by Tom the Actuary

“Everybody my age knows that things were much better in the old days.  For instance, it used to be that wrestlers could really wrestle.  Why, if there were still such things as marquees, that’s what they would say at the shows – ‘wrestling’.  The Rock and Triple H did a so-called ‘Iron Man’ match last year that lasted an hour.  Huh.  All the wrestlers used to be able to go an hour, or longer, in the old days.  These new guys couldn’t hold the old guys jock straps.”

Well, no one cherishes the old days more than I, but in my opinion, the wrestler of today is the best ever. By "best ever" I mean a number of things, and certainly mean no disrespect to any wrestlers of any generation.

Let me outline my reasons for what makes the modern wrestler great:

1. Travel Schedule. Wrestling has always been a traveling business. What's different about the wrestler of today is the frequency and distance of travel and the amount of different kinds of work they are expected to do outside the ring: public appearances, radio interviews, television shows, web casts, whatever. Wrestlers travel all around the continent and, often, the world. This is certainly different from when wrestling was a regional phenomenon. And working four shows a week also exacerbates point two, which is:

2. Standard of Appearance. Wrestlers today are expected to keep up their physiques, with the athletic look being part of the show. Dusty Rhodes couldn't have even broken into today's wrestling, good as he was in other parts of the business. Someone like the Big Show could have made a career in the past strictly off of his impressive size. Not anymore. The wrestlers at the top - i.e., Triple H and the Rock, have set sky-high standards for physiques. How they keep them up as much as they are on the road is mind-boggling.

3. Variety of Opponents. In the WWF of my childhood, a good feud lasted one-third to one-half a year. For the wrestlers, that meant show after show against same opponents. In the even older days, wrestlers could do the exact same match night after night. With television and PPV shootings, this is not a possibility anymore. Kurt Angle and Chris Jericho have wrestled virtually the entire roster of the WWF - and it's not a small roster - in the last 15 months. What it means is that the wrestlers on the top two-thirds of the card have to work constantly under televised conditions, with ever-changing opponents and without benefit of canned matches. Which leads to point four:

4. Pace of Storylines. Feuds may last a long time still, but except for the top of the card, they tend to be shorter-lived in terms of calendar months than in the past. This is due to the fact that the product is exposed to the public much more often per week than ever before. If the public only sees the show once a week for an hour or two, it's a lot different than seeing the wrestlers three or four times per week for five to eight hours. (By way of a digression, the oft-maligned twenty-minute interview segments are a way of easing the fan that has missed a week or two of television back into the storylines, just as the frequent replays during the show help the frequent channel-flipper. These are inevitable side effects of the rapid pace of storylines.)

5. Pace of Matches. People who grew up with Flair-Steamboat will say that today's wrestlers certainly don't wrestle faster-paced matches than the NWA wrestler of 15 years ago. I don't disagree, but I do think that wrestling in the WWF is faster then it ever was, and as fast as it was in the NWA's heyday. The denizen of puro or lucha will say that WWF style wrestling is dull and repetitive. But, with the additions the WWF has made in the last year or so, there are probably eight to ten wrestlers on its roster who could build and carry a great match anywhere they went in the world. As for the "we used to go 60 minutes every night" contention, from what I've seen of wrestling of years ago, the long matches consisted in great measure of what are now called rest holds.

Now remember, I'm not talking about wrestling like Lou Thesz used to do when he was "hooking" - although I'm guessing someone like Kurt Angle would not be bad at it - I'm talking about staged professional wrestling of the kind we all know, love, and write about ad infinitum on the Internet. The wrestler of today is expected to do more, more places, more often, and look better doing it than ever before.

And while I believe that the "good old days" are now, I respect the generations that came before for their excellence and expect those that follow to exceed this one in ways I cannot imagine. But from where I sit, the new breed of today is earning their right to brag in their old age.