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I recently had a chat with Mike Johnson regarding the state of pro wrestling and why fans, like myself are tuning out of a product that they have followed for so many years. Before I get started, let me give you some background info. I have been a wrestling fan for 23 of the 32 years of my life. Not just any wrestling fan, but a diehard fan.
I am the fan who anxiously a waited returning home from Pennsylvania to watch
the tape of the WWF tag team title match between Iron Sheik and Nicolai Volkoff
and Barry Windham and Mike Rotunda. I am the fan who could not sleep the night
before a Wrestlemania show when I was a youngster. I am the fan who still
followed WCW during the often very dark 1991-1995 period, and I am the fan who
bought Superclash III, the weekly TNA PPV’s and for the first 4 years of their
existence, all of the ROH DVD’s. I think you get the idea, I am a big
wrestling fan, or should I say WAS a big wrestling fan.
For the first time in my life I feel as though I have outgrown pro wrestling.
This coming from someone who still reads comic books, watches cartoons, and has
Batman pajamas. I am the fan that wrestling was never supposed to lose, but
they have, and this series of columns will outline why. Why has wrestling lost
one of its biggest fans?
Part 1: Why aren’t more fans embracing Ring of Honor as their true
wrestling alternative?
In the latest edition of his “Afternoon Thoughts†column on the site, Mike
Johnson asked why more fans who are disenfranchised with the current WWE product
are not turning to the more athletic, hard hitting and high flying style that
ROH features. As someone who was a diehard ROH fan, with a cabinet of DVD’s to
prove it, I can try to explain why.
1. The price.
Young fans do not really have the money and older fans have families, houses,
and other expenses and responsibilities. ROH is set up to draw from a very
small segment of fans who have the money to burn and a lot of room to store what
has to be hundreds of DVD’s at this point.
2. Lack of exposure.
The taped, bargain priced PPV’s that they had hoped would bring more exposure are basically drawing from that same audience that already buys the DVD’s. I do not know very many people who flip through their PPV channels and see ROH: Driven and say, I don’t know what it is, I have never heard of it, but I need to buy this. I will admit that I am not really sure what the answer to this problem is. TV? Having a television clearance could help but I am not sure how much of a difference it would make, if any. Let's not forget that pro wrestling was really created for TV. It was cheap programming in the beginning of the TV age that drew big numbers and it stayed like that for years until the Monday Night Wars blew that plan out the window. I think that ultimately it hurts any company to not have TV, but at the same time, in the era of 800 channels, just having TV doesn't mean as much as it used to.
If ROH got a spot on a network like Versus would they do any significant
numbers to increase its exposure? Would the cheap production values turn people
off? More importantly would they be forced, like ECW on TNN to increase their
production value to be on TV? I cannot honestly say that in this case a
television clearance would make a big difference.
3. The product itself.
Yes the wrestling is good, often great, but there is more to it than that. What people forget, especially when they bring up ECW comparisons, is that you need more than good wrestling, and right now ROH doesn't have anything compelling to follow. The first time I saw tapes of ECW I saw Shane Douglas throwing down the NWA belt, the Bourne Again storyline with Doink/Matt Bourne doing the multiple personality gimmick, and Sabu going through a table. None of those things had anything to do with great wrestling, but it got me hooked. The great wrestling in ECW was a bonus, just as the violence in ECW was a bonus. The thing that made ECW great was that it was about compelling stories, feuds that made sense, and championships that meant something. It was old school wrestling with a modern edge.
Even with ECW, once the compelling TV and storylines were gone, ECW got
stale. If I buy an ROH PPV or DVD I know that I will see good wrestling, and
probably at least 1 great match, but after awhile it all seems the same and just
isn't worth the investment. I stopped ordering ROH PPV’s when I felt as if I
had seen this all before. Never a good thing. The 2 best wrestling tapes I
ever owned, were Memphis video yearbook 1991, and Georgia Championship Wrestling
highlights 1980-1983. There was hardly any real wrestling on either tape but
the storylines were so great that I watched them over and over again. Just a
thought.
4. Overall disinterest.
This is a problem that goes far beyond Ring of Honor. This problem stretches to the entire industry right now and I will get into this in more detail in future installments. Many of the Monday Night War era fans who climbed aboard the band wagon when the business got hot are gone. The NWO and Austin 3:16 shirt wearing fans who tuned in religiously on Monday nights but never followed Japanese wrestling, didn’t know much about ECW have left in droves.
Right now you are probably saying, “but Chris, what does this have to do with
Ring of Honor specifically� Well it’s simple. If many of the fans, I believe,
that have tuned out pro wrestling in 2008 were the last remaining holdovers from
the Monday Night Wars and the Attitude era, those fans would never get into a
promotion like Ring of Honor, just as they didn’t get into ECW when it was
around. They are WWE or WCW fans. They were NWO and Stone Cold fans. They
want the Rock and DX, not a 45 minute, 5 star classic between Bryan Danielson
and Nigel McGuiness. Many of the original ECW fans were gone once the promotion
closed its doors. I don’t think Ring of Honor ever had them, and if they did it
was for a brief period of time. Quite simply, the mainstream wrestling audience
has gone elsewhere. Where have they gone?
Coming in part 2: Where are the disenfranchised going?
