company. Essentially Hunter is playing a caricature of himself, emphasizing the reputation he has (deserved or not) for holding down wrestlers who don’t fit the mold he comes from.

As recently as January, it wasn’t clear that Bryan’s war with “the authority” was going to go anywhere; it seemed like he’d been fed to HHH and Orton to build them up for some other rivalry at Wrestlemania. But when live audiences started to realize Bryan was being moved down the card, they rallied around him until there was little choice but to set up this match, with this stipulation. It’s hard to say if it was all by accident or design. What is clear, though, is that Bryan is over for more than just being a strong technical wrestler, or a legend from the indies, or an “internet darling.” All that nerd credibility aside, he’s been the focal good guy in WWE storylines for the better part of a year, to the point that even casual fans see him as the #1 hero. With CM Punk abruptly walking away from the promotion and John Cena long past stale, there just isn’t anybody else for crowds to really get behind.

With that in mind, it’s almost inconceivable that Bryan can lose this match. Perhaps for that reason, WWE has worked very hard to make Triple H seem as unstoppable as possible. Logic would dictate that the hero has to prevail here, but politics suggest that you can’t rule out HHH booking himself to win in spite of common sense. So that gives this match a real irresistible force/immovable object feel, which is just what I want at Wrestlemania. Whatever happens, it’s bound to be exciting. I must admit I’d like to see the spectacle of the Superdome shitting all over a Triple H victory, but nevertheless I’m picking Bryan to win.

continue reading "WrestleMania XXX: An Axel Braun Parody"

So a lot of wrestling nerds are really upset because instead of doing what basically every wrestling fan alive wants – up to and including Mick Foley – and simply putting Daniel Bryan in the main event, last night’s RAW was used to try and sell the idea of D-Bry going up against Triple H at WrestleMania instead. Which is stupid, because nobody thinks Triple H is a main-event level match any more except Triple H; that was part of the reason CM Punk walked out in the first place, and the Twitter reaction was decidely skewed towards “no, we don’t want this.”

However, now we are at the point where, to book a satisfying main event for WrestleMania, you have to satisfy the following conditions:

1. Daniel Bryan wins the title
2. Batista is involved (because his contract stipulates that he main-events WrestleMania this year)
3. Randy Orton is involved (because Orton needs to get his comeuppance)
4. Triple H is involved somehow (because whatever)
5. It is a good match

The problem here is obvious: right now you have one babyface (Bryan) and three heels. Batista is a heel no matter what awful promo he gives about respecting the fans, because absolutely nobody wants him around – I know, it’s hard to fathom that wrestling fans wouldn’t be enthusiastic about a 45-year-old wrestler who can barely go for five minutes without collapsing in heaving gasps, returning to the ring after almost four years, during which time he pursued a failed MMA career and a mostly-failed acting career1, and during which time he took every opportunity to mock wrestling and wrestling fans. I mean, who wouldn’t want to cheer for that guy, really? And of course that ties into the second problem, which is that Batista can barely wrestle any more; his recent matches against Alberto Del Rio were embarrassing, with Alberto doing his absolute best to wrestle for two and cover Batista’s inability to do anything at all capably.2

Because it seems unlikely that Bryan and Orton, both excellent wrestlers, can cover Batista’s flaws entirely during this match – he’s that bad now – and because the face/heel imbalance is problematic, we can’t simply have an Orton/Batista/Bryan three-way dance for the title, because you’ll have all sorts of problems: when Orton and Batista are in the ring together for an extended sequence without Bryan, which has to happen in three-way matches, the crowd will be dead or chanting DAN-IEL BRY-AN, which isn’t the reaction you want particularly.

The answer, however, is very simple indeed: put in another face.

Next week in Chicago, redirect the HHH/Bryan challenge to HHH refusing Bryan’s challenge and then pivot it to D-Bry demanding he get a title shot – and then HHH says “fine, if you want to be in the title match at WrestleMania? At WrestleMania, you’ll first have to beat me – AND Kane.” And then up the stakes (always up the stakes) by saying if Bryan loses, he has to retire (“I’m tired of your little career and your chants, it’s time for you to go away and be irrelevant forever”). So now we have the most unfair, stacked-against-the-babyface situation possible: Daniel Bryan has to beat two guys in a handicap match and risk his career ending in order to get a second chance to beat two guys for the title.

But THEN what you do is you have HHH or Kane get cocky and say something like “nobody in the locker room REALLY supports you” and say that if Bryan can find a partner, then it can be a tag match against HHH and Kane at WrestleMania, but the same stipulations apply: Bryan’s partner is putting HIS career on the line too, but will also get a title shot. And that’s how you get either CM Punk (the obvious choice, but one that may not be available) or Dolph Ziggler (the perfectly acceptable alternate and a major crowd favorite) into the main event at WrestleMania.3 And of course Bryan goes over, because duh.

That’s how I’d book WrestleMania at this point. You know, if I wanted it to be good.

(Also, here is a freebie: introduce a fourth Wyatt Family member, and then you have an eight-man tag at WrestleMania: the Wyatts against the Shield and John Cena. You get a second match out of the insanely hot Shield/Wyatts feud, you get all the dramatic tension of bitter enemies teaming together to defeat a greater evil, you can use it to further the Shield breakup angle because Dean Ambrose doesn’t want to team up with Cena but Rollins and Reigns want to be practical and beat the Wyatts, and the superteam of Cena/Shield can credibly beat the Wyatts at WrestleMania without the Wyatts losing any heat in the process.)

1. Guardians of the Galaxy was a Hail Mary pass for Batista, assuming it succeeds. Incidentally, don’t be surprised if the marketing for it drops off, because Disney originally decided to do Guardians because they wanted a Marvel answer to Star Wars – and then they bought Star Wars, so Guardians is now the lame duck of the Marvel Cineverse. [↩]
2. He came close, because Del Rio is a damn good wrestler – but only close. [↩]
3. If Punk doesn’t want to wrestle – which may well be the case – I would use Ziggler and then STILL offer Punk money just to show up and interfere on Bryan/Ziggler’s behalf at WrestleMania in the main event, have him give Kane and HHH a half dozen chairshots to the back so the crowd can go atomic. [↩]