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WRESTLING COLUMNS

Angles That Are Too Big For Business
April 1, 2002 - By Brad Dykens

The Draft -- Doomed to fail.. and this is why:

History has laid it out perfectly. It couldn't be more obvious, especially for Vince McMahon and his creative team.. But still they're moving forward with this draft fiasco.. Fans with brains know this draft thing will not work, because we're conditioned to see a bad thing coming, unlike some of today's top bookers and promoters..

The simple explaination is that angles that affect an ENTIRE company, are NOT successful.. Not since the original nWo, which is hard to admit now with all the garbage WCW put out since then.. The nWo was a brilliantly portrayed storyline that the entire roster was a part of in some way..

However, every copycat storyline since the nWo has basically crashed and burned big time.. The most recent failure would be the WCW Invasion angle, which went bottom up within weeks of debuting.. The genius McMahons should have at least been able to keep the angle afloat for a few months before burning it out..

More recently, the reuniting of the new World order, which was originally booked as the 'poison' that would kill the WWF.. What? Did I miss something??

Let's go back further, the most drastic example was when Vince Russo and Eric Bishcoff reformated WCW and scrapped ALL storylines and started from scratch.. That idea went sour REAL QUICK..

What about the ECW Invasion 6-7 years ago in the WWF.. That lasted all of 2 weeks!

The Higher Power angle took off like a drag race but fizzled out with a less than entertaining outcome..

And of course we cannot forget the unbearable McMahon involvement in just about every storyline.. Sometimes the McMahon's were the focus or an angle without actually competing.. Such was the case at Wrestlemania 2000 when each McMahon Family member aligned themselves with a participant in the Fatal Four Way Match for the WWF Federation title.. The struggle for power, but nobody really remembers the outcome to that McMahon struggle do they?!

Why can't a company revolve around a number of storylines?! Remember the good old NWA days when Ric Flair & the Four Horsemen ruled top of the card, and then we had the Rock'N'Roll Express vs Midnight Express feud, and Dusty Rhodes doing his thing, fans could watch several different storylines and if they don't particularly like ONE, the others will make up for it.. in other words, there was always something for everybody.. However NOW-A-DAYS if you don't like an angle, THE ANGLE, that is shoved down your throats for the entire duration of every TV show and every PPV, then the entire experience is ruined..

With so many big names and HUGE ego's running around the WWF locker room, not to mention wrestlers who are special 'political influences', it's hard to pull an ENTIRE locker room into a storyline and keep it neat and entertaining and most importantly (yet often forgotten) having it make sense.. Some wrestlers just don't want to be a part of the 'big angle' and they just choose to keep distant.. Triple H was smart enough NOT to become apart of the new World order because he knew it would fail.. which it did.. Hulk Hogan was smart enough to GET OUT! Stone Cold saw the failure a mile away and took advantage of his high standing and took a two week personal strike.. With a history of failure, it's no wonder wrestlers are reluctant to participate in a large-scale storyline that confuses fans and decreases the quality of the product..

Too bad MORE wrestlers haven't stood up to bookers who come up with really crappy stuff to shove down our throats.. Believe it or not, there are SOME wrestlers left in mainstream wrestling that care about the fans and want only to entertain them.. I won't name names.......



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