A new day in the squared circle?
Ready?
This will not be the usual fare.
It’s not the Sooners.
It’s not Ryan Walters or Kevin Stitt or Gentner Drummond trying to do something about Ryan Walters and Kevin Stitt.
Nope, it’s none of those things, though perhaps I can keep it entertaining.
It’s pro wrestling — DON’T STOP READING, PLEASE — once one of the loves of my life, though I mostly gave it up in March of 2001 when World Championship Wrestling died.
Actually, it might have been sooner and I can check.
The last wrestler I actually cheered for, who could lift me out of my seat, was the great Diamond Dallas Page and … maybe make yourself a sandwich as I thumb through the WCW world championship list … here it is: Page last won the crown, defeating Jeff Jarrett, egregiously overrated his entire career, on April 24, 2000.
That title reign lasted all of one day when, via a horrendous angle … if you must know how Page lost the belt the next night, you can find a thumbnail sketch of it here. I’d explain, but the angle still makes me too mad to take the time.
That angle aired a day later, so perhaps it was April 26, 2000, I mostly gave up on the squared circle.
Believe it or not, the little wrestling I’ve watched since has been a conglomeration of Ring of Honor, New Japan, TNA and NWA; rarely WWF or what it’s called itself since 2002, WWE, ditching the F for Federation for an E for Entertainment, accomplishing two things.
One, it settled a legal dispute with the World Wildlife Fund, which beat it to the acronym. Two, it buried wrestling for so many fans like me who grew up on the Mid-South and Georgia territories, which represented the “sport” like it was really a sport, rather than a scripted melodrama staged by musclebound actors.
Entertainment?
It’s supposed to be wrestling, man.
So there’s that.
Yet, something happened last Saturday following the WWE’s Bad Blood pay-per-view that just might get me to care about it all over again.
Apparently, because I didn’t watch the pay-per-view, had no idea there’d been a pay-per-view and would not have cared about it had I known there was a pay-per-view, Cody Rhodes and Roman Reigns, previous enemies, teamed to beat Solo Sikoa and Jacob Fatu in the pay-per-view’s main event.
Then, afterward, outside the arena, in front of a WWE tour bus doubling as a rolling placard for Wheatley American Vodka, an incident occurred that was not caught, nor meant to be caught, by WWE cameras, but by fans the company surely new would be eyeing and recording it with their phones.
It was Kevin Owens, another wrestler, who until that moment had been a good guy, a “face,” not a “heel” just like Rhodes — though perhaps their “friendship” had been recently stressed — arguing with Rhodes on the pavement outside the arena.
When Rhodes bent down to pick up his “Undisputed WWE Championship” belt — did I forget to mention Rhodes is the promotion’s champion? — Owens attacked with a flurry of punches and kicks as Rhodes attempted to cover up to little avail.
The thing was, I did not see Owens attack Rhodes until after I saw that “Triple H,” who I remember more fondly as “Hunter Hearst Helmsley” — though his actual name is Paul Michael Levesque — had tweeted about the incident in his official role as WWE head honcho, which he real-life is now that Vince McMahon has been banished (and may soon be indicted), making way for Triple H, McMahon’s real-life son in law, to real-life run the promotion.
Triple H tweeted this:
“We are aware of the incident outside of the arena last night between Cody Rhodes and Kevin Owens. The matter will be dealt with internally.”
Do you see?
Because here’s what I thought when I read it.
I actually thought, “has the revolution arrived?”
If you were the kind of wrestling fan I was growing up — therefore now a lapsed fan, one who regrets what Gordon Solie*, the greatest wrestling announcer who ever lived, used to call “the ultimate game of human chess” no longer applies to what modern wrestling has become — you likely understand.
The great Jim Ross is next on that list and nobody is a close third (though Lance Russell is a distant third) … Solie wins because he’s the guy who made it all feel so legit in the first place, with a seeming doctor’s knowledge of anatomy and which parts of it were affected by each hold. He also invented or re-invented terms like “a real pier-sixer” to describe a huge brawl, or “Katie bar the door” as an indicator something needs settling in the ring right now. Ross called a more exciting match, but he needed Solie to set the stage for him to do it with so much believability.
Yet, if not, let me explain.
After reading the tweet, I went and found the video of the incident between Owens and Rhodes, only to quickly realize it was a “work” and not a “shoot” — i.e. part of WWE’s narrative rather than real-life Kevin Owens real-life attacking real-life Cody Rhodes — and my heart swelled at the possibilities BECAUSE THAT MEANT TRIPLE H, WHO REAL-LIFE RUNS THE COMPANY WAS NONETHELESS TREATING THE NOT-REAL INCIDENT AS THOUGH IT WERE.
Do you see?
In the old days, though in the dark recesses of our minds we knew it couldn’t all be real because they’d be killing each other if it were, we still watched and allowed ourselves to be swept up by it as though it were.
We did it because the announcers played it so straight rather than tell us all the secrets on their podcasts.
We did it because the wrestlers were not actors, but performers whose public-facing private lives did not disagree with their wrestling ones.
If a wrestler “broke” his arm in the ring because he needed to rest his body for a couple weeks, he had a cast ready to put on that arm should somebody ring the doorbell.
If they hit the bars after the matches, and they were a “face” they only hit them with other faces, while the “heels” found their own bar.
And because they did all that, what’s called “living the gimmick,” they didn’t need scripts for their promos. In character all the time, all they needed was a microphone to push the narrative where it needed to be pushed.
So here was Triple H, who really does run WWE, who is real-life cutting a new path for the promotion, going back in time and treating it like a sport, like it’s real, issuing a statement that things would be dealt with internally following a public brawl between two of his stars because if it had indeed been a real-life public brawl, that’s exactly the type of statement he’d issue.
Oh, I miss it.
I miss it so much.
So, Saturday, Triple H put out a tweet after an incident between Kevin Owens and Cody Rhodes and everything felt possible again.