PWP Nation’s Bruce Hart talks about the booking of Monday Night Raw and the reign of Shane McMahon.
Greetings.
Back in the day when I was first breaking into the wrestling business, my dad used to always say that rule number one, as far as booking (orchestrating story lines) goes, in wrestling, was that the ends need to justify the mean. In other words, whatever you do should have a pronounced purpose or be for a reason. If it doesn’t, then you shouldn’t be doing it; plain and simple.
After having watched the whole Shane McMahon charade unfold for the past few months, including: his Nelson Mandela type return from exile; to calling out the evil empire: Stephanie McMahon, Vince McMahon and Triple H for having ruined the wrestling business; to being scornfully reproached by Vince and labelled an ungrateful “son of a bitch” and subsequently being ordered to put up or shut up by having to fight the Undertaker in a Hell in a Cell match; to his his epic “leap of faith” from the top of the cage through the table, and ultimately being reinstated as the new boss of RAW, it was anticipated that when all was said and done, the ends would somehow justify the means.
Having said that, I’m not really sure if that really proved to be the case. I’m not sure about you, but my take on Shane O’Mac’s return to the center stage was that it tended to be somewhat underwhelming and anti-climactic, certainly when you take into consideration all the trials and tribulations he’d been through and all the prevailing hype and his outspoken vows to clean up the WWE.
It’s all well and good, I suppose, for Shane to be having AJ Styles fight Sami Zayn, or ordering Charlotte to defend her title against Natalya and whatever other minor modifications he implemented, but to my way of thinking that sure as hell doesn’t constitute sweeping change nor does it address many of the fundamental problems he alluded to, when he called out the Authority at the outset of this angle.
I realize that Rome wasn’t conquered in a day, as they say, nor will the WWE be able to get its so-called shit together overnight, but at the very least, if we’re supposed to take this whole thing seriously, Shane and whomever else in WWE headquarters should, at the very least, be defining the apparent problems and issues facing the WWE and endeavoring to come up with well considered, attainable solutions to them.
If I was Shane, especially after all the rhetoric about how Stephanie, Hunter and the so-called Authority had fucked up the business and whatnot, I would have already delivered a “State of the Business” address and outlined how he intends to follow through on his promises to clean up the WWE and to restore pride, legitimacy and whatever else to the business.
From my detached perspective, one of the things that need to be addressed is the erosion of the WWE’s talent base and the decimation of wrestling’s grass roots. While WWE would have you believe otherwise, there are far fewer great workers around these days – which is why the loss of guys like Daniel Bryan and Undertaker and the intermittent loss of others, like John Cena, Randy Orton and Seth Rollins is tough to overcome.
I hate to be casting aspersions upon the next generation of so-called up and coming superstars, but very few of the guys I’ve seen coming up from NXT appear to be the next coming of Randy Savage, Ric Flair, Terry Funk, the Dynamite Kid, the Undertaker, Mick Foley, my brothers Bret and Owen or, even Randy Orton or Daniel Bryan.
I might add that it’s not really their fault, because even if the training they’re receiving is state of the art, there’s still no substitute for being able to apply what they’ve learned in a legitimate, trial and error working environment and learning the other valuable facets of the business, all of which is something the WWF, in its infinite wisdom, did away with back in the day.
If anyone thinks my criticism of NXT is unwarranted, how come virtually all the really great young stars that the WWE has introduced in the past few years, such as Daniel Bryan, Seth Rollins, Kevin Owens, Sami Zayn and Dean Ambrose came from Indy promotions, not the NXT. The majority of the other decent young stars in the past decade, like Randy Orton, Roman Reigns, my nephew Harry, the Usos and the best Mexican and British wrestlers were second generation – correct me if I’m wrong.
I think that some aspects of NXT, as a supposedly viable means of developing talent, might have some ostensible purpose, but, in my candid opinion, the WWE needs to re-evaluate the whole approach, as at this stage it’s certainly not the be all and end all solution that some seem to think it is.
Aside from coming up with a better means of developing talent, the WWE needs to restore “wrestling” back into the WWE, rather than its over emphasis on so-called Entertainment. I don’t want to digress into a dissertation, here and now, on all of that, other than to say that these days wrestling has almost become incidental to all the bullshit, including the scripts, the gimmicks, the smoke and mirrors, the pointless promos, appeasing the smart marks and so much of the other unadulterated bullshit.
Beyond that, most of the misfits overseeing what goes on in wrestling these days are the equivalent of a eunuch in a whore house – they make out to know all about it, but have never done it. I recognize that all sports, be it football, baseball, hockey or basketball have, to some degree, evolved over the years – what with artificial turf, designated hitters, overtime shoot-outs and three point baskets, among other things, but the last time I checked, football was still football and baseball was still baseball and so on and so forth. The same, unfortunately, can not be said about wrestling, specifically the WWE – which has become a misbegotten mutation of what it once was.
There are a number of other important and fundamental issues that Shane and the powers that be in the WWE need to be seriously addressing in the near future – including their various titles, the stale and contrived story lines and assorted other things, which I assume Shane was referring to, in the first place, when he vowed to clean up the WWE in the first place. I’ll look forward to addressing some of those various things in upcoming editions of Hart Murmurs, but will call this a wrap for now.
Until next time, keep the faith!
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