Every wrestling fan will by now be aware that Jim Ross has “retired” from the WWE after over 20 years of on/off employment by the company. It goes without saying that Ross was the voice of the WWE for many years, enhancing the product with his calls in some of the most famous matches and incidents that the company has ever brought us.
Would Mick Foley’s insane stunts in Hell In A Cell have been quite as memorable without Ross’ dramatic commentary? Whatever your opinion on that you cannot deny that JR added another layer of excitement and entertainment to that match with his passionate and heart-felt calls. Somehow I don’t think Vince McMahon screaming “whatta manoeuvre” over and over again or Michael Cole not-so subtly lambasting the product he’s paid to promote (following orders, of course) would have had quite the same effect.
But this is not intended to be a remembrance of Jim Ross’ commentating career in the WWE. Having had the pleasure recently of reviewing the new Mid-South DVD/Blu-Ray (highly recommended by the way) the care and attention Jim Ross paid to that venture as producer was arguably an indication of where his strengths lay in the current era of the WWE. It’s frightening to think what a mess of it the WWE might have made if they’d entrusted it to someone with no knowledge of anything outside of the WWE. Ross was there, in the thick of it, in Bill Watts’ promotion and he parlayed that into fantastic presentation.
And then it got me thinking. Jim Ross was one of the few people with any type of power in WWE who hadn’t spent most of their life cocooned in the WWE “bubble”. Sure there are a number of Road Agents employed who have extensive knowledge and experience outside of the WWE but they have little actual power backstage in terms of the overall direction of the company. The only other name that stands out in that respect is Michael Hayes.
This may not bother some of you. You might reasonably suggest that the WWE is the only game in town and that the old timer’s knowledge of the past is irrelevant in the modern world where the McMahon’s are king. And indeed with no serious competition on the North American horizon (sorry TNA fans, but they’re never making it to Vince’s level) who is to argue that Vince is wrong?
Yet it saddens me that with each passing year, less and less people with any knowledge of wrestling’s past are in the employ of the WWE, leading us ever closer to an homogenised product where there is only one style of wrestling and one way of presenting it to us.
Now I would agree with many that Triple H’s promotion to a position of real power across the board has led to a number of exciting changes in some small ways, such as the rebooting of NXT as a genuine breeding ground for new prospects and other little things like actually spending time building up the Raw and Smackdown debuts of new talent. Many have also made much of the new WWE Performance Center. As a facility it appears to be second to none, even if the scepticism remains that it’s not simply what the WWE do with wrestlers BEFORE they debut on television but what they do with them once they have reached the hallowed ground that really matters. Stop/start pushes are still disappointingly familiar in the WWE. And yet the news recently was that the WWE have employed David Bailey as the General Manager of the complex. His business record at Barnum & Bailey Circus is presumably impressive (and will quietly amuse some in comparison to the WWE) but he has absolutely no wrestling knowledge or experience on his résumé. It smacks again of employing Hollywood writers with no wrestling experience to write storylines and then wondering why they don’t get over.
In the ring, the likes of CM Punk and Daniel Bryan seem to be the last of dying breed. They had years of independent and international experience with other companies before reaching the promised land and it’s perhaps no surprise that they have been able to use that to get over, despite all the obstacles put in their way. Their success has led to the likes of Dean Ambrose and Seth Rollins getting the nod and the WWE’s push for more “foreign” talent has seen the likes of Adrian Neville and Paige ink deals, but as the years go by the general nature of the wrestling business at the moment means that more and more WWE superstars will have limited experience of working elsewhere and certainly won’t have had years and years of experience in different promotions and countries. In years to come many will have had The Rock’s career trajectory where he spent pretty much all his career as a WWE employee. And for all the success he had, just consider how many of the other greats of the past 20 years or so were able to use the experiences they had elsewhere to put on better performances in the “big time” which in turn made the company they work for a lot more profitable.
This isn’t meant to be a lament for a forgotten time. Wrestling changed beyond all recognition on the back of Vince McMahon’s gamble of going national. But if you think that the “WWE style” is entrenched now, just think what it will be like in twenty years time. By then there really will be only one way to “work” in North America if you want to make any money. Jim Ross was the last of a dying breed, sadly soon to become extinct.
– By Matthew Roberts