You see back in the old days the real main event wrestlers were kept away from each other except for on house shows and special events like pay per views. What would happen on a regular basis is guys that were called "enhancement talent" or "jobbers" were used to put over the name wrestlers. This made fans clamor for the special occasion when their favorite face would get his hands on the dastardly heel. Wrestlers would build feuds by promos, random attacks, and just good old fashioned who is better than who, so when Hulk Hogan finally got his hands on someone like King Kong Bundy it was a big deal.
The decline of these type matches happened in the mid 90's when you had the WWF and WCW involved in a monday night war over ratings. Little by little each company started doing away with the squash matches in a way to one up each other. In the short run this was great fans got to see matches like Ric Flair vs The Giant and Mick Foley vs The Rock on free tv on a weekly basis. This spiked the ratings for a long while and wrestling dominated cable viewer ship.
The WWF finally won the monday night war and WCW was bought out by Vince McMahon. This created what should have been another boom period to wrestling fans, alas this was not to be the whole WCW/ECW invasion angle was poorly done. The WWF became the WWE and slowly got stale over time.
The other day I was thinking about how there hardly ever is a 1st time ever match on a pay per view anymore, and I don't mean Snooki wrestling. How much more special could John Cena vs The Miz be if we haven't seen it 50 times on Raw? Now on to the reason for this blog, the WWE and TNA should bring back the squash matches. There are a ton of guys on the roster that have no real purpose either use them or drop them and bring in new guys for the role. Besides the reasons i listed before for these kind of matches you could also use them as a way to get young talent valuable tv time and experience. Before you scoff at that idea think of this Mick Foley, The Hardy's, Triple H, Edge, Daniel Bryan, and AJ Styles were all at one point early in their careers used as jobbers.
Just my opinion, what do you think?
Completely agree. They have made main events much less special since these guys square off against each other virtually every week. There used to be a time when you had to wait with anticipation after being teased many times with face offs, stare downs, and trash talking, before finally seeing the main eventers match up. Great blog G!
ReplyDelete