The Thin Line Between Sports and Entertainment
Kids, you want to start a big ol’ sports website. You want to talk about the big issues in sports right now. Where do you go with your first column? A-Rod’s resurgence? Favre, so you can be like the other 8 million sportswriters out there? Your borderline homo-erotic man crush on Henrik Lundqvist (well, we’ll save that for another day)? Nope. Let’s go to the WWE, naturally.
On Monday night, I made my triumphant return to a live wrestling event, attending Raw at Madison Square Garden. (Or as Good ol’ Jim Ross would say: “Good god almighty…it can’t be…THAT’S JEREMY ROTHSCHILD’S MUSIC!!”) I used to watch wrestling a lot more, culminating in going to Wrestlemania XX, a top 5 sporting event that I can remember going to live. But eventually I got out of it, and now only watch on rare occasions, the odd Raw here and there. But my cousin and I made our return on Monday night, and as always, going to a WWE event means, above all, making fun of the various weirdos who go to these events. My cousin met me at MSG, and while waiting for me, said “I was looking around at all of the people coming into the building. Almost all of them look like they can’t afford to be at this kind of event.” That was the first thought. Ladies and Gentlemen, the WWE! A few quick thoughts from the night:
- If someone tells you tomorrow that Mark Henry dropped dead overnight, what would your level of shock be, from 0 (Britney Spears’ loss of virginity to Justin Timberlake ten years ago*) to 10 (Martin Brodeur’s startling admission of his homosexuality**)? I think I’d be about a 0.73, in honor of his weight in tons. Really, humungous wrestler who’s had to fight back from countless injuries through various methods, who also has zero personality and has to fight and move his ridiculously enormous body 350 nights a year? Let’s hope it doesn’t happen, but I wouldn’t wager against it.
*Can you believe it’s been 10 years since Britney came onto the scene? I continue to find new ways to make myself feel old. I’m the youngest old geezer on the planet.
**This hasn’t happened. Yet. Give it time.
-Is it a bad thing that the presence of Primo, supposedly the little brother of Carlito, warranted a stronger reaction than a video of Barack Obama?
-Judah Friedlander came into the ring to announce the wrestlers in a match, and got zero reaction, despite being clearly introduced. Hmmmmmmmmmmm. So I take it that not many wrestling fans are watching 30 Rock these days?
-DX, the combination of Shawn Michaels and Triple H, got the loudest ovation of the night. People were genuinely thrilled to see them. It was as loud in MSG when they were introduced as any time the Rangers have made a big play in a big game, or any time the Knicks make a…score a…win a…I’ve got nothing. Somebody stop me.
- The Undertaker’s entrance is legitimately A MOMENT. If you’ve never seen his entrance, stop what you’re doing and watch this. Now. All joking aside, his entrance is more exciting than almost anything in any sport. If you tell any person who has ever had any interest in WWE that the Undertaker is about to come out for a match, do you think they’re changing the channel for the next minute and a half? I think not. I think not indeed.
(This entrance is so good that on American Idol last year, Adam Lambert basically ripped off the entire entrance during his finale performance. Was this intentional? Has Adam Lambert ever heard of wrestling? Both strongly debatable. But alas.)
From here, the show took its standard forms. There were a few matches, none of which were particularly outstanding. It had its moments of entertainment value, as it always does. But as the night went on, I kept trying to consider what made a WWE event different from a sporting event. The similarities are very clear. You’ve got an arena. You’ve got passionate fans. You’ve got the highest level of performers in their field giving their all to entertain their fans. So what’s the difference? Why don’t we just all watch WWE and give up on sports altogether, besides our innate desire to give all of our money to Chris Berman and ESPN?
The first difference I noticed was the atmosphere of the crowd as the show started. During a sporting event, the anticipation of the crowd usually depends on how the home team has been playing lately. If a team is on a hot streak, or playing in a big game, the crowd will usually be pumped up and ready to go from the get go. If not, then not so much. For a WWE event, the crowd will be jacked up right away, since there’s no reason to be in a bad mood about the team or company. What could be a reason to not be at your most frantic when the event starts? Why would a fan not be ready to give their all from the very beginning? Okay, if a wrestler kills himself and his family that day, that counts. But that only happens once in awhile!
As the event starts, there are certain things that occur that gets WWE fans particularly excited, in the same way that it happens in sports. For example, as a New York Rangers fan, at a home game the crowd gets a boost when John Amirante comes out to sing the national anthem. Here’s Amirante: This clip is of him singing the ‘Rangers Victory Song’, which is used at the end of games, but just look at him during this. The guy can is a good singer, in a shlocky-1950s kind of way, but can you tell me you haven’t heard a hundred better singers in your lifetime? A thousand? Ten thousand? And look at the hair. The hair! Did he find it on the street? Was a sketchy guy on 51st and 5th selling toupees one day with his folexes and Spate Kade purses for 5 bucks? His toupee was already legendary when this was made. And this was in 1992! THIS WAS 1992!!! Imagine what it must be like now! His toupee is legendary in Madison Square Garden, easily as famous as any current Knick. If a random New Yorker saw John Amirante’s toupee and David Lee walking on the streets, which one gets more attention? The inherent goofiness of Amirante is something we love about sports, a constant reminder that everything will be alright, no matter what else is going on in life. John Amirante’s notoriously odd inflections of the star spangled banner puts everyone in a good mood. And the same is true for WWE. When Howard Finkel comes to an event, its automatically assumed that the event takes on a greater meaning. The Fink has been around since the mid-80s, and his presence alone as ring announcer gives the impression that a big event is about to happen. He has announced every Wrestlemania and major event, and even though he’s also old and in general a mockery of himself, the fans adore each of his moments.
Quick proposal: When, in the future, somebody figures out how to make us all immortal, I say that these types of people should be the first to get the immunity drug. People who make everyone feel better by their mere presence alone. When Mark Messier dies, I’ll be sad because we’ll be losing a legend in hockey, and he’ll be missed. But when Amirante dies? I’ll be legitimately crushed. I won’t be able to go on with my day. Even though he never had the impact on the sport that Messier did, on a day to day basis I would miss him so much more. Here’s the short list of people who should be on the ‘instant immortality’ list: John Amirante, Howard Finkel, Bob Barker, Doc Emrick, Jim Ross, Sam Rosen, Bob Sheppard, Vin Scully, Steve Somers, Regis Philbin, and Mike Francesa and Chris Russo. Plus, the late Harry Caray, Harry Kalas, and Dick Clark, if the potion had been invented in time for them. (What, Dick Clark’s alive?!)
As the night went on, the matches became more predictable. There was a quick Women’s match, plus a fairly dull matchup for the US Title. Rowdy Roddy Piper was guest host, and he had a segment with Vince McMahon, where he wanted to have one last match with Vince. Various hijinks ensued, and eventually Piper got his ass handed to him by Randy Orton. Yawn.
There’s something about the fade of pro wrestlers that is so much harsher than that of a pro athlete. Once a pro athlete hits 35, we start to get the gist of the downward spiral of his career. The contracts get shorter; they start wanting to play for contenders and not require alpha dog status on all of their teams. They might take a bit less money to be in a winning environment. And by 40, most guys are all but done, give or take a few years courtesy of steroids. The more charismatic athletes land sweet TV gigs on a broadcast network or ESPN, some doing color commentary, some in the studio, and some get their own talk shows and radio spots. There’s a path that athletes have gone down, that gracefully and gradually removes them from the public eye. There’s the weepy Hall of Fame induction and the foundation for starving kids in Guatemala. But what do wrestlers have to look forward to? They can’t play for a contender, since they’re already with the greatest team in the world in their profession. Why would they take a pay cut? They’ve earned the right to be the top guy, they feel fine, so why take less money? And if they retire, what are they supposed to do? There are no studio jobs for halftime of Raw. If they get a DUI claiming they’re on the way to get a blowjob from a hot stripper, they won’t get bailed out, Barkley-style, and be back on the air in three weeks. So what are they going to do? They’re going to keep wrestling, because they don’t see evidence that they’re getting worse at it. When Brendan Shanahan sees that he’s only scoring 9 goals a season when he used to score 40, that’s a pretty strong inclination that it’s time to hang up the skates. But what statistic is telling a wrestler that it’s time to go? Some snarky website saying he sucks? Just look at the ages of Raw’s main event performers: The Undertaker and Shawn Michaels are both 44. Triple H is 40. The Big Show is 37! There’s no way to quantify the downfall of a pro wrestler, so it leads to Hulk Hogan dragging his carcass at the age of 55 and doing a leg drop that lifts three inches off the ground and makes everyone in the building think “Oh god, please don’t break a hip right now. That would be ugly.” The percentage of wrestlers that have made fools of themselves at an older age is nearly 100 percent. Almost the only people who haven’t are the ones who are dead.
So we progressed to the main event, a triple threat tag team match featuring DX, Chris Jericho and the Big Show, and John Cena and The Undertaker. Is it a bad sign for your company when five of the six guys in the main event would have been in the exact same main event twelve years ago? The only guy out of those six who is a fairly new talent is Cena. How would the NFL look if Dan Marino, John Elway, Brett Favre, Kerry Collins, Mark Brunell and Vinny Testaverde remained the best QBs in the league? Isn’t this a bad sign for the progress of a brand? Are these same guys going to be wheeled out in another twelve years? Most of them are still fairly productive, except for Big Show, whose wrestling skills amount to “Being Big” and “Being Big”. Is this a road we really want to be going down?
(While we’re here, is there a more polarizing athlete in any sport than John Cena? He was in the WWE system for a long time, caught a break, earned his way through each level of the company, became champion in 2005, and has been a consistent main-eventer ever since. He says the right things, and is good at all aspects of being a WWE superstar. He is a solid wrestler, if not a great wrestler. He has outstanding showmanship, and is a natural on the microphone. And yet, despite the company’s intentions to make him consistently a good guy, he is despised by nearly every wrestling fan. His presence on the video screen in front of us warranted an onslaught of unprovoked booing. What happened is that he started his career with a fairly hokey gimmick of being a rapper, and he would rap each time he came to the ring. He was hated, but in a good-hate type of way. The fans enjoyed him, and his eventual turn to being a good guy was a nice moment for him, and he became the epicenter of WWE fandom. He rose to champion, and…some portion of his audience had enough of him. So what happened? Little kids still adored him, but the older fans who think they’re smarter than the average 7 year old that WWE caters to decided that he was too immature for them, despite losing the rap gimmick. So he would have a mixed reaction whenever he came to the arena, and eventually little kids wanted to act like the super-cool grownups and started booing him too. But this whole time, HE HAD DONE NOTHING WRONG!!! He became this villain outside of even the storylines. He was hated as a person. He never did anything besides try to fulfill his potential as the face of WWE, and he was dragged over the coals for it. This seems worse to me than anything any other athlete has faced. When Yankee fans got on A-Rod, it was because he couldn’t perform in the clutch and October, not because of a genuine dislike of him as a human being. So I feel for John Cena. And…rant over.)
The main event happened, and it was alright. There was only a limited time to be had, since we all knew that the match started after the show was supposed end on TV. Since they were running over, almost the entire match was each wrestler’s ‘finisher’, their best move that usually ends a match. The routine went on, with Cena eventually winning the match. The problem was that everything about it was so predictable. Nothing about this match, which was perfectly acceptable, caught anyone off guard in the entire building. There were a few nice moves, but the overall process of it was…just…tiring. In some odd way, it reinforced my love for sports. Everything that happened was so perfectly laid out, and I felt so incredibly RIGHT about everything. Don’t get me wrong, there are few things in the world that I love more than being right. But what was the point of it all?
I watched the last few minutes of Michigan State versus Gonzaga in college basketball haphazardly the other night. I saw that Michigan State, the home team, went up 4 points with thirty seconds to go in the game. I turned the TV off and went upstairs to unload the dishwasher, assuming that the game was over. What happened? MSU won, but Gonzaga had multiple chances to win the game in those last thirty seconds that I completely missed, assuming the game was completely over. I was wrong. Dead wrong. And I love that. I love the fact that my preconceptions about everything that I watch are challenged on a nightly basis. I love that I think I’ve seen every possible outcome for a sporting event, and then another one comes along with a completely unique result. I love that I can watch a baseball game and see something I’ve never seen before, like a catcher catching a pop-up barehanded, or a player stealing two bases on the same play. I love that I can still watch a football game that gets my friends and I to all scream at the TV in disbelief when a certain coach goes for it on 4th down with 2 minutes to go in the game while winning by 6 on his own 28 yard line. So while consistently being right has its perks, isn’t it more fun to investigate the unknown? I want to explore the feeling of seeing my team win the championship for the first time, and then the second time, and each time afterwards, and if I have to endure the feelings of heartbreak and betrayal in the process, it’s worth it. I want to unlock the emotions that sports provide for us, in every possible way. How many things in life is it okay to be this unsure about? Would you be comfortable being unsure about your finances, your taxes or your political structure? That would be frightening, and not thrilling in any way. Sports is the place where the dregs of security, assuredness and overall safety are replaced with rooting, hoping and praying, not to mention the excuse to drink beer and enjoy the company of friends. I want this website to be a place that asks the questions that might not be so easy to answer, if its about sports or anything else. And that’s why I wrote this column as the first piece to kick off this new website. I might not always be right about what I say. But it’s the constant possibility of being either right or wrong at any given time that makes sports so damn entertaining, and it’s why I love them.
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