411 Wrestling Fact or Fiction: Is AEW Better Than WWE?

Welcome back to the regular 411 Wrestling Fact or Fiction column. I am your host Jake Chambers, long-time contributor to this awesome site, former FoF proprietor and student of the late, great Larry Csonka. As always, I will strive to maintain the standard of excellent debate in this column as established by Larry and contributed to by many great writers over the years.

One thing I discovered when I previously hosted this column is that justifying my viewpoint on the various statements is fun but it’s even better to come up with the statements themselves. So during the past year or so that this column has been on hiatus I’ve banked a ton of wacky and challenging statements and now forward to presenting them to many special guests and talented site writers over the coming weeks.

However, this week is a simple running of the ropes. I’ll throw out a few topics and give my own solo answers. One thing I want to note is that this column is long-form craft writing, almost a niche concept at this point compared to when I first started at 411. Now so much of the dialogue on wrestling culture takes place on message boards or social media or embedded in reviews or on podcasts, but I want Fact or Fiction to be a unique experience of rhetorical authorship.

So ladies and gentlemen, my name is Jake Chambers and these are my takes on the gloriously frustrating, violent bliss of professional wrestling. Nice to meet you.

Statement #1: AEW is a better wrestling company than WWE.

Jake Chambers: FICTION – On the surface AEW is great, sure, and WWE kind of sucks. But is that it? Are we going to simply assess something as complex as professional wrestling based on matches, angles and surprises?

Because, you know what, if this was all about one thing being aesthetically better than another then WWE wouldn’t be where it is today. They were never the “better” wrestling company during all of the previous peaks in pro-wrestling fandom, with NWA, ECW, WCW, ROH and NJPW all outperforming WWF/E both in the ring and out. So then how do you explain the WWE continuing to grow despite never really being the best wrestling company?

Because the WWE is about vision, growth and innovation. Pro-wrestling to Vince McMahon is not opera or ballet, a classical performance to be preserved in its pure form by masterful artisans, but to him it is a constantly evolving entertainment medium. And in that case, the subjectivity of art matters little compared to the objectivity of being able to sustain the act of entertaining.

What the WWF did in the 1980s with professional wrestling media was so visionary that rarely gets the extreme credit it deserves. You can thank the Rock ‘n’ Wrestling era for slimming down the more catch-as-catch-can in-ring style of the NWA and other territories and presenting wrestling matches like simple but epic comic book fights come to life. Apparently this was the perfect form of pro-wrestling for the mass/niche audience provided by the exponential growth of international cable TV and VHS, while also tapping into the patriotic and excessive Western appetite at the time that cultivated a culture of “otaku” that would prevail for the next 40 years.

The WWE we follow today is effectively post-wrestling and that’s the beauty of it: you don’t need to actively watch the matches, in fact, they make their shows so bad that they are practically begging you NOT to watch.

AEW should understand that watching long-form matches and angles in real time is an old way of thinking. These live TV shows are really just a con on the networks desperate to cling to the last few years of traditional TV ad revenue. Meanwhile, the WWE is taking that money and perfecting how to get an audience to “engage” with their content. In fact, not watching wrestling gives you more time to engage with the WWE brand; tweeting, commenting on boards, texting friends, reading updates, watching clips, makings gifs and memes and most importantly, criticizing.

WWE wants you to be angry and disappointed, they need you to pontificate on how they do everything wrong and how many better ways they could obviously be doing things. I watch less weekly wrestling than ever, but I spend exponentially more time worrying, discussing and engaging with the post-wrestling content. This oxymoronic mentality of modern culture in general will only become more so as we integrate AR and VR and eventually chip our brains. AEW can museum-ify “excellent” pro-wrestling like an opera season paid for by rich patrons, or they can truly evolve and figure out how to grow without needing to be amazing.

Statement #2: Roman Reigns is the best pro-wrestler in the world.

Jake Chambers: FICTION – As great as a year Roman Reigns has had, from his excellent diatribes to even giving a fantastic technical wrestling PPV main event with perennial mid-carder Cesaro, I still don’t think I can call him the best wrestler in the world during New Japan G1 season.

Despite some of the negative reception I’ve sensed to this year’s edition of the G1, before and during, there continues to be no denying that it is the standard for measuring main event level pro-wrestling skill. Both Hirioshi Tanahashi and Kazuchika Okada have continued to show their mastery of the form during what was on paper a terrible-looking set of 7-8 card headlining singles matches. Sure, you can have that great PPV main event with a Cesaro, or a cool 30-minute draw with Kenny Omega or Bryan Danielson, but it’s another feat of wrestling excellence entirely to have multiple 20+ minute matches every other day that make guys like Tama Tonga or YOSHI-HASHI look like Reigns, Omega or Danielson. Until Roman Reigns is competing regularly in something like the G1 tournament we can never say he’s better than wrestlers like Tanahashi or Okada.

Statement #3: Repo-Man was a cool gimmick.

Jake Chambers: FACT – I love gimmicks and few are as stupidly memorable as the evil wrestling car repossession guy. He looked like the Hamburglar and acted like a villain from a silent movie. Most importantly, Repo-Man had a very specific motivation: he repossessed things that he believed didn’t belong to someone. This brilliant and simple characteristic was demonstrated in vignettes where we’d see him gleefully taking part in the economic necessity of repo, which every working-class person has to deal with and fear, and also in angles against babyfaces to take their things too and thus incur their wrath. A relatable reason to hate him and a clear motivation for angles with a variety of wrestlers; we need more gimmicks like the Repo-Man, ASAP!

Statement #4: WWE should stop doing shows in Saudi Arabia.

Jake Chambers: FICTION – The WWE doesn’t need to acquiesce to media pressure and stop doing shows in a country for vaguely stated political reasons. You can’t expect them to understand or even care about politics when they specialize in showing oily people carefully make soft punches look devastating to children in the back rows of arenas. WWE is a goof akin to Dennis Rodman bringing basketball to North Korea.

And despite whatever crimes have been committed by the government of Saudi Arabia that should call into question the policy of the WWE to perform in this country, there are clearly thousands of real fans at these events who love wrestling and probably, like most of us, really don’t care that much about the daily political minutiae in their country. Making those people happy should be the goal of a silly tights & fights company like the WWE not, obviously, international regime change.

Statement #5: Watching wrestling is better than good food or having sex.

Jake Chambers: FACT – My crowning achievement as a writer here at 411mania remains this 2017 article that ranked these three life essentials and ultimately decided that sex was at the top of the pyramid: What is the Best Thing in Life? Pro-Wrestling vs. Good Food vs. Sex

The truth is, as I get older sex, like food, becomes a routine, whether it’s something you are doing by yourself or with your partner. Putting the adjective “good” in front of these nouns as a qualifier does diminish in value as the routine sets in and makes good a constant in life. Obtaining this kind of routine is definitely a privileged and achievable goal, as there are many people on earth without the access to even garbage food or the freedom to enjoy the regular sex life of their choosing.

However, a nice routine does not create touchstone memories. And I can no longer discern the meal I had 8 months ago from what was assuredly an awesome sexual encounter 8 years ago. But you know what I do remember vividly on an almost daily basis: my floor seat experience watching Sycho Sid defeat Shawn Michaels for the WWF Championship at Survivor Series 1996 in Madison Square Garden.

The energy Sid brought to the building that night was so raw you could feel it go through your toes from the rumble on the floor all the way up through the electrical tingle in your hair from the boos in the air. The match was the climax to a fantastic card of fights, imitating the embedded narrative rising action of a fine dining or sexual experience, and imprinting on me a memory so strongly that almost 30 years later I still recall intimately that lasting sensory experience. Unlike in 2017 when I wrote that seminal article, I now believe that sustaining this kind of memory, one that – for me – has been achieved from multiple wrestling watching experiences, must be the most important thing in life. The great memories of our wrestling fandom defy even the most satisfying routines in a long life that only threatens to go longer.

So if you believe that, good or bad, watching wrestling is the greatest thing in life then please come back next week and join me for more wacky insight on all the drama, gossip and theory surrounding this bottomless obsession.