Shining a Spotlight 10.11.12: Corporate Mentality

It’s a term coming up a lot for wrestling fans lately. WWE is of course the big subject, with many complaining about how the company is caring far too much over its standing and finances than taking creative risks. However, ROH has also been getting heat over it with many long-time loyal fans realizing the company is falling apart after stuff like the iPPV debacle. Meanwhile, TNA is on a creative high but still has their own corporate issues as well. It’s a unique problem for wrestling, one that’s only come up the last few years. It’s easy to run it down as horrible but one must remember that it’s part and parcel of an old issue of creative vs control that’s been hard for the business for years and doesn’t look like it’ll go away.

Corporate Rise

It bugs me constantly that people moan and groan over how the territory era was this utopia of everyone getting along well until Vince McMahon came alone. The brutal truth is that the majority of guys then could make Vince look like a saint with their treatment of workers and greed, not to mention wicked double-dealing and backstabbing. The NWA was less a true alliance and more just a bunch of guys trying to get along to make money. Indeed, that’s the key to wrestling, making money, amazing more people don’t understand that.

It’s easy to blame Vince for it but let’s face it, the territory system was always going to fall, with or without Vince. It’s like assuming the old Hollywood system of the ‘40’s would be around if not for television or the music industry without iTunes and downloads. If it wasn’t Vince, it’d be someone else and maybe it’s best it was Vince as he understood how the business was changing and needed to adapt for the fanbase and shifting times. It’s like that in so many forms of entertainment, you have to shift things up and Vince knew consolidating was the future.

Of course, he wasn’t alone as Crockett’s bad moves would force him to sell to Turner and that’s where the corporate theme of things got into things. The point has been made numerous times but has to be repeated: If not for Ted himself, the company would have dumped WCW a long time earlier. Turner was a mark for wrestling and also remembered how the Crockett shows had helped put the fledgling TBS on the map so felt inclined to let them continue however long they wanted. Indeed, in 1993, with ratings down and creative in a mess, some in Turner wanted to sell the company but Ted put his foot down to stop it. It was Turner himself who allowed WCW to go on, giving them a blank check to run things and keep itself strong.

Of course, there were major drawbacks. Right from the start, Dusty Rhodes was upset about the edict of no-blood and so protested by doing a bit of the Road Warriors attacking him with a spike for a bloodbath on Saturday afternoon TV that got him fired. Then we had the infamous problem of people who had no experience with wrestling put in charge like Jim Herd, who insisted on stupid ideas like the Ding Dongs and his attitude eventually culminating in the firing of the company’s biggest star. Kip Frye actually did great by offering cash bonuses to guys putting on the best match of a certain night so you’d have workers really busting their asses. But then came Bill Watts, a man who was pretty much the worst choice to work in an early ‘90’s ultra-PC company and whose backwards ideas just ended up angering the workers rather than rallying them.

That leads us to Eric Bischoff, a man who played the corporate game very well, maneuvering himself to being boss of WCW and handling the difficult politics of the time. Bischoff was great convincing Turner to back “Nitro” and the money to really take the fight to Vince and it worked wonderfully. Of course, it bit Bischoff in the ass when the New World Order started fading but he kept right on pushing the old guys and misused talent and was finally removed for Vince Russo. Russo’s tenure was marked by him taking open shots at Turner and how the company went way overboard cutting down on the T&A Russo believed was what fans wanted. The ultimate proof of the corporate mentality came when Turner was removed from power at his own company following the AOL-Time Warner merger and WCW found itself under the control of people who gave a damn about the bottom line. Thus, seeing no hope in a company that had lost so much money and favor in the last few years, the company cut WCW out, ending decades of history in a single day, still a stunning move.

It’s a point made numerous time, that the one thing WCW didn’t have but needed was Vince. Not the man himself but a single person who could lay down the law and be the effective boss. WCW, on the other hand, had a true corporate mentality where you had guys literally not knowing on a daily basis who was in charge of what and shows made up an hour before airtime. With Vince, you at least knew what you were getting, both good and bad. And as far as fans today are concerned, that’s pretty much all “bad.”

Corporate Grind

In one of his several excellent books on Disney, David Koenig had a great line on the relationship of Disney fans and the company: “Everyone knows it’s a business. They just don’t like it when it acts that way.” There are entire blogs on how people analyze every move Disney makes and chastises them for daring to flex with the times and not present rides from the 1980’s anymore. Yes, the company makes mistakes, every company does but people do tend to overreact to them. I work at UPS, a corporation and we get upset a lot at the moves management makes but put up with them. It’s no surprise that Undercover Boss is so successful, seeing the CEO finding out how things really work and how far he’s gotten away from the workers.

WWE doesn’t have quite that problem as Vince is in there every day with the workers to smooth things over. Of course, some say that’s a problem now, that Vince is too ingrained to see how WWE has fallen into a rut. It really does seem like the company is afraid of risk, afraid of breaking the mold as the constant push of Cena seems to show. That’s why Punk exploded like he did in 2011, he was just saying what so many were thinking, that WWE was too stagnant. Ironically, Punk himself has been champion for a year so some may complain about that showing WWE in a rut too. The company is just creatively stagnant of late, no real push of new guys and while they’ve backed off from some of the celebrity aspects, it’s like they’re afraid to mess with what works.

Then again, that’s a common thing for wrestling. It was ECW that sparked both WWF and WCW to step up their games in the mid-‘90’s when they were both cartoonish. It was WCW kicking his ass in the ratings that pushed Vince to embrace the Attitude era that led wrestling to new heights. But without that drive, that need to really do something different, WWE just goes along, business as usual and it’s starting to really affect the bottom line. And it’s quite unlikely the competition can give them any real impetus to change in the near future.

ROH has fallen hard thanks their corporate ties. More than a few formally die-hard-ROH loyalists have noted that the company just hasn’t been the same since the Sinclair sale. If anything, it’s worse, attendance falling and some long-time guys leaving not a good sign of the company’s future. But the recent iPPV debacle may be the final straw. It’s bad enough they couldn’t get a decent signal out for a couple of their shows. However, ROH just made it worse, only offering a 24-hour window for a refund for customers but then came the reaction as Edwards put out a message basically saying to ignore negative comments by people just slamming ROH for no reason. For a company that built itself on love from the IWC to slam justifiable anger as just trolling was absolutely ridiculous and insulting. That comes off how more fans note that on the ROH message boards, they go out of their way to delete negative comments rather than have people talk openly about the company’s real problems. This was corporate bullshit of the highest order, slapping on the blinders and pretending everyone else had the same viewpoint.

It happens a lot, just witness the number of companies that have gone under the last few years as the economic crunch exposed their problems. When Borders went under, some were quick to say “oh, people don’t buy books anymore” but I’ve read plenty of comments from people who once worked there who say it had been building for a while, the company horribly mismanaged. Add in various other companies since. Hell, WCW stands as a place where the guys at the top just burned money like there was no tomorrow, not realizing the issues facing them as the fans fled and the numbers dropped. WWE seems in much the same boat but it’s understandable as Vince has always had an issue with perceptions. On various DVDs, folks openly mention how stubborn Vince is, how he clings to his own mentality no matter what and it’s hard to talk to a guy like that about how bad things are. Keep in mind, Vince’s stubborn and single-minded attitude is what made WWE a success in the first place, you can’t fault him for letting his ego grow after all that. To be CEO, you have be hard and a bit of a bastard and that also includes thinking only you know best. Again, Vince is hardly the only corporate boss to think that way, it’s just hitting him harder now.

True, TNA is technically a corporate entity as well although Panda doesn’t seem to interfere too much aside from providing the cash necessary to sign whatever star the company wants. The company is on a major creative high now, much better than WWE although business-wise they’re still not up to par. However, goodwill goes a long way for wrestling fans and so far, WWE is losing at lot of it. I’m not saying they’re going to go under soon; the company has been so ingrained in not just the wrestling landscape but also popular culture itself, to go out of business is pretty much impossible. However, it’s clear their mentality and current business model has to change as playing safe isn’t working very well now.

Maybe Vince is getting the message with word of changes with the writing staff. But the company does have to take more risks, break out of the PG-rated stuff, embrace a new attitude (no pun intended), the same thing that led them to massive success over a decade ago. It’s hard to see Vince changing too much, the man is so set in his ways but he’s still a businessman, he has to know you need to change to survive, he’s done it before. But the corporate mentality, the need to keep things business as usual is still there and hard to break. It’s what ROH is having trouble with, this “we know best” idea that’s costing them more and more business. That company still refuses to update their production values and it’s hard to win new fans over when your shows all look like they were shot by a high school video club. But worse is how ROH has gotten even worse than WWE with their treatment of fans, dismissing honest complaints as just IWC bitching, a slap in the face for a paying customer and no surprise ROH is bleeding fans now. If they want to survive, they have to realize that trying to be like WWE may be the worst possible thing.

It’s easy to dismiss the corporate aspects as horrible for wrestling but, again, it’s always been a business. Vince McMahon just took it to the next logical step, you can’t fault him for that. But this attitude of business and keeping things even leads far too much to stagnation and that’s what WWE is feeling now. ROH is much worse as their corporate bosses are not only squeezing creative life out of a once-hot company but also making things worse by running the goodwill ROH has lived on for so long. Hopefully, each company can remember that the fans are the bottom line to keep things going and to please them is what’s important. Because going too far into the corporate mentality has ruined quite a few companies over the years and it’d be a true shame to see ROH or even WWE fall victim to that.

For this week, the spotlight is off.