PWP Contributor & host of “The Bottom Line” on PWP Nation Radio Network, Zack Heydorn feels that it’s The Greatest Responsibility of the WWE live TV audience to know their role & do their job.
The wave? Really? This rudimentary type of audience nonsense has infected WWE crowds now? Get over yourselves folks and remember why your butt is in that seat.
If my count is correct, it has been four or five Raw episodes in a row now where matches or segments have been hijacked because of an audience that just won’t shut up. Their apparent obsession with voicing their annoying and oftentimes misguided opinions ends up derailing segments or matches before they can even get on track and gain steam.
Whether its fans deciding that a wave is necessary in the middle of a main event, chanting “boring” during a promo, or screaming “we want Lesnar” during a Divas match, their lack of understanding of what their role is on these shows is astonishing.
Pro wrestling is a true art form. For art to be successful, it needs to have an audience. That goes for painting, comedy and music. Without an audience that can react to the art, is it really there?
The unique thing about wrestling is that the audience is involved in the product and therefore they help drive the artistic expression of the performers in the squared circle. In a match, fans cheer the babyface and boo the heel. They are playing an active and important role in the story that is being told inside the ring.
Furthermore, the performers are reacting to and altering their performance based on how the crowd is reacting. It is a pivotal give and take relationship and if one of those two elements is lacking or totally missing all together, the entire piece of work gets corrupted.
This is why I implore WWE fans: Stop it with the shenanigans on TV. It is affecting the quality of the product and everyone’s enjoyment of the product as well. There are different kinds of fans all around the world. All of them want to see a great WWE product and the amazing thing about that is, they have a hand in helping it become what they desperately want it to be. Unfortunately, they also can have a hand in destroying it.
Let’s stick with the former, guys.
Remember why you fell in love with wrestling to begin with. It wasn’t because you could go to an arena and chant whatever you wanted at whoever you wanted. It was because of the magic happening in the ring. It was because you connected with it and it connected with you. Trust me, you are still able to enjoy and embrace that. Let that drive your reactions and cheers at the show. If you sit back and take a look, there are many great things happening.
The main event on this past week’s Raw is a perfect example. Roman Reigns vs. Bray Wyatt.
For quite some time, fans have been clamoring and almost begging for something fresh in main event segments on Raw. This past Monday, we got one with this match. Five minutes into it though, the crowd became restless with some boring chants and audience members reacting to someone getting bounced out of the arena. This is incredibly hypocritical. We wanted a fresh main event and the WWE satisfied that want by giving us this match. They listened to us and then basically we threw it right back in their faces.
To further show how bipolar WWE fans can be, by the end of the match they were chanting “this is awesome”.
Listen to me folks. The match would have been even more awesome if you allowed yourself to just straight up enjoy it from start to finish instead of needing immediate gratification. By the end we all had a match we were happy with and raving about. It would mean even more if you invested yourselves from the start and would have been even better.
The Divas Revolution is another perfect example. For years, WWE fans have been pleading for better Divas matches and more time allocated to women’s wrestling. Then after a couple months, fans are chanting for Brock Lesnar during what was a long Divas segment. Pick a lane! You wanted more for the divas. Now that you have it, enjoy it and help it succeed by giving it the attention that it deserves.
The reason that the women in NXT have been getting the reaction that they do is because people gave them a chance. More importantly though, those people consciously made an effort to be involved and engaged in the women’s product. This effort from the audience and the performers together led to greatness.
If that same formula was used regularly by WWE audiences who knows how much better the product could get. Now, I’m not naïve enough to think that the performers and writers have no stake in this. They most certainly do. It is their responsibility to create stories and characters that we want to connect with. As the audience though, we need to do our part and give the stories and characters time to grow. That is our job and we will enjoy it all better if we do it properly.
Think of it as a bottle of wine. The writing team is the person that sells you a bottle of wine. If immediately after you buy it you rip it open and chug it, it probably isn’t going to be that good. But, if you wait a day, then open it, let it sit for a few hours, pour it into a glass, take a few little sips, and swirl it around in the glass, odds are its going to taste a heck of a lot better.
Yes, it’s the seller’s responsibility to sell you a decent bottle of wine, but it’s not their fault when you ruin it by not giving it the proper care and chug it out of the bottle in five minutes. Of course it will suck. The same goes for wrestling. It is the writers’ and performers’ jobs to sell us a decent product. Once we have it though, we can do our part to make it better by giving it the time, attention, and care that it deserves. The product will be more enjoyable for us because of it.
Imagine if during the Austin 3:16 promo, people were chanting the announcers name over and over. That promo wouldn’t mean even close to what it means now if that were the case.
So remember this the next time you are sitting in the audience of a WWE event. You mean something to the product you are watching. You are dictating it to some extent. That is a big responsibility to all the fans around the world so take it seriously. Wrestling fans are the most passionate fans out there. Ditch the wave and harness that passion to drive the product to new heights. You never know what might happen.
