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| How can you expect a group of 8-20,000 to "behave?" Photo Credit: WWE.com |
The last two weeks have put this topic into focus. RAW last week in Newark has been called one of the best in wrestling history. Conversely, I saw a lot of reactions on my Twitter timeline last night chastising the crowd, saying they sucked. Honestly, there was a marked difference from last week to this, but I would have been utterly surprised if the reactions were the same. Newark was a post-WrestleMania crowd in a city known as a hotbed for fans like myself. That intersection not surprisingly produced one of the most unique, heel-cheering, creatively-chanting crowds in recent memory. Last night's crowd in Greenville, SC, was more of a traditional wrestling crowd. Of course, that wasn't the only difference. Last week's crowd was treated to one of the most critically-acclaimed wrestling shows of the last couple of years. RAW this week had a smell that the consensus agreed most resembled a wet fart.
That's why I really can't fathom why people were surprised that the crowd was dead anyway. If you don't like what's presented in front of you, why should you react? If you put minimal effort into cultivating an environment that makes people want to cheer, then why act surprised when they don't want to cheer, or boo, or take cues, whether traditional or new? Even so, all of that might end up as being irrelevant anyway. No two crowds are exactly the same, and no two wrestling shows are exactly alike. The closest thing to uniformity that I personally have ever seen has been in the Impact Zone, but even then, I'm sure the makeup of that crowd wasn't exactly the same from taping set to taping set.
The old logic is that promoters only know what their fans like by how they react. It's still true in some cases, although in WWE, those cues can sometimes be ignored, especially if you're Zack Ryder. But take for example Japan, where it is not uncommon to find shows with riveting action to be greeted with mostly silence. The wrestlers didn't fail in their jobs, because even now, but especially in the salad days of All-Japan Pro Wrestling for example, those fans kept coming back and filling up the arena. An American wrestling traditionalist might look at that and be baffled, but the culture was and still is different. The real question then becomes how much of that attitude has leached over into American wrestling crowds? The answer is that I have no idea if any.
Trying to parse a crowd is exceedingly difficult to the point where I don't know where to begin other than saying that getting groups of people in a certain area is volatile. Oftentimes, even the crowds that were the "best" like last week's do things that get on people's nerves. I know that any crowd that chants "We are awesome!" can go right to hell, but at the same time, how the fuck am I going to be able to judge how people enjoy a wrestling show? That's the one hangup I've developed over legislating chants or hush-hushing people for saying things that I thought weren't "appropriate." Someone who chants "This is wrestling!" is showing that they enjoy the show in their own way. They're saying something I think is dumb, but I think I'm able to forgive that over someone, like Mark Madden, who spends the bulk of his or her life shitting all over something to make money or get attention while all the while hating what they're writing about.
Regardless, I think there needs to be some kind of baseline, some starting point where we can try to understand how the brainwaves of people get together and form a crowd. I think the best place to start is trying to correlate between a show's quality and the reaction to it. Obviously, my view of a quality show may not be the same as the guy down the street whose kid love John Cena and who still watches for not only his offspring, but because it's a good way to let off steam. But still, we can agree last night's show was kinda universally terrible, right? Well, maybe not, but I get the vibe more people hated it than not. Even if it was still good, and the crowd STILL shat on it, there's no way of knowing whether it was because they didn't care enough to cheer, or because they were maybe rapt enough by the show that they didn't feel the need to react to everything like Pavlovian dogs.
Unfortunately, there's no instant analysis that can be done on a show like last night. The only way we find out whether Greenville really rejected last night's show or not is to see how the attendance changes the next time WWE comes back to town.