Wrestling Stories Are Best Told In the Ring

If you’re a fan of professional wrestling who foolishly spends time on “X”, the social platform that used to be Twitter, you’ve likely encountered O’Shea Jackson Jr, a Los Angeles based actor best known for playing his father Ice Cube in the biopic Straight Outta Compton, then pretending the audition process had been a difficult and uncertain journey of self-discovery and not, as the AV Club wrote, entirely in the bag when “it was determined that Jackson is Ice Cube’s son.”

Junior, like many children of celebrities who exude danger and charisma, may look like his father—but he doesn’t feel like him. He’s like Ice Cube if, instead of a rapper from the dangerous streets of Compton, he was raised mostly in a Malibu Branch of Whole Foods.

Despite being a millionaire child of nepotism in a city where the sun never stops shining, O’Shea spends a significant amount of time fighting the wrestling wars online, establishing a niche as a dependable anti-AEW account, one with a veneer of respectability that separates him from the standard wrestling troll. But, opinion-wise, he’s no different than AEWBOTCHZ69 or BLOODLINE4LIFE. He likes wrestling the way it’s always been slopped out to him and is very opposed to the idea it could be presented differently.

If you haven’t seen his account, you can surely imagine it. He shares posts from those weird AEW Botch accounts, defends the honor of WWE against all comers and does a smarmy “who is this guy” act every time fans get excited about a foreign talent coming to American television. As a child of the times, he actively solicits negative feedback, then complains when it pours in, casting himself as an innocent “just asking questions” and the fans he baits as disgruntled losers.

Jackson Jr exploded across the wrestling internet yesterday when the podcaster Chris Van Vliet interviewed him about his fandom and Jackson put on his best innocent face, batted his eyes and took aim at AEW once again:

“The issue I have is… if I'm watching someone on AEW and I ask, 'Who is this guy?' I don't need you to tell me I'm not a real wrestling fan, to tell me, ‘How could you not know such-and-such?'

"Inform me, bro. Or at least have your program in a way to let people know why you should love this dude, why you should fuck with this guy. That's something that I feel like is missing.

Obviously this kind of concern trolling is very familiar. Any AEW fan has seen it countless times from the “Just Asking Questions” Brigade, supposedly well-meaning “constructive” advice offered by accounts that spend all day every day weirdly posting and liking negative content about a wrestling brand.

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Jackson spent hours on Twitter fighting with critics who rightly pointed out that he wasn’t an innocent bystander in the wrestling wars and retweeting any praise that came across his timeline.

“How dare I want human interaction,” he wrote at one point. “How dare I use social media to ask people questions. You know how many homies I made on here from talking wrestling? How many have different opinions but because they had real convos with me we became cool? How dare I want wrestling homies.”

As funny as “wrestling homies” is, I think it’s worth engaging him on the merits here, pretending this wasn’t merely a way to level criticism at AEW and troll its fans while successfully tricking the gullible and naive into believing he doesn’t have a dog in the fight. Jackson’s broader point is that AEW needs to do more explaining, introducing wrestlers with extended video packages to help highlight them for newer fans. You know—the way WWE does.

“What they have is this niche of people who watch all of these wrestling shows,” he said. “They’re already in the know. So, when they see these names together, it is a dream match for them. But you’re trying to sell this to American television baby. You’ve got to movie that up a little bit. You’ve got to give me some cinema to follow. Something to hold on to besides the announce team running down a list for me while this dude is walking down the ramp. And I feel like that’s missing.”

Like many of the most ardent anti-AEW accounts, it never occurs to Jackson Jr that there could be another way to learn about a wrestler or understand their character—actually watching them wrestle a match. A WWE wrestler requires an extended introduction because, inside the squared circle, almost every bout has the same beats, rhythms and structure. The wrestler is plopped into an existing template, fitting comfortably into the existing paradigm, all square pegs long ago sanded down to fit a round hole.

Because modern WWE has such a homogenized presentation, especially in the ring, it can be lost on some fans that wrestling is a unique art. It isn’t “cinema” or a movie. Much of the story, especially when a performer is particularly gifted, can be told in the ring. Sure, you could do a video package that highlights some of Hechicero’s past exploits. But he was more than capable of showing who and what he was during the course of a wrestling match.

Show versus tell.

The best way to learn about Hechicero, for example, really is to Google his name and watch a bunch of matches. A video package wouldn’t be nearly as effective. An announcer talking over an entrance isn’t nearly as effective. Wrestling is action, it’s motion and emotion. Words are wind for almost everyone in the space, especially someone communicating in a second language. A wrestler tells you who he is in the ring. You don’t need anything else. Nothing else, in fact, can accomplish the job quite like actually watching someone do what they do.

Guys like Jackson pretend that they want to “learn” and be “educated” but that’s disingenuous. He bristles at the idea he isn’t a “real wrestling fan.” But isn’t that true? He doesn’t want to know more about wrestling as its been presented around the world for decades. He wants things delivered to him in the WWE style and will reject, out of hand, anything else. Moves that don’t land perfectly, when not hidden by a hundred camera cuts, are “botches.” Anyone who hasn’t been on WWE RAW is a nobody. The most basic concepts and stories need to be drilled into a fan’s head endlessly, otherwise they are apparently impossible to comprehend. Those are the lessons learned from watching WWE. To many, it’s what wrestling should and must feel like.

They want AEW to feel like WWE. But we already have WWE for that. Perhaps there’s room for wrestling to be presented in more than one way?

These WWE fans remind me of people who build their identity around being coffee drinkers—but actually go to Dunkin Donuts every morning for a drink filled mostly with milk and artificial flavoring, topped with a liberal amount of whipped cream. For this “coffee lover” the actual bean is a very minor part of the experience. They have little in common with someone who orders a bag from a specialty roaster in Portland and truly savors it. They likely don’t really even know how to talk about coffee with each other.

Wrestling is such a minor part of the WWE experience that talking to a hardcore fan is like speaking a different language. Both identify as “wrestling fans” but they have very different experiences and methods of engaging with the sport.

And that’s okay.

One criticism often leveled at AEW (and wrestling generally) is that it isn’t clear why certain wrestlers are fighting each other. What, someone will ask, is the story? The origins of the pseudo-sport are so obscured at this point that many in the audience apparently don’t even get the central conceit. Wrestlers are competing because wrestling is a sport and they want to prove they are better than the person standing across the ring from them. Why do the Suns play the Lakers? Because they are athletes, this is a sport and that’s what they do. That’s the story that underlies all other stories. Some feuds and angles require more than that—but that’s what makes them standout and makes fans take note. If every match on a card has an elaborate, charged back story, it’s much harder for any of it to truly resonate on an emotional level.

In other words, sometimes a match is just a match, enjoyable on its own terms without promos or vitriol to prop it up. There needs to be vanilla for other flavors to truly challenge the palate.

Obviously I come at this from a different perspective from newer fans. I agree that a boxing or UFC style faceoff and an extended “Dusty Rhodes as the Common Man” package of vignettes can be interesting. But I’ve also watched wrestling from foreign countries extensively, long before any of the promotions had English language announce teams. That never, however, stopped the greats from telling me their stories.

A perfect example is the series of matches between Jumbo Tsuruta and Mitsuharu Misawa in the early 1990s. It’s the tale of a fading, aged lion desperately trying to fight off both Father Time and his young rival. From Misawa refusing Jumbo’s tentatively extended hand to open the first match, wary of anything that reminded him this man was once his mentor and idol, to the look of complete shock when the referee’s hand counted three, everything that needed said was expressed quite eloquently through action alone. Misawa’s peers lifted him onto their shoulders, celebrating the impossible—but Jumbo’s disgusted face, an anger no doubt directed internally at his own failings, made it clear the story was far from over.

There was no video package or English voiceover explaining it to me when I checked the VHS tape out at the Japanese grocery store. If you need wrestling distilled for you in this manner, maybe it just doesn’t connect with you. The beauty of wrestling is that it transcends language and nationality. At its best, the stories told require very little in the way of explanation.

In fact, the endless over-explaining we get from contemporary announce teams is actually counter-productive. Almost everything that needs said is said physically inside the ring. Courage, fear, anger, sadness, glory, defeat—these are concepts true masters are capable of expressing through their art. They don’t need to be transformed into “cinema.”

Wrestling is its own form of expression.

Jonathan Snowden is a long-time combat sports journalist. His books include Total MMA, Shooters and Shamrock: The World’s Most Dangerous Man. His work has appeared in USA Today, Bleacher Report, Fox Sports and The Ringer. Subscribe to this newsletter to keep up with his latest work.