As I was watching the television the other night, I came across one of those wrestling documentaries that try to tell the “inside” story of professional wrestling. It was either on A&E or TLC – I can’t quite remember – and I didn’t really watch the whole thing because it was extremely dated (you remember the ones that they showed that had NITRO on top of the wrestling world…). Anyway, something hit me in the few minutes that I watched the special and it rang a bell in my mind to something that I brought up in a past column called “Wrestling Dirty Secret”: The lack of respect for the new guys in the locker room who are more talented than the older guys, but are younger and thus not allowed to excel.
As I was watching the documentary, one of the backyard wrestlers said something to the effect of, “We want to be just like those guys in the WWF, and they don’t respect us. All we want is to be like them.” Let’s get this straight first – I do NOT condone 99% of what goes on in backyard wrestling as most of it has nothing to do with true wrestling. Being a former amateur wrestler myself, I find myself enthused when I see someone like Ric Flair or even Bubba Ray Dudley do a quasi-amateur wrestling move. To think that the “Dirtiest Player in the Game” or the “Mayor of Dudleyville” can do something like a front side leg takedown really stuns me at times. However, even though I don’t condone most of backyard wrestling, the comment that that kid made is the epitome of what I believe is a major problem in wrestling.
As I chronicled in my earlier article, “…you will never hear of someone like Brock Lesnar actually making his own storylines and having a large amount of input in what he does like some of the big names. Why is this? Some might argue that it is because he doesn’t know enough or that he doesn’t have an iota of creative control. I disagree. It has become obvious that there is an aura in wrestling locker rooms around the nation that basically states, “You will do as the older guard tells you. Do not fight against their ideas, do not expect to be treated equally – for you are a youngster and you have no respect.””
Keeping this mindset, it is easy to see how right some of these backyard wrestlers’ philosophies are…in theory. You see, these guys in the backyard want nothing more than to be like their heroes in the ring on Monday and Thursday nights. Well, what do they have to look forward to? They have to learn “the ropes” and “pay their dues” in the independent leagues and again in the WWE. Who wants to do that? Someone might argue that if they wanted it bad enough, they would endure and I do agree, but why make a man walk through the desert if he has wings to fly over it in a fraction of the time?
Some might answer, “Well, it will teach them to appreciate the end result.” Bullshit. Let me try to put this in perspective…for each Kurt Angle (a certified Olympic champion) there are countless Brock Lesnars (amateur champions). To say that one should have to endure the pain of the journey to enjoy the benefits at the end does not pay justice to the talents that someone might presently have. One person might be able to do an unbelievable moonsault and have the same wrestling abilities as someone like Tommy Dreamer (limited technically, but a hell of a brawler), however the world would never know because they are bogged down by the greed of the independent scene and then the hierarchy of the major leagues (if they ever get there).
As I alluded to in my earlier column, did the NBA tell Kobe Bryant to “pay his dues” or did they put him in a minor league situation and tell him to work there for a few years before he would be able to even enter the NBA at the lowest rung on the ladder? Hell no. To do such a thing with burgeoning talent would be an act of a moron. Who wants to stifle someone like Kobe when he is just oozing ability? Maybe someone who is bitter, someone who wants everyone to go through the hardships that he went through, someone who wants to milk that spotlight for everything it’s worth while they still can. You know, I can’t say that I don’t understand this side of the story and the primordial desire to see the “young” go through what you went through to be at the same level that you are, but I can say that it is fundamentally wrong.
If this was the way of the world, there would be no progress. If the inventor of the helicopter had to go through the primitive learning that Leonardo da Vinci had to go through, we would have no air travel right now. It’s an undeniable fact that progress builds on progress builds on progress and so on until forever, and that this principle can be applied to all aspects of life. Think of this principle in the wrestling world – if the older guard had to go through the hardships of getting gypped by going to greedy older wrestler’s schools to learn an arm drag, why would they want to see their younger counterparts go through the same crap? If the older guard had to ride in a car with 15 people for 100 miles to get to a show to make no money, then why complain when someone who is new buys a first class ticket (with his own money) so he can relax before getting to a show? If the older guard knows what it’s like to be on the bottom rung of the ladder when they should be near the top, then why hold down someone like Brock Lesnar or Rob Van Dam when they should be headlining shows?
My point is about backyard wrestlers. They want to be like their heroes, but their heroes don’t want to let them rise to the occasion. As the kid in the documentary duly noted – they are the ones that pay the wrestler’s salaries. They are the ones that buy the videos, the pay per views, the t-shirts, the merchandise – all because it has an image of The Rock on it, or Steve Austin, or Triple H. The backyard wrestler’s philosophy on the mainstream stars is correct – the backyard wrestler’s project the idea that they don’t care when the mainstream guys say that backyard wrestling is crap and that there is no place for it. For someone who is a true backyard wrestler, this is like your hero saying to go to hell…and the rebuttal of the “whatever” mentality from the backyard guys is something that I have to agree with them about. If the mainstream guys piss all over your hopes to be like them, then they can go to hell because they are “pissing on this industry” as one of them so aptly stated at one point.
To put it in a quick nutshell, while I do not condone 99% of the actions of backyarders, I feel that the dirty secret in professional wrestling of “paying your dues” justifies their feelings of animosity towards the words of the mainstream guys. Paying your dues…you know it’s funny. Someone can wrestle their entire life, train everyday, workout in the gym all the time, do the work of ten regular amateur wrestlers and still not win the big match when it comes to the Olympics or it comes to the NCAA championship. When this guy wants to go into professional wrestling, he can learn how to wrestle quicker than anyone else because he has a solid amateur background (which does wonders for great professional wrestlers) and basically be a top notch wrestler in a year. So when he gets to the WWE, he is put on the back burner because now he has to “pay his dues.” Wrestling from kindergarten until the present day isn’t paying enough for the pompous asses in the WWE (it’s obvious who they are that are like this). Oh no. Not until you’ve gone through the hardships that they have gone through will they see you as someone worthy of being in the same general area as they are. What a load of crap.
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