Welcome to another
installment of Straight Shoot, where we pull on our boots and bounce around the
ring with some of professional wrestling's most fascinating issues. If you
haven't already, catch up on this week's Raw with our weekly WWE Monday Night Raw recaps.
Then follow writer Aubrey Sitterson on Twitter and make sure to check back every Thursday afternoon for a new
Straight Shoot.
As I type this, WWE has no less than six championship titles:
WWE, World Heavyweight, Intercontinental, United States, Divas and Tag Team.
The truly shocking thing is that's not even a huge number for the promotion, as
you only have to go a few years back to find two women's belts and two sets of
tag team championships. Go a little further back and you'll find even more - in
fact we even did a feature last year on some of our favorite defunct
wrestling titles.
Meanwhile, TNA has six titles of its own and nearly every promotion worth it's
venue in a local gymnasium boasts its version of the World Title. But with all
these different belts in existence, do any of them actually mean anything? And
more importantly, if the answer's "no," then what's the point of keeping them
around?
Hand wringing over the value of titles, especially World
Titles, is nothing new in professional wrestling, and has been going on pretty
consistently since the National Wrestling Alliance was formed in 1948, with one
of its primary goals being the establishment of a single World Championship.
Prior to that, every shitkicking territory from coast to coast had its own
World Title that they tried to put over as the real one. Even after the NWA was
up-and-running, however, the controversy and confusion didn't end, with several
promotions running in lucrative territories setting up their own versions of
the World Title, including New York City area's WWE (then WWWF) and Verne
Gagne's AWA in Minneapolis. In those days, there might have been some dispute over
whether Lou Thesz was a better wrestler than Buddy Rogers (Thesz, natch), but
everyone could agree that both were formidable competitors, as in the early
1960s, the business still looked as if it might have consisted of bona fide
athletic contests.
Caption: Buddy Rogers, the inaugural WWWF World Heavyweight Champion.
The biggest hit to the legitimacy of wrestling titles is,
quite obviously, the fact that everyone watching knows that the champ has the
belt because someone in charge wanted him to, not because he's the best
wrestler. This isn't a eulogy for kayfabe - that's a much longer, much
different article, and frankly, I think that wrestling has become more
interesting as it has evolved into more straight-forward entertainment - but
the simple fact of the matter is that it's already difficult to start caring
about titles when you know that a champion was decided on in much the same way
a company might settle upon a new logo.
Just because a World Heavyweight Title in WWE doesn't mean
the same thing as a World Heavyweight Title in UFC, however, that doesn't make
the former completely meaningless. In a very real way to most promotions, the
holder of a company's main title is still the flagship performer. To take WWE
as the easiest example, the company has used its top title to both reward and
identify its top stars, from Buddy Rogers and Bruno Sammartino all the way up
to the present, with John Cena and CM Punk. While it doesn't mean anything in
the way titles originally did, a promotion choosing to honor one of its
wrestlers with their version of the World Heavyweight Title is the ultimate
vote of confidence, making it far from meaningless.
Caption: Chris Benoit and Eddie Guerrero celebrate at WrestleMania XX.
This is a great thing to mine for drama, as seen at WrestleMania XX, when Chris Benoit and
Eddie Guerrero celebrated winning the World Heavyweight and WWE Titles,
respectively. Or, to take a more recent example, internet fan-favorites CM
Punk, Daniel Bryan and Zack Ryder celebrating on Raw as three of WWE's top
titleholders. In both of these cases, the title switches were seen as a
changing of the guard, with deserving wrestlers being elevated as part of the
deal. But you can't have a changing of the guard every week without contending
with some serious booking-related diminishing returns. And that's where the
trouble starts...
It's not the 1970s anymore, and absolutely no one is
interested in seeing the same guy retain any title for years at a time. Title
changes are exciting, and people love paying to see them. Plus, there are a
host of reasons that a wrestler might need the title taken away from them,
including injury, misbehavior or even a defection to a rival promotion. Not
every title change can be a years-in-the-making "struggle to the top" story or
a meta-comment on what's going on backstage, sometimes the title needs to
change hands just to keep everything moving or shake up the status quo. But,
multiply those necessary, but not-so-exciting title changes by six and it's
easy to get fatigued on the whole thing and start to think that titles don't
really matter.
Caption: Primo & Epico won WWE's Tag Team Titles at an untelevised house show in early 2012.
The problem is compounded with
the generic nature of many titles. Again, taking WWE as the most well known
example, it's not even clear which title is the absolute best or most
desirable. As a fan, I have an affinity for the WWE Title because it has a
history that stretches back to the 1960s, but within WWE storylines, wrestlers
don't really appear to make much of a distinction between it and the World
Heavyweight Title. But while the distinction between the WWE and World
Heavyweight Titles can be somewhat chalked up to WWE having two, somewhat,
kinda-sorta separate brands, there's no real defending the Intercontinental and
United States Championships.
It's not that those belts don't
have impressive, fascinating histories of their own - because they do - it's
just difficult to justify the internal story-logic of why wrestlers give a
turkey about them. Why would a wrestler go after one of these secondary men's
titles when they could be concentrating on the main ones? When watching
professional wrestling it's relatively easy to believe you live in a world
where Daniel Bryan might possibly be able to beat the Big Show, but it's hard
to imagine why former main eventers would take a break from chasing the real
prize to challenge for the Intercontinental or United States titles - it's just
a bridge too far for reasonable suspension of disbelief.
Caption: Former World Heavyweight Champion Jack Swagger with the United States Title.
In the old NWA days, promotions'
secondary titles were generally referred to as "Junior Heavyweight," which
actually made a lot of sense. The very name of the title carried a couple
important implications: 1) That the title, while important, was a
stepping-stone to the real prize, and 2) That there are likely some kind of weight
restrictions. These distinctions helped set the Junior Heavyweight Title apart
from the Heavyweight Championship, making it a more meaningful prize than
either the Intercontinental or United States Championships. This is why I'm a
fan of the more gimmicky belts like the Hardcore and Cruiserweight Titles. Both
come with certain restrictions and qualifications that make it easier for the
folks at home to understand and become invested in storylines.
But for gimmick-based titles to
work, a promotion has to stand by them. TNA is the most instructive example to
investigate here, as it honors not only a World Heavyweight Title, but also a
Television Title and X-Division Title. Television Titles can be a useful tool
to keep things interesting between pay-per-view events, but the way the
championship is handled in TNA, it's basically just another belt, and in fact,
has been known in the past as the equally meaningless Legends Championship and
Global Championship. Even the X-Division Title, which is basically a pretty
neat version of a Cruiserweight Championship, has fallen into a similar trap,
with decidedly non-cruiserweight guys like Samoa Joe, Kurt Angle and even Abyss
competing for it.
Former X-Division Champion Abyss.
Just giving your titles easily
defined gimmicks and sticking with them, however, is nowhere near enough - you
also have to keep people engaged. This isn't the UFC or boxing, where people
are legitimately interested to see who is the better athlete. People watch
wrestling because they are caught up in the storylines, and since titles no
longer carry the meaning they once did, it's increasingly difficult to base
stories strictly on a group of guys wanting to get their hands on that hunk of
gold. That's why title pursuits and championship matches need to be supported
and propped up by compelling drama.
Now, that's not to say that
titles can't be an integral part of that drama. The best recent example is, of
course, CM Punk challenging John Cena for the WWE Title at Money in the Bank last year. Sure, it was a WWE Title Match, but
what was really important was the backstory. There was more than just a
championship at stake - CM Punk was out to send a message and make a statement,
taking a bold stance against WWE's status quo - and that's why people
(including myself) went absolutely apeshit bananas over that match.
CM Punk with the WWE Title at Money in the Bank 2011.
But fighting over a title isn't
the only way to manufacture drama, as wrestling storylines with no
championships involved at all can be just as compelling. In fact, (prior to
merging with sister company Dragon's Gate) the independent wrestling promotion EVOLVE
had found success without a single title, choosing instead to focus on win/loss
records, with a new leader announced at the end of every card. But whether
you're focusing on gaudy championship belts or win/loss statistics, it's always
useful to have something to get the conflict started. Wrestling needs
MacGuffins.
Popularized by filmmaker Alfred
Hitchcock, a MacGuffin is the plot element that gets things moving, oftentimes
as an object of desire that characters are willing to go to great lengths to obtain.
Sound familiar? Sometimes, the MacGuffin serves as the focal point of an entire
story, as in a feud revolving around two wrestlers who just want to be
champion. In these cases, it's important that the title still mean something
and remain somewhat protected, as it's really the only thing at stake. The more
interesting storylines (both within wrestling and without), however, use the
MacGuffin as a mere starting point.
John Travolta looks inside the briefcase MacGuffin in Pulp Fiction.
Though CM Punk vs. John Cena at Money in the Bank began as a conflict about the WWE Title, it quickly became something very different, much larger and far more interesting, with the championship acting as an "in" to all the drama inherent to the storyline. Professional wrestling titles are like the glowing briefcase in Pulp Fiction. We don't know what it is, what it means or really anything about it, but we know that it's valuable from the way that characters want to get their hands on it. Once a couple wrestlers are involved in a good storyline, what got them going in the first place doesn't seem to matter quite as much. And that's why even though I find most of them largely meaningless, I'm totally fine with WWE having as many titles as it does.
Professional wrestling titles
almost certainly don't matter or mean anything in the traditional sense, but
that's the wrong question to be asking about them. Whether a promotion
capitalizes on their titles or not, every single championship, down to the
lowliest Light Heavyweight or secondary women's title, holds the potential for
drama. Titles are an excuse to get wrestlers fighting one another, so while
they might be meaningless, they're also extremely important.
What do you think about
professional wrestling titles? Are they necessary in a contemporary promotion
or just a relic of the past? Which titles would you keep or get rid of? Tell us
in the comments below!
