Sell, Sell, Sell! By Matthew Roberts
Wrestling has to evolve to remain relevant and popular. We may not always like the changes on a personal level, but change is a must in any business. In that way it’s very difficult to compare era’s and the talents within those era’s with each other. Bruno Sammartino, Hulk Hogan and Steve Austin were all super over draw’s in their time, for instance, but how can you compare how much of a draw each man was. Sammartino having to draw crowds to a house show loop on a monthly basis is vastly different from Hulk Hogan headlining pay-per-views and NBC TV specials which is again different from Austin having to draw people to switching on Raw on their TV sets on a weekly basis.
Some things however can be compared. And when they are absent from the current day WWE and TNA products and that absence has, in my eyes at least, a negative effect on the business you can certainly do something about it.
And my problem is selling. Or rather the lack of selling. Sure, wrestlers sell a blow at the time, and there are a number of talents who are good “bumpers” but It seems as if “proper” selling is a talent that isn’t valued these days.
This was highlighted by Shawn Michaels return to RAW recently following Hell In A Cell and his segment with Daniel Bryan. When Bryan attacked him it was like a light had been shone into the darkest recesses of the wrestling world as HBK actually sold the pain of the hold and continued to sell it even after the move had been loosened. You know that Shawn wasn’t hurt, but he made you believe in his pain, and thus in the segment as a whole. As I cast my mind back I realised that the last time I could recall a sell-job that effective on WWE programming was last year when Brock Lesnar attacked Shawn and “broke his arm”.
Now Shawn is one of the best ever (and I would argue the best WWE style performer I’ve ever seen in the ring) so it would be unfair to expect everyone to be up to his excellent standard. Yet most don’t even seem to try.
The first obvious target for my wrath would be John Cena. Quite beyond his “superman” style, Cena rarely sells anything beyond the few seconds it takes him to get back up in the immediate aftermath of being knocked down. Despite returning months early from a devastating injury and subsequent surgery on his arm, Cena was allowed (or allowed himself) to treat Alberto Del Rio’s legitimate submission holds with contempt, powering out of them as if they were nothing at Hell In A Cell. Whether it’s a lack of talent, an unwillingness to do it or orders from above to “protect” his character is neither here nor there. A submission hold that would be legitimate in the UFC was rendered impotent in a second, a fact we will be expected to forget the next time Del Rio gets a big push.
And the UFC brings me onto another facet of selling that is completely ignored. John Cena infamously went into business for himself after his match with Brock Lesnar in 2012, talking and walking out of the ring under his own steam despite the apparent beating he took (and was supposed to sell to attempt to build up interest in a rematch) . But shows are littered with people who were in brutal battles on a pay-per-view on a Sunday night showing little ill effects the very next night. Diamond Dallas Page became a figure of fun for spending about seventeen years in WCW with taped ribs, but at least he was visibly selling “injuries” and bringing his own style of believability to proceedings.
A third “John Cena” problem
The epidemic spreads far beyond Cena, of course. The Miz is brutally attacked by Randy Orton but is out next week doing his Miz TV segment with no ill effects; Dean Ambrose can take ten elbows to the head and hardly react; for all the undeniable spectacle of the Money In The Bank matches, selling in those matches is practically limited to lying out of sight at ringside until it’s your turn to do the next crazy stunt.
I’m aware that the changing nature of the business, at least in the WWE terms, means that wrestlers are expected to wrestle on TV every week (if not twice). This means that the “money” guys can’t spend weeks or even months selling injuries as part of a storyline unless they’re actually injured and out of action completely. The WWE want their pound of flesh from their full-timers and it’s simply not going to happen that main event wrestlers will be given weeks off TV for this purpose.
There will even be fans saying that it’s all “entertainment” and we know that they’re not really hurting each other so what does it matter if a wrestler appears on Raw the night after a brutal match without any noticeable ill effects? But without some type of selling wrestling is just two muscled men in tight trunks pretending to fight. Wins and losses in the WWE already mean very little and this has had a deleterious effect on the prestige of championships, with no clear progression towards championship matches. The lack of selling goes further and makes every match irrelevant beyond the “entertainment” of the moment.
The WWE isn’t going out of business anytime soon so they may well see nothing wrong with the “no-sell” era. But it becomes increasingly difficult for anything to have meaning, and thus become “must see” for fans, if nothing they see on screen has any effect on the wrestlers and characters they are watching. And in the long run, that can’t be any good can it?