If I Could Be Serious For A Moment 05.05.09: Pro Wrestling Irritated

Posted by Chris Lansdell on 05.05.2009

Why Vince hates the internet, what he does to show it, and why both parties need to stop the hate.

Greetings, humanity! Welcome back to If I Could Be Serious for a Moment, your weekly dose of intelligent wrestling discourse with me, Chris Lansdell. After last week's unscheduled absence due to internet issues, I've got a topic for you this week that relates to the internet. It's something I've wanted to bring up ever since a PPV Round Table we did a while ago. We'll get to that shortly, but first the

BANNER!

Vince vs the Internet

It's no secret that Vince McMahon is no fan of anything that tries to control or expose "his" business. Whether it's revealing documentaries like Beyond the Mat, almost-true movies like The Wrestler or the backstage leaks that reveal his storylines or surprises, Vince likes to keep a tight reign on everything wrestling. Although the first two are completely out of his control, Vince still feels he can control the IWC and what gets out through them. It's also been my opinion for a while that he books specifically to annoy or confound the internet fans. Why? How? Does Vince need the internet? Does it need him?

10 Things I Hate About You

Imagine you are the owner of a multi-million-dollar business. It's an entertainment business that makes its money off being able to keep its fans guessing and on their toes. Your employees have a precarious morale due to being on the road so often and having to work with minor injuries. You have to share trade secrets with your employees in various positions and you have to trust that they will not pass them on. Instead, your surprises and ideas get leaked to the public constantly. Your employees get attacked and slandered by journalists, being the subject of everything from aspersions on their wrestling ability to rumours of disciplinary action and firings. Your scripts, methods, procedures and even your ideas are often public knowledge before everyone in the company knows about them. It's borderline industrial espionage, and it's really no surprise that, given these things, Vince McMahon hates the IWC.

411mania is one of the more reputable sites on the internet, in that we do not publish half-founded or unfounded rumours. However, in order to keep up in the never-ending click war, we have to post spoilers, backstage sightings and other confirmed stories or rumours from reputable sources. As such, the phenomenon is self-fuelling: all have to stop, or none will stop. I think if the leaks were limited to spoilers of taped shows, Vince would be OK. He has to expect that a taped show's results will be blabbed, but it's when the news of people arriving backstage for a show starts coming out that he gets pissed. Surprise returns or debuts pop the crowd and make people want to watch every show in case they miss something, a feeling that's been sorely missing from WWE recently. Even if the named person doesn't appear on the show, their presence can be seen as a sign that they will be signing with WWE.

Of course who is backstage and what happened on a taped show are not the only things to get leaked, nor are they the most important. By far the more important and costly leak is that of storylines. Who is scheduled to win what feud might not always be a big problem unless a title is involved, but who is getting a program with whom and who is turning face or heel can be a big secret. Yet somehow, they seem to find there way to the public eye. Worse still, we have recently started to see things like scripts, lineup cards and the like have been leaked. Not only do these items show where the stories are going, they also show the degree to which things are scripted and generally slaughter any vestige of kayfabe that might have been left in wrestling.

What has to both anger and scare Vince McMahon is that he has to know that these leaks are coming from one of his employees, someone he pays, employs and trusts. With everything we know of Vince's temperament, it has to be killing him that he is paying someone to spill both his trade secrets (regarding everything from promos to match timing to pyro cues) and the substance of his program. That HAS to be disconcerting to say the least.

Perhaps even more disconcerting is the fake news that some less-than-reputable sites will put up on slow news days. You know, the kind of stuff Shad Gaspard complains about: X is getting fired, Y is in the doghouse, Z is about to get suspended for wellness, A and B had a backstage scuffle, Paul London smokes too much pot...wait, not so much the last one. Right now, wrestling is in a delicate position. They have a lot of young, fragile guys on the roster who don't necessarily know how to handle false stories in the news, especially since there have been cases of people learning of their release on the dirt rags. These same guys are too timid or too stubborn to listen to the veterans, or maybe the advice doesn't always hit home, and their morale starts to suffer, their performance with it. In the current environment, Vince is left with little choice but to remove them from TV, thus making the false news into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

YOU! SHALL NOT! PASS!

So what does Vince do in a case link this? He takes steps. Measures. Precautions, if you will. Some, like banning camera phones and not allowing E-60 to tape a whole production meeting, make sense. Some are a little extreme. The most famous example of an extreme step was the tarping of the elimination chamber structure while the wrestlers rehearsed for No Way Out. This was ridiculed at the time, but really what choice did Vince have? Had one of the leaks seen Edge rehearsing with the Raw guys, or the SD guys doing most of their match without Edge, it would have been worldwide in 10 minutes. Another recent example can be seen in the booking of Christian's return. When it became known that Christian had re-signed with WWE (another leak!), the rumours started about his re-debut. The most prevalent suggestion was that he would end up being the one behind Jeff Hardy's streak of bad luck...which of course didn't happen. Instead he went to ECW and we got a Hardy Boyz feud.

It has been well-publicised (again, by more leaks!) that Vince McMahon is very secretive about his ideas, changing the booking several times before key PPVs and not letting anyone in on his thought process until the last minute. When he does share his ideas, it's with as few people as possible, very much on a need-to-know basis. When John Cena shocked everyone at 2008's Royal Rumble, the only people who knew were those who would be in the ring at the time number 30 came out, Vince himself, Michael Hayes and Pat Patterson. As a result, the entire wrestling world was shocked when it Cena's music hit.



In an effort to find leaks, Vince has also been known to selectively leak false news to suspected moles. This has lead to more than one firing from his creative team. Although on the face of it this might seem too much, it's really a smart move because you quite simply cannot have a dishonest person on your staff. Recently John Carle was released from the creative team for leaking a script online, and I know one more was too. I want to say Dave Lagana but that might be wrong.

Cause and Effect

Unfortunately, Vince's obsession with restricting information has hurt him far more than it's helped. For one, the news is still getting out, and with not much of a decrease. Yet Vince continues to hoard his ideas, imposing them on the talent with no filter and no discussion. This often leads to Vince booking the shows for himself, because if there's one thing Vince has consistently shown over the past few years it's that he has not got his finger on the pulse of today's fans. When wrestlers are put in angles, matches and situations where they are not comfortable, or that have changed 4 times since the morning production meeting, it once again lowers morale and prevents them from performing at their best.

The desire to stay one step ahead of IWC guesses, predictions and "backstage sources" has often meant last-minute changes to plans, some of which can be a little hard to figure out. WrestleMania 22 was a perfect example of this, where Rey Misterio was not supposed to win the title as late as the morning of the event. Ken Kennedy said in a recent interview that he has had match results change while he was in the Gorilla position, and had an on-air appearance cancelled recently mere minutes before it was meant to happen because it got leaked.

Perhaps the most insidious result of Vince's IWC vendetta is his treatment of internet darlings. If you look at the members of the WWE roster that are favourites of the IWC – Shelton, Punk, Morrison, even Jamie Noble – very few of them ever get strong pushes. People will give you various reasons for this, and one of them is that Vince won't push anyone that the internet loves, because the internet has done so much to scupper his plans. Vindictive and petty? Maybe, but that's Vince.

The IWC has an effect too though. All the leaks and such make people watch far less often, because they know when it's going to get good. This too leads to Vince trying to make changes, like with the Jericho Save_Us return dragging on longer than anyone expected. With every 'net journalist predicting that the return would come that week, people kept tuning in until the eventual return.


I love you, I hate you, I can't live without you

The problem Vince has is that he needs the internet. For one thing, it's a solid barometer. Ratings and live attendance can only tell you so much, but the internet and its anonymity and universal access tells you so much more. The IWC is a barometer of how his product is doing, a brutally honest and hypercritical Nielsen rating. If they say you suck, you might not suck, but if the IWC starts praising your shows (or at least the majority do, one trait of the IWC is that we never agree) then you're doing most things right. We're a hard bunch to please but we know what we like and when we get it we exalt it to the heavens.

There's also the word-of-mouth aspect. Vince's PPV replays still do some good numbers, and in this digital age a lot of the reason for that is the passing of positive reviews from person to person through blogs, Twitter, Facebook and such. Vince is not slow to use his own website to promote news, which is quickly picked up and propagated by the independent sites. And the DVD releases, which almost always get rave reviews, certainly don't suffer from the big-time pimping they get from the likes of JD Dunn.

In a sweet touch of irony, Vince uses the internet to keep in touch with the indy wrestling world. Through the IWC, he knows who is popular in the smaller feds and who he should be raiding. Or rather, where he should send the scouts. No way does Vince lower himself to watch anything that isn't in HD. He can hunt down all the bodybuilders he wants, but ultimately I think he knows that he needs the skill guys to carry the power guys, and he knows where to find them.

Fanning the Flames

We in the IWC are hardly blameless. If there's one thing the IWC is guilty of more than any other, it's inflating our sense of importance in the wrestling world. While it's true that the opinions of the Dunns, Csonkas and Meltzers of the IWC are valued by fans and even some companies, the majority of writers on the majority of sites barely register as a blip. What we WANT to happen has little to no bearing on what WILL happen, because by and large we're not the ones with the disposable income. That's the families who go to events and shop on wweshop.com. We're not normally the noes with marketing degrees or experience in writing for TV, and we haven't been in the business for 50 years. Really all we are is fans with favourites and more knowledge than the ones screaming at the arenas. We want our favourites to succeed just like the kids do, but instead of cheering for them at a stadium we'd rather bitch on a computer that they aren't holding every belt in existence, as if it will make a difference.

Really, doing this just hurts our chosen ones more than it helps them. With the exception of established main eventers like Edge and Randy Orton, who both enjoy(ed) some degree of IWC popularity, Vince is certainly not going to push someone just because we like them. The more we whine and bitch about the lack of push, the less likely it becomes. If they read the internet themselves, they're going to start believing in the hype and wondering why they're not getting pushed. This happened to the Motor City Machine Guns (yes I know they're in TNA) and CM Punk, to a lesser extent.

Of course, the more leaks that pop up and the more we try and coax out of the WWE, the more determined McMahon will become to shut us out. Why do we need to know on Tuesday what will happen on Friday? Can we not wait? Why do we have to know who might get fired or who isn't in tight with management? Can't we just watch wrestling and enjoy it? Apparently we can't, because we have to show how smart and connected we are, first by making "great" predictions, then by masquerading them around as facts. Out time is so precious that we cannot force ourselves to watch a show unless it contains 11 four-star matches. The less we watch, the more Vince feels he has to shuffle the deck and get outlandish to bring us back...and that's not what we want.

What we do want is for the two sides to realise that they are far better working together than trying to one-up each other. You find out Jericho is coming back, I don't give him the belt. You don't give him the belt, we obtain a script. You get a script, we tarp the ring. Stop the madness!

There can be only one

Winner, that is. Eventually, Vince will die, while the IWC will live on. It's a war he cannot hope to win, but while he's alive he can certainly win battles. Vince, like a megalomaniac, wants to control things beyond his purview, like the internet. The IWC reminds me of a malevolent android: created to help us, but ultimately too big and too smart to be controlled by humans. It knows its purpose and it feeds on itself, because it cannot endorse and advertise inferior lifeforms. It exerts what it feels is superiority, refusing to acknowledge that anything less than awesome can be any good. Vince is the one guy trying to defeat the android, but in doing so loses his own humanity in the process.

Me? I just want to watch some wrestling.

Well folks, that's my creativity tapped out. I'll see you next week, same time same channel. To make sure you don't miss it, you can follow 411wrestling or just me on Twitter, or of course you can just bookmark 411mania!

Stay Cool, Rock Hard. Lansdellicious – Out.