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| The King of the Bad Man Bookers Photo Credit: WWE.com |
A lot of times, people have made claims that they'll never support [insert promotion here] because of the misdeeds of the promoter. Most recently, Chikara has come under fire for rumors about improprieties committed by Mike Quackenbush. I'm not going to address them, because they've been roundly denied as false and would be damaging to more people than just Quack. However, it's insane how much it spread like wildfire, and how much of a pall it cast on the end of Aniversario, even with the in-story doom and gloom that was built into the end of said show. It's believable because Quack has a reputation that precedes him, one that has been corroborated by a lot of sources.
Personally, I don't have anything but nice things to say about him from my experiences with him. I won't throw shade, but it's naïve to deny the existence of reputation. People have a hard time reconciling supporting a company whose owner has skeletons in the closet, and just because this latest rumor doesn't seem to be true doesn't mean there aren't other major things that are true that keep people away. The dilemma becomes then which promotions are "safe" to support then?
On the surface, it's a straw man argument to always bring up Vince McMahon, but at the same time, if you want to give money to companies who aren't headed by scoundrels, there's no way that watching WWE on anything more than a pirated stream can be reconciled. I mean, McMahon's laundry list of personal flaws and heinous acts stretch a mile long. As it turns out, most people who front businesses, not wrestling companies alone, but businesses in general tend to be ruthless, even if there are a bunch of examples to the contrary.
I've written this before, but it bears repeating. The biggest myth in American economics is that the propagation of the cult of the business owner is essential to the survival of this country's fiscal future. I am not a Communist by any means, but it's common sense to realize that it's actually possible, not plausible or even likely, but possible for the workers to be able to own the means of production and labor without a bourgeois "in charge" of them. However, on the macro scale, it is nigh impossible for anything to get done without the workers. By nature, the rank and file tend to have more "good" people than the management, because getting ahead in business oftentimes means you're cutting throats like Jack the Ripper to do so.
In real world terms though, management is needed, but not nearly in the scale that it's relied on in any business in America, especially wrestling. I hesitate to call wrestlers, by and large, good people, because the number of professionals in the business that I know who aren't in management numbers one, and it's tenuous to say that I really know Rachel Summerlyn outside of Twitter and podcasting. In those areas though? She's a total sweetheart. But for every He Who Shall Not Be Named who had a checkered past BEFORE murdering his wife and son, there seems to be stories of wrestlers who are good dudes or dudettes, whether backstage or front.
When boycotting a wrestling promotion, it's the wrestlers who suffer most. Sure, it's probably the best to make someone like McMahon or even Thorne suffer by not spending money on their company. But what about the people who work for them who by all accounts are the sweetest people on the planet? I mean, yeah, you can end up buying merch directly from wrestlers, but then if the companies don't get support, then how will the wrestlers end up getting dates? Not everyone can work for Beyond Wrestling or SHIMMER, so following wrestlers around to companies that aren't run by people who have relatively clean records won't work when cobwebs are discovered about each promoter behind said company in a systematic fashion.
But at the same time, like I wrote last week, it's very hard for me to tell someone to support or not support a company due to behaviors of people within the company. That's why these sorts of things are so tricky. I hate to write the same thing over and over again, but I don't have answers except that you do things that you in your heart feel are right. If supporting WWE or AIW or Chikara or TNA or any wrestling company doesn't feel right to you, don't support them. But at the same time, there needs to be a better way of supporting the actual wrestlers, especially ones who end up getting forsaken because their bosses aren't the best people in the world.