The Heat and the Shine

How do you know you're addicted to pro wrestling?  Because you care about WWE Extreme Rules, that's how. And, it's the low form of addiction.  The ugly form.  Not the 'addiction' of passion and focus.  The addiction of need; the loss of control.  The addiction that public service announcements warn you about. There is no other rational cause for an adult to care about the current WWE product.  All that makes the art form of pro wrestling is absent from Extreme Rules.  Suspense, empathetic characters, irreconcilable conflict; all absent.  In their place are false drama, cartoonish caricatures and easy choices. To rebuild WWE will take a massive effort and it is not clear when that will come; or If.  The promotion has been in decline for nearly a decade and a half.  Spurts of creative power -- as with Nexus or Daniel Bryan -- have provided false hope.  Nostalgia acts like The Rock have delivered fleeting peaks of interest.  Yet the core continues to erode.  

A void exists.  And voids don't last.  Either the void will be filled or the void will go away.  But voids don't last. The void is in the wrestling business.  The demand of fans and ex-fans for a more intelligent, grounded product has no supply to feed from.  WWE can't or won't give up scripted promos and "invisible camera" segments.  Lucha Underground is a fine product, but it's more television than wrestling.  Pro Wrestling Guerrilla (PWG) thrills local fans in Los Angeles, but their goal has never been to go mainstream.  Surely there are other contenders, but none that have caught on.  And so the void continues. Voids cannot last because eventually the demand dries up.  People move on.  Fans become fans of something else.  How many have moved on to MMA or fantasy football or something else altogether?  But wrestling's void persists.  A hardcore fanbase and an intransigent monarch have sustained it. Nigel McGuinness wants to fill the pro wrest

The  Triple H interview  on Grantland is well worth a read.  Of course a long interview with a powerful WWE executive is going to be interesting.  Of course a publication like Grantland will make sure the interview stays a shoot, which makes it even more interesting. Most interesting (at least, to yours truly), is what Triple H reveals about himself through subtext.  Namely that he is a wrestler in full: wise, savvy and paranoid. Triple H is wise in that he gets what a lot of hardcore wrestling fans choose to ignore: the fact that WWE offers opportunity.  Bray Wyatt is the example he cites in the interview, but there are dozens of others.  WWE wants wrestlers to get over because over wrestlers draw money. There are exceptions to any rule, and that applies to WWE's promotion of wrestlers.  They screwed up Goldberg.  They probably could have handled Scott Steiner better.  It always felt like Shelton Benjamin could have been something more.  But by and large Vince has good tas