The Up & Under 08.10.08: Wrestling With The Inevitable

“Every saint has a past, every sinner has a future, so you know what keeps me hangin’ around…”
     -Ludo
     Topeka

The world is small. Though each of us comes into contact with hundreds or even thousands of people every day, we all inevitably run into many of the same individuals during the course of our routines. If you work in the service industry, you invariably have “regulars”, customers who frequent your place of work, and with whom you have a simple, but steady relationship. We all run into neighbors and co-workers and friends of friends of friends, each of whom seems to wander in-and-out of our lives, playing the role of the recurring guest star in the television show of our lives.

And meanwhile, life ticks by like clockwork.

Loyal readers might remember that in the late part of last year, I was dating a woman named Amy. At the time I wrote a column discussing my hesitation in sharing my love of wrestling with her. That piece, which looked at what makes wrestling connect so deeply with its audience as well as the stigma of juvenility attached to the medium, was met almost universally with the question, “what does Amy think about this column?”. For those still interested, the answer is that she found it interesting and came to have a new appreciation for me as a writer. For the record, by the time that column was published, I had already shared my “secret” with her, so the column itself was not really any sort of big reveal.

In a completely unconnected occurrence, Amy and I stopped dating about two months later. Unlike some of my previous relationships, there was no epic fight or crucial breaking point, things just sort of fizzled out and both of us moved on with life.

Of course, because the world, or in this case, the Milwaukee social scene, is small, it was only a matter of time before our courses intersected again. To wit, a week-and-a-half ago, I saw one of her friends at a street festival, and in relatively short order Amy dropped me a line, checking in on things and looking to reconnect a bit. While some might have advised me to stay ‘moved on’ and avoid a face-to-face reunion, I think most will understand that I jumped at the chance to have lunch with her this past week. Why not? After all, it’s a small world and we were bound to run into each other eventually.

The wrestling world is no bigger. Things go-around and come-around on a rotating basis throughout professional wrestling, with feuds dropped and reignited at the drop of a hat, depending on the available talent and needs of the given storyline. In Ring of Honor, Nigel McGuinness and “American Dragon” Bryan Danielson have had tremendous matches in each of the last three years, and each time the dynamic between the two has been different. Shawn Michaels and Chris Jericho were at each others throats in 2002, and now six years later have been brought back together to reprise their one-upmanship. Heaven knows that it’s only a matter of time until TNA programs Samoa Joe and Homicide together in at least something of a retread of their issue in ROH. And all of it is a result of the very same principle: the world is small and after a while, history tends to repeat itself.

The convention actually runs deeper than the mere repeat of a feud or storyline; as in real life, sins are forgiven and good deeds forgotten when convenient to the overall picture. After Claudio Castagnoli’s last run as a heel in Ring of Honor, he was transitioned into a babyface by slowly ‘earning the fans’ respect’. Does anyone really expect something different to happen after his freshly conceived turn on Bryan Danielson runs its course? Once Ring of Honor needs Claudio Castagnoli back on the babyface side of the ledger, the company will do what it needs to for the fans respect him yet again. And the fans, like sheep, will once again welcome Claudio back into their good graces, regardless of the fact that he has already burned them twice before. The same will go for Nigel McGuinness’ eventual, and inevitable, face turn and Bryan Danielson’s next run as a dastardly heel.

It’s just how things go.

And yet, we as fans shouldn’t be surprised. We demand that things be ‘shaken up’ every so often in an effort to keep us interested and entertained. We sacrifice our credibility and connectivity for the sake of being engaged, and rightly so, because in the wrestling world the sacrifice is a small one to make.

But real life doesn’t quite work the same way. With more on the line, why do we put ourselves in a position to be let down repeatedly? The old wisdom goes “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me,” but too often we are blinded by idealism and hope, thinking that “this time will be different”. Certainly, in the context of the current storylines, Danielson must have thought ‘there’s no way Claudio will turn on me now…” right up to the moment were Castagnoli kicked him in the face and set him up for a McGuinness pinfall.

So why would I, knowing full well that things didn’t really work out the last time around, sign up to spend more of my free time with Amy. I don’t want to make it sound like she’s a bad person, or paint her in any sort of unflattering light, but the fact remains that we probably parted ways at the right time. Thus, when, and note that I wrote “when” and not “if”, things go south the next time, I’ll really have no one but myself to blame. Indeed, I should have seen it coming.

A big part of why so many of us let ourselves be “turned on” repeatedly lies on one of the blinding factors I mentioned a few moments ago: hope. We want to believe that the people we choose to associate with are inherently good, or perhaps further, that even if they are bad, they wouldn’t betray us specifically. A few years ago, Ring of Honor ran a fantastic angle where Alex Shelley was turned on by Austin Aries, then one of his stablemates in Generation Next. The storyline was built around the irony of Shelley’s followers turning on him, just as he had led them to turn on the rest of the company’s roster. Left without any allies, Shelley was forced to fight off his newfound enemies, while simultaneously paying the price for having tormented the rest of the promotion while still a part of Generation Next. Of course, the whole storyline ended with Shelley turning heel, because the only ones who would accept him were the lowest dregs of ROH, the hated Embassy. Also, years later Austin Aries would have another Generation Next member, Roderick Strong, turn on him in a moment reminiscent of Aries’ assault on Shelley. One could almost surely say that Aries should have seen it coming.

Jericho and Michaels’ issue over the past number of months has actually been built on this very issue. When all the extraneous elements are removed, the two are warring primarily because Jericho is frustrated by the fact that Michaels is beloved despite being almost pathologically disloyal to his friends, allies and partners over the years. Amazingly, in pointing out Michaels’ lack of trustworthiness and devotion, Jericho has become painted as the wrongdoer himself. In itself, that is a wonderful touch to their expertly executed feud, as Jericho has been faced with something that is very much a part of the real world: being viewed as the villain for pointing out someone else’s mistakes. I would dare say that each and every one of us has been reviled for our reactions to something, even when we weren’t the one originally in the wrong.

Unlike last November, there is little mystery in my current situation. I’m pretty confident in the fact that I already know how things will go over the next few weeks or months as Amy and I continue to reconnect. That is to say, they’ll be fresh and interesting again for a while, until one or the other of us gets bored and decides to “shake things up”. Just as CM Punk boasted during his landmark 2005 heel turn, “You old fool, I’m a snake…”, I cannot believe that Amy is under any more mistaken an impression than I am. We, just like everyone else, are who we are, and we cannot really be expected to act like anything else for all that long.

So we will continue to intertwine the same way we have before. Just as the fates will eventually bring Bryan Danielson and Nigel McGuinness together for another milestone encounter, and just as Claudio Castagnoli will someday turn his back on the fans one more time, and just as Davey Richards turned on Roderick Strong to add another link to the chain of Generation Next members being doomed to repeat history, so too will Amy and I dance along until our next “fizzle out” moment. And then a few of my friends will say I should have seen it coming.