Cirque Du BOSJ: Under The Big Top Of Wrestling Chatter

The tournament is over. All the matches have come and gone. We have a new Best of the Super Junior winner.

Now it’s time to assess the rubble of one particular match so picked apart, a pile of dust remains where it once stood.

So much was made of “The Match That Will Not Be Named.” Practically everyone who was someone (in 1997) weighed in. Everyone who wasn’t someone but has a podcast and a blog so surely they’re making their way to someone status weighed in. The chatter and overblown debate surrounding the event became more of a circus than the acrobatics within the match that were such a key point of contention.

As much as I am sure there is some sort of expectation for me to pick a side, I’m going to be really lame and say, drumroll please…

It’s valid.

As overly sentimental as it can be to describe wrestling as an “art form” (hi Mauro), the fact is the way it is processed and evaluated by its spectators often resembles reviews of albums, films, etc.

So to use a musical anecdote: when Grimes released her latest album “Art Angels” there were a number of very angry men on the Internet who cried foul at the bubblegum pop direction her music was taking as opposed to what they were used to and how they, to some extent, wanted her to create music.

While that example has a great deal of other undertones as to why people reacted the way they did to it, the reaction is not dissimilar to how our corner of the Internet responded to Will Ospreay vs. Ricochet. There was significant uproar because they had a concept of what their wrestling should be and they got shafted.

A kind of possessiveness takes over the debate because one person on the Internet (multiplied by thousands, perpetuated by tweets, blogs and podcasts) knows exactly how wrestling should be and because that match didn’t check their boxes, all of wrestling is dying in front of their eyes.

If you didn’t like it, that’s cool. If you thought it was amazing and a guide book on what the future of wrestling should be, that’s alright too. Ultimately not every performer is going to be able to do stuff like that, and they definitely won’t all want to.

Part of the fun of there being so many different wrestling scenes all over the world is the comparing and contrasting of what goes into a match. And there’s going to be something for everyone in various corners of the world, or in various decades of wrestling’s history.

The variety of styles and available outlets is what makes it more than just silly, it’s absolutely absurd to say one match is going to kill wrestling.

(And there is an oversaturation of commentary about professional wrestling due to a lack of market regulation and this whole situation could have been avoided if there wasn’t such an abundance of overinflated self-importance among professional wrestling opinion makers BUT MOVING ON…)

There’s always the possibility that a majority of performers will gravitate toward furthering a style of wrestling that resembles Ospreay vs. Riochet. If it happens, there will be an audience for it.

But it’s worth cautioning this direction with another anecdote from men’s figure skating: In the last 20 years the difficulty of jumps and routines has grown at arguably an exponential rate. The necessity for multiple quadruple jumps or quad combos in a routine seems almost necessary to compete at an Olympic level. Canadian Patrick Chan in past competitions has had routines with fewer difficult jumps than his competitors, but his technical prowess can be so sound and so effortless that it keeps him at the same level, or overtakes, his trick-happy rivals.

I think you can get the idea from that little tale, it might be a good idea to balance rudimentary techniques, storytelling, and tricks for the sake of furthering the acrobatic genre.

In the long haul, is this going to cause another spike in New Japan’s international audience? Well it got them some great ad revenue on YouTube thanks to The Match being uploaded for free, but it’s not going to be another Wrestle Kingdom 9 situation.

The most important thing New Japan must do is not allow this situation to make them think they can postpone taking the Junior Heavyweight booking in a new direction, like they did the Heavyweight division when they suddenly garnered more Western attention. The Junior Heavy division has gone from lacking in the past couple years to really lacking in the past couple months. KUSHIDA and Will Ospreay are going to have at least one or two more fantastic matches in the future, but unlike WWE’s women’s booking, a division cannot run on two wrestlers alone.