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| Back Of The Net |
Brian Elliott |
Can the internet ever truly be a positive for wrestling?
Nine years ago in a shoot interview with RF Video, industry veteran Bobby ‘The Brain’ Heenan was brutally frank in his opinion about the future of the wrestling business. “Wrestling is over,” he said, clearly saddened by what he saw as the reality. “The magic is over. We've now taught the fans how we do tricks. If Houdini or Blackstone showed everyone how to do their tricks, they couldn't draw a house the next time. [Wrestling promoters] retarded their own product…”
Of course, the former AWA, WWF and WCW personality was referring not only to how promoters had failed to mask the realities of the business he’d been involved with since 1961, but also to how freely available the information about that truth had become. In large part, the latter fact was down to the internet, whose death grip on kayfabe grew in direct correlation to its rapid expansion.
One thing was clear: wrestling would never again be as it was in the Sixties. Unlike then, no-one was going to argue over whether perennial WWE champions Triple H or The Undertaker were the toughest fighters around, as they had done in the days of Lou Thesz and Danny Hodge. But whereas that was part of the definition of professional wrestling to Bobby Heenan, there was a new breed of wrestling fan to whom legitimate fighting ability didn’t matter; a fact proven during the wrestling boom period of 1998-2001, perhaps not-so-coincidentally at a time when the internet was having its own explosion in growth.
Some promoters may have mourned the loss of wrestling as it once had been, but for many it was a small price to pay for the exposure the internet afforded them. One such company was Ring Of Honor, which began running shows in 2002 and, with the backing of the online wrestling community, gained worldwide notoriety within months. Now, in 2010, it’s planning its second internet-only pay-per-view in April from one of the great cities in wrestling’s history: Charlotte, North Carolina.
Not surprisingly then, the story of the internet’s effect on wrestling has two sides. But while it may have only been a little more than 15 years since the birth of online wrestling, in many ways it’s difficult to remember how the business was in the early Nineties and even earlier…
For the rest of this feature, check out issue 52 of FSM - available at WH Smith and all good retailers. (For US readers we are now carried at Borders and Barnes & Noble, so check for local availability or click here to subscribe.)
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