Jump to content

Joe Rogan blasts Pro Wrestling, Opinion of Lesnar.


XXX.

Recommended Posts

  • Replies 67
  • Created
  • Last Reply

 

That's the vid for those who haven't seen it. I actually found it pretty funny, although I might be a bit biased since I have been pretty annoyed with wrestling lately. Like someone earlier mentioned, Joe Rogan isn't attacking the wrestlers, he knows it requires athleticism. What he isn't a fan of is basically the unrealistic moves that wouldn't really work in real life and playing to the crowd during a match. I'll admit he needs to realize everyone has their own reasons for liking something. He didn't really care to listen to the other guy's reasons for being a fan.

 

Also can't believe people think Joe Rogan would get his ass kicked by majority of pro wrestlers. Joe Rogan is an experienced martial artist- black belts in Brazilian Jujitsu and Tae Kwon Do, practices Kickboxing, etc. Anyone ever seen videos of him practicing his kicks? He's got a lot of power that impresses top fighters like GSP. Also wouldn't be surprised if he knew more submissions than any pro wrestler with his years of BJJ. There's only a minority of pro wrestlers that stand a chance, only one that comes to mind right now is Lesnar.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

 

That's the vid for those who haven't seen it. I actually found it pretty funny, although I might be a bit biased since I have been pretty annoyed with wrestling lately. Like someone earlier mentioned, Joe Rogan isn't attacking the wrestlers, he knows it requires athleticism. What he isn't a fan of is basically the unrealistic moves that wouldn't really work in real life and playing to the crowd during a match. I'll admit he needs to realize everyone has their own reasons for liking something. He didn't really care to listen to the other guy's reasons for being a fan.

 

Also can't believe people think Joe Rogan would get his ass kicked by majority of pro wrestlers. Joe Rogan is an experienced martial artist- black belts in Brazilian Jujitsu and Tae Kwon Do, practices Kickboxing, etc. Anyone ever seen videos of him practicing his kicks? He's got a lot of power that impresses top fighters like GSP. Also wouldn't be surprised if he knew more submissions than any pro wrestler with his years of BJJ. There's only a minority of pro wrestlers that stand a chance, only one that comes to mind right now is Lesnar.

 

THEY'RE *censored*ING CHARACTERS!!! THEY'RE SUPPOSED TO PLAY TO THE CROWD! duuuuuuuuuh :spas:

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

That is a really antiquated view on wrestling and wrestling fans held by Rogan.

 

But who cares really, because Rogan is pretty washed up. Fear Factor was a long ass time ago.

 

What's funny is that once upon a time professional wrestling was indeed a real sport like boxing. This was a very long time ago though, longer than what many wrestling fans and even wrestling detractors seem to believe. I'm talking in the old gaslight theater days, up until the early 1930's. Even then there were some carnival shenanigans from time tom time (plants in the audience who would challenged a known wrestler). But for the most part, pro wrestling featured competitive contests. Those contests took a high degree of skill and training. But guess what... on the flip side, those contests were often quite boring. Matches would sometimes last well over an hour (and not in a good way like Flair vs Steamboat). Matches weren't quite like amateur/collegiate/etc... wrestling either. No starting positions or typical points systems. It was like true freestyle catch wrestling. Winning often involved excelling at defense. This results in snooze fests though. I'm sure there was plenty of hugging and dry humping going on and crap like that. Reminds me of modern UFC sometimes.

 

I love MMA, but the UFC is honestly a kind of watered down MMA league. Not many will admit that since it's still big in America, but UFC is far from the pinnacle of what MMA can be. Pride FC > UFC all day, every day!! When someone won a fight in Pride it was usually because his opponent was a bloody pulp, barely able to stand afterwards. When someone wins a fight in "modern" UFC, it's usually because they won over the judges with skillful dry humping on the canvas.

 

UFC is criticized by some as savagery and human cockfighting

WWE is criticized by some as being fake and unrealistic

 

The difference is that WWE hasn't tried to hide that in ages. Fans don't "pretend it's real" like Rogan said. They know it's "fake" because if it were real, it would be boring as all hell. The WWE took that "fakeness" and embraced it and hence Sports Entertainment is a good enough descriptor for their scripted TV show.

 

UFC will be labeled (unfairly perhaps) as brutality by some irregardless of whether it has many rules or not so many. Yet they try to clean up a sport which is still modern day pit fighting any way that you slice it. Which I don't have a prob with pit fighting because I approve of sports which include legally sanctioned violence that adults willing sign up for. But the UFC's effort to make pit fighting a safe sport causes it to rarely have great finishes anymore. They used to, and on rare occasion still do, but they toned it down too much. I'm beginning to see a parallel with modern American MMA and the legitimate pro wrestling sport of early 1900's yesteryear.

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

What's funny is that once upon a time professional wrestling was indeed a real sport like boxing. This was a very long time ago though, longer than what many wrestling fans and even wrestling detractors seem to believe. I'm talking in the old gaslight theater days, up until the early 1930's. Even then there were some carnival shenanigans from time tom time (plants in the audience who would challenged a known wrestler). But for the most part, pro wrestling featured competitive contests. Those contests took a high degree of skill and training. But guess what... on the flip side, those contests were often quite boring. Matches would sometimes last well over an hour (and not in a good way like Flair vs Steamboat). Matches weren't quite like amateur/collegiate/etc... wrestling either. No starting positions or typical points systems. It was like true freestyle catch wrestling. Winning often involved excelling at defense. This results in snooze fests though. I'm sure there was plenty of hugging and dry humping going on and crap like that. Reminds me of modern UFC sometimes.

 

Didn't they still have plenty of shoot fights and generally a lot of hookers in the 50's and 60's aswell?

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Didn't they still have plenty of shoot fights and generally a lot of hookers in the 50's and 60's aswell?

 

 

 

That is an excellent question. The answer is two fold in a yes and no sort of way. Firstly though, there were not as many legit shoot fights as the wrestling world would have liked fans to believe, that much is certain. By the 1950's TV boom, wrestling promoters already had their pre-arranged acts down to a science.

 

Shoots happened, but people learned from the mistakes of others, because shoots often lead to failed feuds and loss of revenue. Plus no one wants to get blackballed in any industry for being difficult to work with. Still, ya know swerves could and did happen, and some promoters were more open to hiring loose cannons than others. Guys might pull a swerve to get noticed, and occasionally it might actually work for them. It's was not like today. Imagine if some midcarder actually told Vince to suck it and just did whatever he wanted. Dude wouldn't be able to find a wrestling gig in the afterlife let alone in this one. But in the 50's and 60's there were scores of promotions and thus hookers were seen as mercenaries more than anything. Still a fast track to a short career though. Plenty of guys touted themselves as hookers (a strange and hilarious sentence in modern context) and many were, but that didn't mean they were stupid enough to kill their own career proving it. Hooking was mostly a skill to protect yourself from swerves, a rarely needed skill, but that doesn't stop doomsday preppers from building bunkers either.

 

The word "shoot" actually changed over time as well. In the very early 1900's it was used more to mean not abidding by the unwritten rules than going off script. There wasn't any script at first or even a determined winner so much as a trust between competitors and promoters to not take dive money, to not let a match degenerate into a fist fight (unless as a planned stunt to draw attention), to not intentionally injure your opponent in a way that would prevent them from competing in the future and for lack of a better way to say it, the promise to attempt to have a competitive match that didn't suck. These were handshake deals at the lower levels and at the higher levels they were contracts backed by the wrestler's own money and drawn up by wrestling boards and committees to protect themselves from all sorts of double cross crap such as:

 

Wrestlers walking out on an event they were booked to headline

Hookers sent from underhanded rival promoters to hurt rival stars

Attempts to put on intentionally boring matches to drive fans away, before switching companies

Outside fixing and dive taking

 

The latter is a big part of why things changed. If wrestling boards only approved certain potential outcomes and the promoters and wrestlers agreed on the specific outcomes, they now gained a monopoly on the fixing, and that meant the mob couldn't try to fix what was already being fixed. The unorganized nature of wrestling and the fact that it's stars often had cross promotional matches with a fix already pre-planned and worked out between competing promoters just made it too damn difficult (fortunately so) for the mob to dictate things they way in which they attempted to with pro football and horse racing and especially boxing in the earlier 1900's.

 

So for wresters and the evolution of worked entertainment I imagine it went something like this:

 

Agreeing to play fair in the ring led to agreeing to play fair with the promoters. This led to agreeing to not be boring or erratic in the ring which would drive away paying customers. Which led to developing a style and pace that varies a little from win at all costs. This led to agreeing to letting the promoters choose who wins and who jobs. The irony being that the intended loser might get a bigger purse behind the curtain from the promoter... hey beats letting the mob call the shots. This lead to wrestlers, promotrs and eventually writers to collabo on how the whole match would play out.

 

Here is a cool story about a famous "Shoot" from the 50's. It's even between two bad ass chicks.

 

http://sabrebiade.hubpages.com/hub/The-Greatest-Female-Wrestling-Match-Of-All-Time-Mildred-Burke-and-June-Byers

 

I have no idea why this headline lables it the greatest female wrestling match of all time though. Because all other accounts of the match say it was an atrocity. (I don't know if there is any preserved footage, if so I haven't seen it, although individually you can find each of them in some matches on youtube). Either way, they never wrestled again, thus their feud didn't draw money like it could have. The shoot stemmed from real-life drama and hurt both of their careers and reps.

 

Now many may see why the WWE still does things like have Jerry Springer appear on RAW to mediate a fight between twin sisters. Because this sort of drama actually unfolded shoot style in wrestlings past and it worked in terms of building interest.

 

But actual shoot fights between wrestlers that weren't in any way, shape or form worked shoots were very, very rare because they were just bad for business.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

unknown...do you write wrestling articles regulary? Because that is very well written :cool:

 

Thanks man! Unfortunately I do not. I have no idea where I would begin trying to find a paid gig or any sort of gig writing about wrestling and stuff on the interwebs. Perhaps I should look into something like that. I could write about a myriad of topics really, certainly not just wrestling. It's that I just haven't really put much thought into how or where I could start doing this. I've written about a bunch of different topics right here on caws, and that's about it, though I haven't been very active lately.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

To that he said that in a show like Game of Thrones, it actually looks like they cut someone's head off. He mentioned someone using a horrible looking rear naked choke on Dexter, which made him stop watching that show as well. Found it disrespectful.

 

I think his problem is clearly the same as many other who hate on wrestling. They think that the WWE are actually trying to fool people into believing that it's not pre-determined.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

They don't even do that though. They even break kayfabe outside of the show themselves semi-regular nowadays. They can't run the show in a way that would make the people know it's "fake" though. It'd completely ruin the show if they would act like it's pre-determined because it'd make every storyline and every match redundant.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Come on, peeps. We all know this isn't the first time someone has made comments like this. I don't think it even makes sense considering even WWE decided to state they're entertainment. If this ideology applied to everything in life you wouldn't be able to enjoy anything entertainment based. Don't people see Jennifer Aniston and call her Rachel because of her role in Friends? Most people won't even know who Alfonso Riberio is, but call him Carlton and it's "Oh, yeah!" I damn near cried when I first watched the opening sequence of Pixar's Up, but I didn't need someone to tell me "Hey, you know it's just CGI, right?"

 

Wrestling is a lot more real that more stuff on TV based on passion alone. Their on screen personas basically being extended versions of themselves. Moments like Mick being thrown off the HIAC and getting back up to finish the match for us, Chris Benoit and Eddie at WrestleMania, Edge's retirement. I'll never forget that stuff, it's like a connection you have that you can't really experience watching anything else.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.


×
×
  • Create New...