by Tom the Actuary

The winds of fashion blow, and carry light minds with it.

Everyone, as you know, hates Billy Gunn. And they all hate X-Pac. They all also hated the Road Dogg before he left. Which is odd to me; odd because, a few short years ago, D-Generation X was the thing, and these same wrestlers were being touted as great by many of the same people who now despise them.

Which is fine, hey, some performers get stale in the sense that our tastes weary of them. But seemingly, everyone got tired of these performers at exactly the same time. I find that odd, but in many ways, typical.

You see, an undeniable phenomenon in Internet wrestling fandom is this: here, among the most passionate, knowledgeable and opinionated wrestling fans in the world you find - an appalling uniformity of opinion.

How can that be? We are the true defenders of wrestling and its traditions! We are the ones who care about the art that goes into a well-constructed match. We understand the business. We see what is good, and pure, and ignore the fashionable whims of the more ignorant crowd… right?

I'd say, no, wrong. There is often more diversity of opinion among the "marks" then among us "smart" fans.

As a matter of fact, I think these two terms should be reversed from their traditional usages. The "smart" fan enjoys wrestling for what it is and gets into it exactly as much as the quality of the product warrants. The "mark" is the idiot (like me) who watches wrestling any time it's on and pays for PPV's even when there is no point to it.

Which is not to say that wrestling (especially wrestling PPV) sucks right now - it doesn't - but it is to say that we who watch, write about, and read about wrestling all the time often get into a sort of group-think mind-set. I mean, if Reviewers A and B, who know a lot about wrestling, say that Chris Jericho is a sloppy worker, and his promos have gotten boring and that Jeff Hardy is a much better prospect, you suddenly see a huge flock of people who never did it before bashing Jericho. Which, come to think of it, is beginning to happen right now.

This sort of thing doesn't happen when you are Joe or Jane Fan who is not looking for the "next elevation" or the "next Shawn Michaels" or whatever other sort of pap we Internet types regularly throw around in discussions. I've seen WWF wrestling shows in the last couple of years, and Jericho and the Hardyz have been getting monster pops for some time from the "average" fans. These fans would never think not to cheer these wrestlers until they were officially "being elevated"; they just cheered for what they saw that they liked.

To be fair, there has been on the far end of the spectrum another group of "fashion conscious" wrestling fans, and they are the ones who only came out to see Hulk Hogan, or the Rock, or Steve Austin, or whomever the biggest star of the day was. These have made up a decent percentage of the wrestling audience, but the vast majority of fans fall between these wrestling neophytes and us wrestling fanatics.

I have my own favorites. I like the Undertaker, Kane, and the Big Show. In fact, I like big man wrestlers, in general, even though they are the bane of wrestling match reviewers. I never liked Shawn Michaels. I liked Hulk Hogan. I liked Yokozuna. I was not a great Ric Flair fan until he was in the WWF. I throw these random opinions out as the Internet version of running against the wind, because, the vast majority of people who write on these subjects feel differently than I do. And you see, that might be just as it should be: real differences of opinion.

But to really qualify as a "real difference of opinion", there has to be two genuine opinions, that the persons themselves formed, based on their own reactions, and not just mimicked ones spouted so as to fit in with their heroes in the online wrestling community.

Take it from me, the group mindset is so easy to fall into, most of us aren't even aware that we're in it. One experiment I tried in the past: I watched wrestling for about a month (a) with the sound turned down; and (b) without reading any previews or reviews of matches. When I turned the sound back up and got back online, I discovered that my opinions of matches and performances suddenly varied more widely from the online community's than they had for a while.

Which reminds me of an old joke I heard years ago about men and marriage: Marriage saves a man an incredible amount of time and energy - he doesn't have to expend any forming his own opinions.

Just don't let this website or any other do that for you.