Kevin Nash says the thing missing from wrestling now is the sense that the people in the ring are having a fight, and pointed to a four-minute clip from the eighties to make the point.
Speaking on Kliq This with Sean Oliver, Nash was discussing how much wrestlers used to learn from the volume of matches and the time spent on the road together, and picked up on a conversation he had been having about a much harder style.
Oliver named the pairing as Samoa Joe and Necro Butcher after Dark Side of The Ring was brought up.
“Yeah, and we were saying how you know that you just couldn’t work that style 300 days a year.”
Nash then described something he had come across online.
“You know, and I think that’s one of the things that’s missing. Is I watched. I was watching on YouTube the other day, or it might have just been on Instagram, but it was a. It looked like it might have been a TV taping, but you know, it was a while back. But it was Tully Blanchard versus Sam Houston, probably about a four-minute clip, and it looked like they were having a fight, you know. I mean, it really had like a really gritty feel to it, and I think that’s one of the things that’s missing.”
Blanchard and Houston worked together in the NWA in the late eighties.
Oliver put it to him that the product might simply have evolved, comparing it to boxing and the NFL, where crowds pick sides passionately without anyone needing to play a villain. Nash’s answer was that the mechanics underneath have not changed.
“I’ve said this my entire career. That’s all good said and done, but the blueprint of the match is somebody’s got to make a comeback, and somebody’s got to give it at the end of the night.”
Asked directly whether a stadium being split down the middle is a problem, Nash did not answer yes or no. He reached for the most familiar example of a divided crowd instead.
“I don’t. How many years did we watch them say, ‘Let’s go, Cena. Cena sucks.'”
