WE CAN LEARN NOTHING FROM THE PAST

The problem with looking back on professional wrestling is that everyone has their own definition of when wrestling was “good.” This period of time is, without a doubt, the period of time when the person found themselves drawn to the show week in and week out. It occurs usually twice in life, once as a child, another as a social event with friends in their late teens. Ask just about anyone in their mid-30s, and they’ll tell you they watched pro wrestling as a kid. As anyone in their 40s, and they’ll say the same thing (and say the wrestling ten years later was awful). People tend to outgrow wrestling and eventually come to think of it only as a bygone fad, like a pet rock or a tamigotchi.

Since everyone has their own sense of when it was “good,” the only real way of defining the good times of pro wrestling was when it was objectively very popular and figuring out exactly what they were doing right. Do this, and in theory one unlocks potential to repeat the past and bring popularity and influence back to the art.
There have been three periods in North America when pro wrestling held the public’s attention as viable entertainment. The first boom happened in the 1950s with the burgeoning popularity of television and a more animated cast of characters. At the time, wrestling appeared harmless as a family-oriented event a family could watch together. Evil characters reflected the xenophobia of the cold war: communists, japanese, nazis, and indians held top villain spots. Heroes were often blue-collar Americans. They had families to feed and believed in the American dream to no end. Wrestling took inspiration from comic books in taking real world headlines, flattening them into a digestible two dimensions, animating the performers into caricature to provide some distance from real life, and have their serious problems completely solved within a single episode.
It made for quality fantasy, but the same tactics could not be used today. Treating the world’s problems as episodic trivialities might seem possible, but one only needs to look at the various attempts to portray Mohammad Hassan in 2005 to see how this doesn’t work today. The character, a frustrated villain sick of being portrayed as a “terrorist,” entered the WWE with the desire to punish xenophobes. It was a terrible concept; Hassan came across as paranoid, and everyone he fought came across as borderline racist. Worst of all, WWE scrapped the character and fired the wrestler portraying him following the London 7/7 terrorist attacks in 2005. Not only was WWE failing in delivering a dialogue about racism involving athletes of middle eastern descent (a huge opportunity wasted), but they killed the character the second he became actually controversial.
In many ways, there is really no room for two dimensional stereotypes in professional wrestling.(That doesn’t mean they don’t still try their hardest. 2008 might have been the year where caricatures made a solid comeback, first with the Domino brothers and then with the “Diva” title replacing “woman” on the women’s championship.) With the rise of the internet and the widespread knowledge of a pro wrestlers’ inner life (thanks in part to the wrestling industry) we can no longer distance our viewing of a character from that of a real person (much in the same way we know that Brad Pitt has a house somewhere with three dozen kids to feed). The days of fans challenging a foreign wrestler out in the parking lot (or running them out of the arena with pitchforks) is long over. The villains of the current era are often indistinguishable from the heroes in terms of action and character. Almost no lessons can be learned from 1950s wrestling.
The next period of pro wrestling popularity was with the rise of Hulkamania in the mid-80s. Much like the Mario Brothers in the video game industry, Hulk Hogan’s psycho-All American rose the waters for all boats. The popularity of the WWF at the time was immense and is still being felt today. This era gave us the term “sports entertainment,” an idea so insane that everyone bought it for 20 years. (Aren’t all popular sports entertaining to an extent?) This was the genius of the marketing at the time; the WWF was at last everything to everyone. The show delivered human characters for the first time; Randy Savage, Ricky Steamboat, and Roddy Piper were all cartoons, but more genuine humanity came through their personas than anyone had ever seen from a wrestler before. We were given stories about infidelity, faith, politics, greed, and humility. The period between 1986 and 1990 was packed so tightly with important moral tales I’m surprised it never came out as a book of fables.
All of it was coated with the All-American ethics of a 4th of July celebration. Wrestlers were the greatest athletes in the world, and wrestling fans were the best people. This period gave us Hulk Hogan, The Ultimate Warrior, The Iron Sheik, and so many others that still define pro wrestling in the minds of the general public. This is, however, no longer a good thing. It is the image of the steroid-riddled Warrior that leads to so much ridicule about wrestlers being terrible role models; it is the xenophobia attached to the Iron Sheik that shows us as being a racist group of people; it is the Hollywood cheese of Hulk Hogan that makes us fans look like devotees of d-level has-been celebrities.
What little value there is is telling a moral tale flies straight out the window when the players have all largely been found out to be incredibly immoral people. Insider knowledge travels faster than real news these days, and the steroid and drug abuse alone would destroy the ability for pro wrestlers to tell a moral story.
This acceptance that wrestlers are the bane of society is, ironically, how wrestling became insanely popular in the late 90s. By letting otherwise evil people deliver justice to the corrupted heroes in a hope of destroying the status quo, pro wrestling briefly tapped into counterculture and punk sensibilities.
The people running the show in the late 90s realized one very important lesson; wrestlers were human beings, and allowing them to feel and act human on stage led to greater emotional reaction. This led to two important things; the rise of the anti-hero, and the elimination of any semblance that “wrestling is real.”
The stars of this generation are in fact still considered stars to this date. The Rock, Stone Cold Steve Austin, Goldberg, “Hollywood” Hogan, HHH, Shawn Michaels, and Mick Foley are often the wrestlers still associated with pro wrestling, even though only three of them are still working for any wrestling company. This has stopped being a great marketing tool (come to see Mick Foley and the rest of the TNA stars!) and begun to be a sign that newer wrestlers have been completely looked over by the mainstream vision of wrestling. (The exception to this rule is Chris Jericho, a fantastic performer whose talents include music and acting. Whenever there is a mainstream story about pro wrestling, Jericho is almost always the one being interviewed, as he is seen by just about everyone to be well-spoken and a great face for the art, even though he only ever wins the world title has a scheming bastard.)
But the problem with the late 90s period of pro wrestling was not its over-famous icons. It was, somewhat ironically, that it revealed wrestling to be an ugly place. In a purposeful move to distance itself from its own past, pro wrestling became more realistic than ever before. Brutal violence defined the appeal, largely thanks to “Hardcore” influence from underground wrestling organizations. The reality of it was that wrestling was just as scripted as ever, but the attempt to portray itself as “more real than other wrestling” forced its performers to put on more realistic matches. There was even a small period where ultimate fighters and boxers were given spots on the show to exhibit their skills. They were often the least watchable aspects of any show. It took many people many years to realize this point, but the point has been since clearly proven: wrestling fans don’t actually want reality. They want the art of professional wrestling, and in retrospect the late 90s delivered very little of this.
Unfortunately, the past delivers few messages of hope for those trying to make pro wrestling important again. The rules appear to change every generation, with fans demanding something different every time.