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I've made a big post on the obvious failure in WWE concussion protocol last night in the WWE thread and I can't be bothered to copy and paste it in here: basically last night was a massive failure for them and they need to really examine their processes to figure out what exactly failed but they won't since The Safe Company don't care about safety. WWE is the company that you can talk about the most here since they have the bigger issues. A lot of long-term injuries aren't through doing certain dangerous moves but through just repetition of bumps and unless everyone just does grapplefuck forever you can't really eliminate the back bump from wrestling so you have to look at things like the schedule and the sort of matches people are working. WWE have the biggest schedule (four days a week for main roster people; with three days for travelling and resting) which isn't enough for people to heal up properly; and they do a lot of singles matches and even gimmick matches on their house shows which means that you have people working some pretty drat serious matches for four days a week all year and then not really getting prolonged rest which is what causes injuries and is why a lot of WWE wrestlers require things like knee surgery earlier than wrestlers from outside. Considering that house shows don't draw anyway it might genuinely be worth shifting them up to mostly be tags and trios matches like most Puro house shows in Japan in order to spread the load significantly, which allows your top talent to rest up and not need to slowly injure themselves working a hardcore singles world title match that will only be seen by 2,000 is some random show in Alabama or wherever. People will point to New Japan or other Puro main events as being hard hitting and while there are examples of major injuries there (Shibata obviously, Kenta being rung in London this year as well) outside of the big singles tournaments they do tours where you'll at most have one singles match on the tour; lots of six, eight or ten man tags where you go in to do signature spots and take two bumps and gaps between tours to rest up which is significantly kinder to the body and which allows them to work a stiffer, stronger style. What's happened in WWE is that really in the last few years a fusion of that style and US indie style has merged with the old WWE house style to become their new style and so you have people working the equivalent of just below a major NJPW main event three days a week plus whatever they are doing on TV and the body can't handle it - there's a reason why the tours before and after both the G1 and BOSJ are minor tours where outside the Dontaku Junior Title match people not in the title scene will do nothing: because they want to save their bodies for the punishment and then recover afterwards. The danger isn't in individual moves but its in the amount of ring time you work and that's significantly higher in WWE than elsewhere. I also think they need to really cut down on the number of gimmick matches. We've reached the point where people have basically seen everything they ever will in a Ladder or TLC match so in order to get big reactions they need to go higher and higher and bigger and bigger and we must be near the limit where you can't do anymore: especially on the WWE schedule where you may well be working a TV match the next day with 0 time to rest. In an ideal world you'd only do gimmick matches in stories and feuds that naturally build to them and then if two people are killing each other you want them to remember it: the impact of the Moxley/Omega match is an example where they took a match format that in reality was probably safer than a lot of WWE gimmick matches but made it look brutal to create that reaction. Most TLC matches in WWE now are forgotten since they weren't really built to and they can't top what came before so you have people doing these massive stunt shows killing themselves, for... what? This is especially the case when they do the things on House Shows: does anyone buy a ticket to a WWE house show because they announce a CAGE MATCH as the main event; especially with their history of changing lineups last minute. Not only would doing that make the wrestlers safer but also it'd make the thing more interesting when you actually do them: a special treat rather than "oh wait its TLC we have to have two TLC matches". Its telling to me that people generally react more to normal matches and the stuff you do in those now over the gimmick matches as well: which is another reason to ditch them.
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Dec 16, 2019 22:41
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Low Desert Punk posted:the problem with limiting dates is that wrestlers need a TON of ring-time to even be passable at professional wrestling, unless you're a prodigy like Angle, and even then you need a couple years. so if your idea is to develop new talent instead of just harvesting husks of old wrestlers, you need them to work a lot, because otherwise you get a situation like Britt Baker where she's had a pitiful amount of matches in her career and it's extremely unlikely she'll get any better wrestling once every two weeks on Dark and Dynamite The solution is to change how people are trained: in Japan there are plenty of examples of people who've debuted pretty quickly after starting and immediately looking great - admittedly in most cases they aren't pushed immediately and there's lots of time spent working opening matches but there are examples of super rookie pushes. Utami Hayashishita started training in Stardom February 2018, past her pro test (the test that most Joshi companies have their trainees do to make sure they are ready to debut; tests physical fitness, ability to do basic bumps, rolls and other fundamental things and an amateur wrestling/grapping portion to test those skills) in July 2018, debuted in August and got to the final of Stardom's G1 equivalent the following month and while she's a very unique example of someone who debuted and just got it there are others who look great within months of their debuts in Japan. I don't think that its because Japanese people are naturally more skilled so its either that Japanese promotions are better at identifying and signing talent (but a lot of those great wrestlers are from small companies that are often getting people right out of high school and can't afford top level natural athletes), have better training methods and approaches or that they work more dates, which in some companies isn't true since there are weekend-only companies around. You'll also see than in a lot of the young lion tags on New Japan shows they'll either have a team of young lions or have teams of rookies+vets with the rookies working most of the match: that's because they want the rookie in there to learn, develop and improve while also meaning that the veterans on that time can do less and take less bumps which gets you the best of both worlds. That's quite common when you look through Japanese cards. Jerusalem posted:Kazuchika Okada gets people to lose their loving minds when he hits a dropkick. It's all about timing and presentation, but the wrestlers themselves need some latitude to be able to learn and develop these skills and build up a relationship with the audience. WWE's micro-management really severely curtails that. This is the key thing though: the reason why WWE crowds react to only entrances, catchphrases, big moves and finishers is that the WWE product has conditioned them that only those things matter. Meanwhile you look at Japan and you'll see crowds reacting big to a rookie going for a cradle to get a win on a big name only for it to be a near fall and the Okada dropkick spot or other very simple things because those crowds have a much deeper level of personal investment in those wrestlers. I'll give a live take from going to EVE the last few years: there's a wrestler in EVE called Jetta who started as a comedy heel that was over the top and egotistical but she naturally turned face and became this underdog figure that everyone wanted to win. In 2017 she entered their big annual round-robin tournament called the SHE-1 and gets drawn in a death block that has Meiko Satomura, Emi Sakura and Viper in it and predictably loses every match; the matches against Meiko and Emi were basically squashes but she fights on valiently against Viper getting close to the time limit before losing; and leaving the tournament with 0 points. In the 2018 SHE-1 she qualifies again and gets drawn in a block with Command Bolshoi, Toni Storm and Kasey: the first two matches are a similar story to last year but in that final match against Kasey, an opponent much closer to her level, she valiantly fights hard, holds on and manages to get a time limit draw to get a point in the tournament and the crowd roars, like she's won the World Title. In 2019 she qualifies again and this time is in another very tough block: against Jazz, Mei Suruga and EVE Champion Rhia O'Reilly, who's also top heel in the company and says that while she doesn't think she'll win the tournament her goal is simple; to improve on last year, to get a win. She falls to Jazz and Mei while Rhia manages to defeat both and because of that she's automatically through to the final no matter what happens. They face in the third night; and while I think everyone has a good idea what they'll do by the end everyone has forgotten that. The last five minutes of the match is basically Rhia putting Jetta in various submission holds with Jetta holding on, fighting her way to the ropes several times but being dragged back several other times. The crowd is red-hot this whole match: and at this point everyone is screaming for her to hold on, continually checking the time remaining on the big screen to see just how long there is left. And then with ten seconds to go; Jetta manages to reverse the crossface that she was in into a cradle and manages to pin the champion; and get her big win. The roof was almost blown off the Resistance Gallery: everyone was happy and cheering; some people were even crying. And they managed to get that reaction not with a load of big moves or with a load of weapon spots: it was a simple, long-term story that everyone was into with a logical finish that everyone expected, but then forgot that they expected mid-match so that when it happened everyone was ecstatic. There's one core rule with pro wrestling: if you can get people emotionally invested in your stories then it makes your life a lot easier and it helps to cover any flaws you might have since people want to like things and they'll overlook minor mistakes. And that's when you get little special moments in wrestling: like for example that moment in this years New Japan Cup where briefly, for just a few seconds, everyone in the crowd thought that Shota Umino genuinely had a chance to defeat Hiroshi Tanahashi and move on: people are only going to think that if you have them emotionally invested in him and in Tanahashi. And frankly if you can get people to care about your matches then you can do what Naito does: in the big matches he works he goes all out and puts his body on the line but in the random tags in between? He does gently caress all; usually wrestles with his shirt on, comes in to take maybe a couple of bumps at most and do some signature spots and maybe hit a destino to win the match if he's winning the fall. And yet the people in that building don't care because its Tetsuya Naito: they love him anyway and even doing barely that in an eight man tag is enough to make them go home happy. There's no one in WWE who could get away with that and that's the problem: in order to get people to react and to care they have to do a lot more and combined with the death schedule it kills their bodies quicker.
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Dec 17, 2019 03:27
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