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| If you think Bryan is being mocked by anyone other than the heels for being "small-time," you may have missed the point Photo Credit: WWE.com |
To the untrained eye, WWE is in essence declaring war on the indies as competition. Sure, the combined yearly revenue of every independent promotion in America (that's every non-TNA and non-ROH company) might not equal the amount of money WWE makes on its worst pay-per-view. That scene is not an aggregate threat for sure, but each promotion provides a nominally similar service to what WWE offers. One can argue the ethics WWE putting the clamps on them, and honestly, I think it's kind of a scuzzy move, akin to Wal*Mart heading into random podunks and putting all the mom 'n pop shops out of business with their rolled back prices and near criminal treatment of workers.
That being written, Vince McMahon is a noted unscrupulous scumbag in terms of his business maneuvering. He's the guy who nearly singlehandedly tanked the territory system through his scorched earth campaign taking the World Wrestling Federation national. If the company narrative was bashing the indies and opening fire on them the way McMahon destroyed the territories, then yes, I might be up in arms as well.
However, I don't think that the indie-bashing is a company narrative as much as it is a device to get heat for stories and performers. Notice that this "bingo hall" narrative is being levied by adversaries of two of the three most popular wrestlers in the company. Sure, the third, Cena, is big-timing Bryan with his use of that talking point. However, Cena is a noted cause of bipolar crowds. If you're a fan of Cena going into SummerSlam, do you really need him to say out loud that Bryan is a product of a small-time system that may have inflated his self-worth? If anything, his promos along that line are red meat for the fans of Bryan to react more vociferously, to drown out the women, children, and fans of musculature in wrestling at best or to compete with them at the very least. With Punk, the bingo hall diss is meant to rile support for him as the underdog against the mammoth Lesnar and to get more heat on Paul Heyman, the man who invented the idea of the armory draw in the national era, as a hypocrite.
The most telling aspect of how this narrative is used is that only Bryan and Punk are the ones being levied with it as a complaint. Working in the indies could easily be used against Antonio Cesaro, two-thirds of The Shield, or Luke Harper. However, the only wrestler that has even been hinted with a past beyond their gimmick has been Cesaro so far. The WWE Creative department does not want you the fan to hate a wrestler because they have a "small-time" background, but they sure as hell want you rally behind one if they achieved cult-hero status outside of the corporate environment.
The way things are going in WWE makes me think that folks within the company know it can't really survive in an environment without a WCW-level competitor (lol if you think TNA ever put a tenth of the pressure on WWE that Turner did) without a proving ground. I'm not sure McMahon realizes it, but Triple H certainly seems to. Ever since he's taken over as the talent relations head, not only have the indie signings been on the uptick, but the insertion of them into prominence has been widespread. Even though it seems as if the threat of WWE pillaging the indies into extinction is ever-present, it never plays out in that regard because the talent stream can't be allowed to dry up.
The grand experiment of having a developmental territory alone has seemingly failed as a sole strategy. While WWE will always pluck green body guys, ex-athletes, or fitness models to put into their system, the indies remain the best crucible for imitating the pressures of being in the WWE spotlight, even if stylistically, the environments differ vastly. By putting a shine on Bryan's and Punk's pasts and making the big-timing part of the heel shtick, WWE is not so subtly telling you, the fan, to support the indies in an attempt to find the next one of their ilk. McMahon made the mistake of destroying a healthy ecosystem in the '80s, and judging from the direction of the company now, it feels like Trips may have learned from that error.
If you're angry at the use of the bingo hall narrative as a diminutive in WWE rhetoric, then their plan worked. While on the surface, WWE is bashing the indies, the context reveals that they know they need the supplemental help in developing their future stars. Don't be worried when the haughty Brock Lesnar or the out-of-touch John Cena make claims against the pasts of former indie standouts. Instead, get worried if WWE ever stops referring to their pasts in a positive light on DVDs or if they start raiding the indies of all the talented workers in strip mine fashion. We haven't gotten to that point yet, thankfully.