Over the years, professional wrestling has changed. I'm not breaking any new ground with that statement, it's obvious to even a casual observer that wrestling is not the same thing as it was in the 80's when I was a kid, or even what it was when I was a teenager and young adult in the 90's and early 2000's. Still, I'm a lifelong fan, and although I now get way more enjoyment out of watching old matches on YouTube or WWE Classics on Demand, I still try to catch Monday Night Raw every week, even though roughly three quarters of the show does nothing but piss me off and make me wax nostalgic for the days when wrestling was "good".
But what makes older wrestling good, you may ask? Well, for starters, nowadays the WWE doesn't even refer to itself as wrestling , they call themselves "sports entertainment" (not sure what they think that second W stands for), and the wrestlers are "superstars." They avoid saying the words wrestling or wrestler like the plague. The title belts are only referred to as "championships" too, for reasons I still don't quite understand (to the point where the announcers will say "he hit him with the championship". Its a little fucking ridiculous). And I guess that's fine, Vince McMahon can market his product however he likes. I can watch or not watch as I see fit. And I do. I still watch hoping to catch a glimmer of what used to make wrestling great. Every now and then they even come close. I could go on a rant listing all the things that are different now, and why it was much better 10, 15 or 20 years ago than it is today. But I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to focus on one thing that it seems to me that the WWE has forgotten how to do, and the product in my opinion suffers for it.
