YO, F--- THE RATINGS!

By Justin Henry

(All feedback for this article can be sent to its author, either on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/notoriousjrh) or Twitter (https://www.twitter.com/cynicjrh)

When did we, as wrestling fans, allow the weekly TV ratings to dictate our feelings toward the business?

I’m always amazed at the futile arguments between WWE fanboys, TNA fanboys, and people that hate both (because they hate everything), simply because the arguments are self-containing. Read the comment thread on any NEWZ~! site that reports the ratings for Raw or Impact, and you’ll find some of the more prominent examples of schadenfreude and self-superiority that you could find in a business that’s designed to entertain willing viewers.

WWE fans mock TNA for their inability to get past a 1.1 or a 1.2, and should they reach 1.4, they say, “Oh, big deal: Raw got a 3.3. Eat our asses, TNAholes!”

And WWE haters that may or not love TNA, or just troglodytes that enjoy to annoy sensible people, will crow loudly should Raw dip below the 3.0 mark. Raw gets a 2.93, look out. Here comes the troll parade and their usual weaponry of caps lock, prolonged shorthand laughter (LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL = LOTS of laughter!), and their enduring ability to argue over the inane. Make a scathing point, go to the kitchen to shove a couple Hot Pockets into their gullets, come back, read a reasonable response, and then reply by calling their mother a junkie whore.

Man, with debate skills like that, it’s a good thing Christopher Hitchens died when he did. His image and reputation as a powerful debater would be forever tarnished if he ever had to go up against the man with the username ‘Swall0wMySeedz’.

But really, who does that? Do fans of Grey’s Anatomy that hate CSI go on CSI message boards and post nonsense like, “HA HA, CSI GOT KILLED IN THE 18-49 DEMO! TED DANSON SUCKS ASS!” Of course people don’t do that, because if they did, no one would blame the government for tracing their IP, going to their house, and administering to them an afternoon of electro-shock therapy.

But enough about these perpetual spraypaint huffers. After all, they’re just angry people who need some outlet to forget about their life’s problems. Since creativity and charity work are out of the question, posting nerve-burning jibes and retorts in a public forum seems to be a logical use of their precious time.

You learn not to respond to such people, adhering to the adage of “do not feed the trolls.” But hey, we don’t have to throw them pellets from a machine to set off their feeding frenzy. The zoo itself does a fine job of whetting their appetites for bad news and despair, don’t they?

Of course, by zoos, I’m referring to the wrestling news sites themselves.

The majority of wrestling news sites (this one included) will provide the Nielsen ratings, usually with a follow-up that includes quarterly breakdowns, for WWE Monday Night Raw and TNA Impact Wrestling. After all, ratings have been a subject of interest in professional wrestling since 1995, when Eric Bischoff convinced Ted Turner to give him prime time, spawning the phenomenon that was WCW Monday Nitro. As soon as Nitro and Raw went head to head, for the first time ever, wrestling fans gave a damn about ratings.

Coinciding with the rise of the digital age, as more homes and communities became wired to handle the internet, more people began to log on to AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy, and other providers in the mid to late 1990s, and wrestling fans had access to more inside dirt than they could have dreamed possible. During downtime of looking up bikini pictures of Sunny and Sable, you could read about which show, between Raw and Nitro, scored a higher rating.

You can credit Stone Cold and the New World Order all you want for the wrestling boom of fourteen years ago, and they were big parts of it. But without the audience, the investments made by a legion of dedicated fans who followed every little detail of the business put it over the top.

You watched Raw to see Stone Cold beat Vince McMahon senseless, and you watched Nitro to see Goldberg break some bum in half. But you watched also because the REAL show was Tuesday evening, when those precious little numbers came out and were posted on the net for the world to see. WCW fans loved seeing the new ratings highs that the nWo was helping prime time cable wrestling reach. WWF supporters were encouraged by the closing gap in 1997, as Austin and The Hart Foundation waged war in the summer and fall. And in 1998, when WWF finally beat Nitro after nearly two years of consecutive defeats, the back and forth battles for supremacy helped turn wrestling into a hotbed of entertainment.

As WWF and “Attitude” flourished, WCW began to wither, as stale writing, laughable concepts, a lack of new stars, and general inconsistency began to chew at WCW’s stronghold like ravenous termites. By the end of 1999, the ratings gap was so wide, you can insert your own ‘slutty girl’ punchline here. And then, in March 2001, Vince McMahon bought his own competition, and the “war” was over after March 26.

After that, wrestling websites….continued to publish the ratings for Raw week after week, year after year, a weekly tradition that continues to present day, the notion being that the news site is providing ‘news’ to its followers.

‘News’ is a word that has been mutilated worse Meg Ryan’s lips, alright? News is supposed to be something that either applies to you, or can be applied by you. The news story about the homicide in your hometown reminds you to be alert as a citizen. The news story about the tax hike in your state applies because, well, it’s your money. The news story about your local pro sports franchise signing a key free agent gets you excited about the forthcoming season, because you invest your time into sports as a hobby. Maybe not EVERY story applies to you, but it likely applies to the guy or girl next to you.

But news today, the word ‘news’ really does need quotes around it. How does Demi Moore unfollowing Ashton Kutcher on Twitter apply to you or me? I didn’t even care about Demi when she hadn’t yet resembled a wrinkled penis with a gothic wig, let alone now that her creepy marriage is failing! But yet, my local news station gave this story prominence over a string of arsons!

And you know, I’m happy for Jay Z and Beyonce and their new bundle of joy, but it’s not a news story. A news story is Beyonce offering to pay one lucky schlub $40,000 a day to babysit the kid while she’s on tour. THAT is a story that applies to you and me, dude!

The degeneration of news is evident in wrestling news sites that continue to display irrelevant trivia, passing it off as news. I understand that, when you take away all of the sludge, you’re left with fewer, more straight-forward stories, like house show results and whatever’s ripped off of Meltzer and Alvarez. But still, I’d take that over news stories about what Chavo Guerrero said about John Cena in a possibly-inebriated Tweet this week.

And the circle brings us back to the ratings for wrestling TV shows, and their complete lack of relevance to you and I. This week, it was reported that the February 6 episode of Raw lost a little over 500,000 viewers between the Triple H opening soliloquy and the Big Show/Daniel Bryan match.

And to this, I say: who gives a flying fuck?

Do you care? If you like Daniel Bryan, are you going to let the story cloud your enjoyment of him? I like Daniel Bryan, and I don’t care about the non-story. There could be a MILLION explanations. Maybe viewers are tired of Bryan and Show’s interminable storyline? Maybe they tuned out because they were bored after HHH rambled for fifteen minutes? In any event, who cares?

It’s like in the 2008 World Series, when it was reported that the Phillies and Rays’ game three did the lowest rating for any World Series game ever. Of course, it was the game on Saturday night that was delayed several hours by rain, and didn’t end until about 2 AM EST, but still, the headline was prominently displayed in my newspaper.

Hey, guess what: I DON’T CARE! I’m a Phillies fan, and my team won the World Series for the first time in my lifetime! I care about the RESULT of the game, not the statistical analysis of viewership demographics surrounding the game. When I was watching the victory parade on Halloween Day 2008, beaming with pride as my athletic heroes gave their speeches at Citizens Bank Park, I was thinking, “They did it. Jimmy Rollins and Pat Burrell worked their asses off for years, and they’re finally champions.” It never occurred to me to think, “This is all pointless. Hardly anyone watched game three. I’m gonna get a wielder’s torch and fuse my leg to a table because I’m just SO miserable!”

Maybe that’s one of the big problems with wrestling. Forget casual fans here, let’s look at the diehards that live and breathe newz stories and analyze every event like it’s the Zapruder film. There are actually fans that can watch a match between, say, Sheamus and Mark Henry, and not think, “Boy, I hope Sheamus wins” but rather “They won’t get big ratings with this.”

At what point did wrestling fans turn into a freelance focus group devoid of a relaxed sense of fun?

We care more now about the affect of a storyline or event on a company’s future than we do the outcome of the matches.

Hey, I understand the ratings were pretty bad in the early nineties for the WWF. I don’t know; I was too busy enjoying Shawn Michaels and Bret Hart, and acting out their matches with my friends, to really give a damn what the 18-49 demographic thought of Men on a Mission and Well Dunn.

I didn’t care that Dave Meltzer gave Shawn and Razor Ramon’s ladder match a five star rating. I was too busy throwing books around my bedroom because MY GUY LOST! MY GUY LOST IN HIS CHANCE TO ONCE AGAIN BECOME INTERCONTINENTAL CHAMPION, AND MY WEEKS OF ANTICIPATING HIS CHANCE TO REGAIN THE GOLD WAS SQUANDERED!

Of course, I was ten years old. I don’t expect myself at age 28, or you in your adult age, to take the outcomes so seriously that you would potentially destroy property over the results of a predetermined fictional encounter. But I would hope that, when you watch Elimination Chamber in ten days, you’re rooting for who you like to win, and you’re not worried about the ratings for Raw or the buyrate or the build to WrestleMania, or what a loss to Wrestler X is going to do to his momentum down the road.

‘

Because if you’re going to be analytical over something that is essentially camp-entertainment with a considerable audience, then there’s a good chance you’re never going to be happy.

So I say to news sites, it’s up to you, but all posting the ratings does is incite arguments that can never be won, between people who embrace anger and hostility, and it feeds into the psyches of fans that need to apply numbers to their hobbies in order to justify what they’re attempting to enjoy. If you eliminate the ratings, you eliminate aggravation. Let the corporate suits panic over ratings dropping, and let the fans enjoy wrestling.

And on a final note, those of you who bitch about wrestling not being ‘what it used to be’, I agree with you completely. The wrestling of our childhoods, our youths, the product we grew up with, is gone. It’s missing.

Of course maybe, just maybe, if you didn’t worry so much about the numbers, you could actually sit and enjoy the product just like you used to.

(Justin Henry is a freelance writer whose interests are rooted in NFL, MLB, NBA, wrestling, MMA, and entertainment. He can be found on Twitter at https://twitter.com/cynicjrh and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/notoriousjrh so check him out)