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| Maybe Vince should worry about the heat he's putting on himself with his biggest recent draw Photo Credit: WWE.com |
The Rock put a lot of heat on himself.What a loaded, company-fed, corporate brown-nosing line. The implications dripping off that line are insidious as they are obsequious. It's to suggest that the performer has no say in his or her creative direction, that his or her only goal is to please the boss. So it doesn't matter if Vince McMahon put a lot of heat on himself with a performer who clearly doesn't need his money. It only matters that the disloyal part-timer put heat on himself for selfishly forsaking the company. Excuse me while I gag.
Let me be clear; this is not a slam on the dirt sheets or any outlets reporting the story in this specific case. Wrestling reporting has been pro-management in terms of how promoters deal with talent since the dawn of the newsletter. It's not a defense to say that it's "the way things have always been done," but it does show how far the general public at large has to go before wrestlers are favored over promoters.
The biggest lie of American economics is that without business owners, nothing would get done. That's utter bullshit. It's possible in extreme theories of the most Communist Communism that ever existed in the minds of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin that business owners are completely superfluous on a macroscopic level. I think smaller collectives prove this theory right, but anything works on a small scale. However, no matter how large or small the scale, you can't build a bridge by yourself. Vince McMahon cannot put on a wrestling show without wrestlers. And yet, the idea pervades the wrestling collective that he's got all the power. It's mind-boggling how people are so ready to bow in subservience, especially when no one fights for them.
It's even more puzzling when someone like Jesse Ventura does fight for them in his call for unionization. Wrestling may never unionize, which is something that keeps this brutal working relationship in fixed place. Because wrestlers have no legally-backed bargaining chip, the only currency is drawing power. Lucky for Rock, he has that in spades.
As it turned out, as details came out, it turned out Rocky was injured at Mania on Sunday, per his own Twitter:
In the middle of last nights Wrestlemania match I tore my abdomen and adductor muscles off the bone. Just part of the job. But as we know..
— Dwayne Johnson (@TheRock) April 8, 2013
Yeah, he tore core muscles off his bone, which means even breathing is probably painful. He flew home rather than even chance aggravating it in whatever WWE had planned for him. Imagine that, a wrestler who may have put his own bodily health over the good of "THIS BUSINESS." Again, the details were as nebulous last night as they are now, but it sucks that a star of the caliber of The Rock is one of the only ones with the luxury of being able to tell Vince McMahon to stick it where the sun doesn't shine.
The problem isn't going to change overnight, but we can start changing the culture by not worrying about what wrestlers have "heat" with management, as if dissatisfaction is a one-way street, especially when that "dissatisfaction" may have been an invention of writers with overactive imaginations. If people are going to care enough about wrestlers that they fund Kickstarter campaigns to pay for surgery, then maybe those same people would be wise to care about them when they're still employed and able to work.