Current WWE writer Michael Hayes recently spoke with Slam Wrestling about Legends of Wrestling and today’s wrestling.
Participating in WWE’s Legends of Wrestling roundtables: “It’s fun. I dig doing that. I watch it back sometimes and think, wow, I’m really an asshole. And you’re good at it too! That’s kind of my job on the show. We had Kevin Nash on the show one time and he was fantastic, the stories he told about WCW, during the (Monday Night) war, and we were just about to wrap up and I go, “Whoah whoah whoah, what about the Arn Anderson parody?” And he looked at me, and he goes, “I thought I was going to get away without having to address that.” But somebody’s got to be Simon Cowell and God put me in that role.”
Can what worked in the territorial era work today? “There’s a couple things there. One would be — just going back to your last question about kids and what they should do — the kids today, their athleticism far surpasses anything that most of us ever did. We had a few that were in that high echelon that could probably keep up with the kids of today, but the moveset is just not to be believed. With that said, what they don’t do in my opinion is they don’t learn how to captivate an audience. Some of them are almost scared to try to captivate and audience and they are somewhat scared of the audience. And it can’t be that way.
Because, see, I’m a tell ya, you can go all the way back in time and it takes you back to the territorial days, but you can have a great wrestler and if he or she was a mediocre talker, I’m going to tell you what’s going to happen. They’re just going to make mediocre money. But you can find a mediocre wrestler who is a great talker and he or she will make great money. And that never changed and it still won’t today.
And that’s why I don’t understand why kids don’t try to go out and perfect promos and talk that talk, and walk that walk, because everybody wants to be entertained. As fans, your lives are so hard working so you can to feed your kids, feed your wives, or whatever, and you want to escape and you don’t want to pay to see Bob the next door neighbour. And when everybody else is able to do these triple moonsaults then it’s not that special. But if everybody else can’t talk for three minutes and captivate people, and piss them off or make them happy, or get some emotion out of them, well then I don’t understand why so many kids don’t see that that’s the avenue to the pay window. And in the territorial days that’s what made it happen.”
