JBL thinks the age at which a wrestler reaches their prime has moved into the late thirties and beyond, and that the reason is partly better training and partly that nobody gets enough matches anymore.
He set the argument out on Something To Wrestle, starting with his own championship reign.
“When I was a champion, I think I was 39 at the time. I was one of the older champions. Now that’s not old, and maybe we’d be considered on the young side from what champions are. The world’s changed.”
The first part of the explanation is physical.
“People’s training is so much better. We didn’t know anything about training. We trained the old-fashioned way, the way that Arnold and Franco trained, how you read in the muscle magazines. He took a lot of protein.”
He remembers what that looked like in practice.
“I remember seeing Sid had this pile, looked like a Flintstones, a pile of chicken breasts. It was him and Bob Holly sitting there just eating so much protein. We didn’t know about diet. We didn’t know about cardio. We didn’t know about so much.”
“A little bit about cardio was starting to be learned, but we were wrestling every night, so we didn’t have to do a lot of cardio. These guys now, it’s a game changer. Absolute game changer as far as the nutrition, the training processes, the functional training that they’re doing, the ability to get rid of inflammation in the body.”
The second part is about repetitions.
“This business is hard to learn. It’s not like a great running back, a Saquon Barkley or a King Henry, where you’ve got this monster, and they learn the game a little bit about football, and they played it a while, and they get to 24, 25, 26 years old and they’re in their prime. It takes a lot longer to learn the wrestling business than it does sports.”
He compared it against his own path.
“By the time I wrestled just a few years, I had 1,000 matches. By the time I got to WWE, I’d been wrestling for two years in Europe. I’d been wrestling a couple of years in Japan. I’d been all over the world wrestling. These guys don’t have that advantage now, and it was an advantage back then.”
“People talk about the old school breaking in, didn’t make much money. Yeah, but it was a great learning process. So by the time you got there, you were further along. It takes longer now because you don’t have the matches, so you don’t get the feel as quick.”
He also thinks the shortage of live events has changed who the job falls to.
“The world has changed as far as the wrestling, because producers are so much more important, because they’re not working as many live events and house shows.”
He put a number on it.
“I thought back then it was somewhere in the 30s. It may be late 30s now. By the time you’re getting where you can be the main event guy, or where you can be the guy.”
“I think early 40s to even late 40s now, these guys are in tremendous shape.”
He allowed for exceptions.
“There’s always going to be freaks. There’s always going to be a Kurt Angle, or a guy that comes along like Brock Lesnar that just picks it up. There’s always going to be that guy, but I think for the most part, it’s getting older and older.”
The people he named as evidence are all still working. Shelton Benjamin, who he called maybe one of the greatest athletes in wrestling history, Jeff Jarrett, and Rey Mysterio.
“How in the world is he doing it after all these years? He’s as good as he ever was.”
His answer to anybody arguing a wrestler is too old is a commercial one.
“Would you love to have guys that are 24 and 25 that are going to have 20 more years, as compared to a person that is 47 or 48 that’s not going to have that many more years? Of course you would. But do you want to fill arenas? Yes. If these guys are filling arenas, who cares how old they are?”
“Is it better to have younger? Of course it is. It’s always better to have younger. But do you really care if you’re filling arenas? Absolutely not.”
He finished on a line from baseball.
“It’s like Satchel Paige says, how old would you be if you didn’t know how old you were? That’s how it is these days.”
