Why WWE Has to Give Wrestling a Chance

If you take a quick look at what’s going on in the WWE of late, you see AJ Styles as the WWE World Champion, Kevin Owens as the WWE Universal Champion (after Finn Balor had to drop the title due to injury) and the enormous critical success of the Cruiserweight Classic. The common thread running through all of it is they are excellent pro wrestlers who’ve built up years of credibility in the indie circuit. None of these guys were brought up in-house by the WWE. They work faster-paced matches with bigger movesets than your standard WWE performer. They’re not spitting catchphrases when they get on the mic. Mostly they act like prizefighters. On any given night, they come to fight.

Fair to say this isn’t business as usual for the WWE. Styles was, for years, the guy that TNA fans held up as better than anyone in the WWE. Owens was a guy fans loved, but figured the WWE would never touch given his rotund build. Balor and the cruiserweights, well they all seem a little small for the WWE’s tastes. Yet collectively they’ve taken over the product. How did we get here?

I think it’s as simple as the WWE (and by that I mean Vince McMahon) has hit the acceptance phase of the grieving cycle. It tried like crazy for two years to make Roman Reigns into John Cena 2.0 with miserable results. It was a terrible idea from the jump. First off, fans were weary of Cena, and Cena is the absolute best at being John Cena. He’s great on the mic. His character never wavers. His self-belief is unshakeable. He works the TV and radio talk show circuit like a pro. He knows how to deliver a main event match. He refuses to acknowledge he’s a dick even when he’s being a complete dick. The man is one of a kind. Yet his act is getting tired. After a decade of doing the same schtick, a wrestlers begins to come across a bit like the musical “Cats”. It doesn’t matter if he plays well with the newbs, the established fans (who are the ones buying the WWE Network subscriptions) want to move onto something new … and that does not mean move on to a wet, Samoan version of Cena.

Second, Reigns doesn’t have nearly enough charisma to be the company’s super face. Like the song from “War of the Gargantuas” says, the words get stuck in his throat. The less he talks, the better. But you know what Reigns is pretty great at? Glowering. He glowers with the best of them. The man is fantastic at looking like he’s thisclose to smacking you in the face, which is a major attribute for a pro wrestler to have, especially if he’s a heel. Humorless and angry doesn’t tend to get you over as a face. No matter how hard they tried to sell Reigns, fans weren’t buying. Creatively, it flopped.

What we got was week after week of the WWE trying to make Reigns into a hero while arena and stadium audiences booed him with gusto. It made for terrible television. If you didn’t know much about the WWE and you tuned in, you were sure to be confused. Why does everyone hate the supposed good guy? This show kind of sucks. And off to better television you’d go. Reigns getting hit with the wellness violation seems to be the straw that finally broke the camel’s back. The WWE had to stop trying to be like its 2005 model. It had to recognize it was at a creative dead end with a tired format that only is going to keep bleeding weekly viewers.

Yet what exactly do you do when your attempt at anointing a chosen one has failed? You could try to chose another one, but that probably means you’re just picking another losing battle against the fans you still have. Instead, you go back to basics. As much as Vince McMahon loves the term “sports entertainment,” the reality is he runs a wrestling promotion. That’s the product – wrestling matches. They can add in all the drama and production value they want, but it all leads to the ring (or the Hardy compound, but that’s a different topic). Not for nothing, but the two biggest stars to emerge in the WWE over the past decade – CM Punk and Daniel Bryan – were former indie darlings who put on great matches and walked into the WWE with loyalist fanbases. Wrestling fans who frequent sites like 411Mania knew who those two were long before they ever hit a WWE ring.

The WWE has collected more wrestlers who’ve developed in the same fashion – Seth Rollins, Dean Ambrose, AJ Styles, Kevin Owens, Sami Zayn, Cesaro, Finn Balor, Samoa Joe, Shinsuke Nakamura, Austin Aries, Hideo Itami, and their entire cruiserweight roster. Most of these guys have history together, fighting for promotions like ROH and New Japan. You can mix and match them and what you generally get is a quality performance. They’ve either built ring chemistry in the past or they fit together stylistically. Rollins and Ambrose had been elevated to the top tier and it seemed like the plan with the others was to fill out the card. Give people plenty of action on the way to the main event. Yet it’s become the one thing that’s working when so much else seems broken.

The WWE ratings are in the tank due to years of terrible programming. I’ve been calling Raw the worst show on television since 2014. There is no quick fix for that. Most of the viewers who are gone aren’t coming back. The WWE has got to figure out how to connect with its increasingly distrustful audience. Even if they finally pull the trigger on Hollywood John Cena, it’s not going to spike viewership back up above 5 million per show. All the company can do is do what it does as well as it can. It’s not a secret formula. It’s not one simple trick that fixes everything. It’s the hard work of proving your worth every week and hoping it pays off in the long term.

What can the WWE be right now? Well, it has the talent to be, arguably, the best in-ring wrestling promotion on the planet. If you’re going to claim to be the major leagues, then you’ve got to back it up by playing major league ball. Styles and Owens have got big time game. Styles and Ambrose tore it up at Backlash. I have every confidence Owens and Rollins will do the same at Clash of Champions. As we saw with the CWC, if you deliver on the action side of the equation, storylines and characters emerge naturally. I’m sure we’re going to get plenty of Vitamin WWE mixed in (e.g OLD FART), but the WWE clearly is paying more attention to what needs to be its core competence. If it keeps getting the wrestling right, it’s got a chance to figure out the rest.

So Kevin Owens is a lunchpail guy, but the WWE needs to shine a spotlight on that kind of worker at this point in time. During the early part of 2016 when Shane McMahon first returned, he was getting huge pops when he ran down the product – talented guys are being passed over for management favorites, fans are tired of seeing the same basic show over and over again, no one seems to be listening to the audience. If the WWE wrote those lines and let Shane say them on television, they had to know in the back of their minds that they had major problems. With the brand split and what seems to be a main event picture expanding to include more highly competent wrestlers, they’re starting to address those issues. By no means are we in the Kevin Owens Era, but he might mark the transition from what the WWE has been to what it’s going to become next. It’s a change that’s been long overdue.