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If I wanted to watch MMA I'd watch the real thing.
The reality era sucks and will kill wrestling.
The reality era sucks and will kill wrestling.
who said it was going to be mma? they'll just have moves that resemble their martial art. BJJ guys will have a lot of exciting and fast paced groundwork, judo guys will have throws, etc. better than getting some boring, unknown indy guy that no one cares for. the reason angle was so successful was because his gimmick was based around his gold medal, plus he was already established as the greatest amateur wrestler at the time.Pro wrestling and MMA are two different target audiences, I don't get why people think they are directly related/direct competition. People don't watch WWE to see kickboxing.
Olympic gold medalist is an accomplishment that really can't be matched. Not even by MMA. You're talking about stage that reaches a billion homes.who said it was going to be mma? they'll just have moves that resemble their martial art. BJJ guys will have a lot of exciting and fast paced groundwork, judo guys will have throws, etc. better than getting some boring, unknown indy guy that no one cares for. the reason angle was so successful because his gimmick was based around his gold medal, plus he was already established as the greatest amateur wrestler at the time.
name recognition + real talent = win for the wwe, win for the fans, and win for the overall product.
again, i'm not talking about an mma fighter. i'm talking about a martial artist who is a champion in his discipline. also, martial artists such as grapplers pick up pro wrestling extremely quick, and are actually better than indy guys what have been doing it for years. just look at kurt angle and brock lesnar, they both picked it up extremely quick.Olympic gold medalist is an accomplishment that really can't be matched. Not even by MMA. You're talking about stage that reaches a billion homes.
Never the less if you're going to bring in an MMA fighter chances are they're going to be washed up (See Lesnar). People just don't trade real fighting for fake fighting.
Not too mention that people don't care too much about the toughest guy in a fake fight. You tell me who you want to win Rock and Austin or Shamrock and Blackmon?
failure of an analogy. football and baseball are extremely different sports. you can't incorporate baseball into football and vice versa, but you CAN incorporate legit martial arts into pro wrestling, because they're both full-contact. and you do realize that legit martial artists have crossed over to pro wrestling for years, right? this isn't anything new. hell, back in the 50's a lot of them had amateur wrestling/judo backgrounds. look at "judo" gene lebell and masahiko kimura, two world class judokas who had a HUGE impact on pro wrestling and mma as well.Alright but why the hell would they do that?
When I build a football team, I don't make a baseball catcher the center.
What you are saying is changing the entire business that is over 100 hundred years old. Martial arts, boxing and etc. have their place in wrestling but not as a complete overhaul.
You got a point and lets not forget Sylvester Terkay from ECW. He was a NCAA Division 1 wrestling champion, but man did he suck in a pro-wrestling ring.Hmmm, I'm divided on this one- as a martial arts man myself I think, with a little training, it would be good to develop a wrestling style based around grappling based martial arts. Indeed, I've often thought of it myself. With a lot of work it could be done but with a half-arsed approached you could end up looking like Vladimir Kozlov- original style, good technique but horribly out of place and quite dull to watch.
WWE’s Gerald Brisco has been heavily scouting amateur wrestlers lately. Brisco was at the Olympic trials in Iowa City last week and currently has two heavyweight wrestlers that he’s really high on. A Greco-Roman heavyweight from Turkey who is 6-5 and 285lbs. wants to join WWE but the hold-up is that he doesn’t know English so they are trying to get him to learn it now.
The Attitude Era was an aberration. Professional wrestling has typically been a family orientated medium. Most of the stars of today started watching when they were very young, much too young for Attitude Era programming. They watched with their FAMILIES. One of the biggest problems among many IWC members is that many seem to think pro wrestling has always been targeted toward 16-40 year old single men. It hasn't.Before the PG Era the product was targeted at 18-30 year old males. That's what mma's target audience is now. I personally stopped watching wrestling in favor of mma a few years ago. I felt WWE's product was so poor at the time that I couldn't even watch, mma was able to fill wrestling's void for me. So they're are people that have chosen mma over wrestling, because wrestling no longer targeted them like they used to. I now of course watch both mma and wrestling, but if I had to choose between current day wrestling and current mma, I'll take mma. I love wrestling as much as the next guy but the current product isn't targeted at my demographic, mma is, it's that simple for me.
I have plenty of friends that followed wrestling with me in the attitude era and now when I ask if they watch wrestling, it's just "Nah I'd rather watch a real fight in mma". Point is the same audience wrestling used to target, is the current target of mma.