Maybe WWE should produce great wrestlers....

[Guest NoCalMike]

I am thinking maybe problems like tonight's Austin situation is a result of the WWE always making stars, and not concentrating on the wrestling.  Now I am not going to blame, Hogan, Triple H, HBK, Flair, Undertaker, Rocky, Austin...etc...because I think they ALL fit under the same boat. Basically, they are elevated to the moon, and then one day they are just told to give it up. Now since I have never been in that type of position, it is hard to say how I would react to it, but maybe the problem lies with how Vince goes about feeding egos in the first place. Now I do understand that you have to elevate Main Eventers a certain amount over the rest of the card in order to give them legitimacy among the fans, yet it always seems to bite them in the ass a couple years down the road.  Now it would be easy to name one or two wrestlers you hate and state that they refused to give up the spotlight, but it seems that is the truth for almost ALL of them, so I am just thinking that maybe the WWE should stop themselves from corrupting the next batch of potential "stars" and just concentrate on getting good matches out of their WRESTLERS and hope the rest can fall into place and take care of itself,(Easier said than done methinks)

[Guest Jobber of the Week]

Unfortunately, wrestling is a business that seems to go through years of non-popularity, where the only people that care about it are Southerners, a small number of marks elsewhere in the country, and Canadians.

 

Every now and then, something comes along that makes John Q Public tune into wrestling. There's a business boom. Guys like Hulk Hogan way back in the day or Steve Austin four years from now. Wrestling is "hip" for a period of time. Unfortunately, this period just recently stopped and the company has yet to realize it, but to get back to the subject...

 

Wrestling as we know it today thrives on these booms. However, to register on the mainstream radar, the WWF has to take guys who are just pro wrestlers and throw enough Hollywood gloss on it that they actually do seem somewhat like a celebrity, and thus they become a household word.

 

This is why so many people know who don't watch wrestling know who Hulk Hogan is but have never heard of Jimmy Snuka. For a modern example, go see how many people know about The Rock but they've never heard of RVD, etc.

 

Without the casual fan explosions of things like the Hogan era and Austin/McMahon, it'd be unlikely wrestling would succeed beyond the regional level.

 

S.Keith said a while back in a Mailbag that even if the AWA kept Hogan, Vince could have chosen Junk Yard Dog or some other wrestler and gotten the same effect. True perhaps, but they would still have to be pushed to the moon both in and out of the ring to get into Joe Casual's attention span.