The Undertaker rates the current generation as the best athletes wrestling has ever had, and thinks that is exactly why so many of them are leaving out the part that lasts.
Undertaker, who now runs creative for AAA, was asked on Insight with Chris Van Vliet what advice he gives younger wrestlers. He started with the risk.
“I try to get them to calm down a little bit in the sense of all of the crazy, I call them flippy doos and stuff like that. I just, there’s, wrestling is dangerous enough, and probably heard me say it. Like within the course of any match, you’re always just a couple inches away from something really catastrophic happening, and when you start doing double backflips off of things and landing on people, that risk goes up exponentially.”
Then the compliment, and the caveat attached to it.
“This level of athlete that’s out here today is by far the greatest in the history of our industry. But what happens is they kind of forget storytelling, and storytelling just isn’t about the angle that the Booker comes up with. Storytelling is how you do your matches and the things that you make a priority.”
His argument is that the spectacular gets devalued fastest by the people watching it.
“So I try to focus on getting them to do things athletically, aggressively, but also makes sense if you’re a fan watching it, because there’s a lot of things you watch and you just go, eh, they lose me because they’re trying to do something that they physically can’t. And even if they can, our audience is so fickle.”
“You see a double backflip, half twist, gainer onto somebody on the floor, and you’ve seen it two or three weeks in a row, and then you’re kind of like, okay, I’ve seen that. Now, what do you got for me? Right. So you make your job harder, as opposed to making the character mean something.”
“You know, trying to get the character to evoke some kind of emotion, whether good, bad, or indifferent. That’s the key to long-term, is having people invested where they want to see you win, lose, beat somebody up, get your butt kicked. There’s a fine line between the athleticism and the storytelling aspect, and I just try to get the young guys to think a little bit more about the storytelling.”
Undertaker named nobody and did not point at any promotion.
Asked separately what wrestling has taught him about life, he carried the same idea outwards.
“Sometimes you just have to in life you just have to grind it out. Sometimes you just have to bear the bad times, and just like in the, like, oh man, this guy’s been getting beat, getting beat, getting beat, and then finally something happens, and he ends up getting a push. Life is the same way, man. Sometimes you just have to get up every day, embrace the suck, and just keep grinding. That’s where life and wrestling kind of imitate themselves, and sometimes it takes longer.”
Undertaker is not the only one making the point this week. Kevin Nash said on Kliq This that what is missing now is the feeling that two people are having a fight, while AJ Styles said on his own show that his 19-year-old son is being taught psychology he was never taught himself, and that fans who only see highlights never learn how a match is built.
