“Need a little time to wake up
Need a little time to wake up, wake up
Need a little time to wake up
Need a little time to rest your mind
You know you should so I guess you might as well”
– Morning Glory by Oasis
If you ever look up what professional wrestling is on Wikipedia, the first sentence will tell you that pro wrestling is a form of athletic theatre that combines mock combat with drama under the premise that the performers are competitive wrestlers.
The drama referenced is not the film subgenre of drama or TNT “We Know Drama” but the actual type of play in theatre known as drama. Mime, for example, is a form of drama. You know, no words but using your body to tell the audience a story? That’s drama through mime. Maybe you can see why pro wrestling is related to drama.
I give you this scholastic basic opening because it’s important to establish what pro wrestling is before I get into this. Because too many people forgot what pro wrestling is as pro wrestling fans. That’s why they keep asking the same stupid question:
Where’s the Story?
The source of this question is pretty obvious. All Elite Wrestling is now five years old, and has tried to present an alternative wrestling product to the mainstream of World Wrestling Entertainment. Like any pro wrestling company, All Elite Wrestling has good stories and bad stories. Some hit and some miss. The Hangman Page and Swerve Strickland story has been phenomenal, with both men changing with the audience and becoming new people to who they were when they first confronted each other. The Devil storyline involving Adam Cole and Maxwell Jacob Friedman in 2023 was one of the worst, just based on the way it divided the AEW audience against itself. It’s a pro wrestling story as any pro wrestling story, but the presentation of it reminded some AEW fans too much of WWE (or just bad stories) and became a rallying cry for AEW to “restore the feeling” by not doing angles like that anymore. A lot of it didn’t make sense and felt forced, and it didn’t really help anyone in the end.
As AEW has existed, WWE went from their main event involving a supernatural children’s TV presenter who would turn into a Tim Burton clown impervious to pain if you “let him in” to their now situation of where their entire pro wrestling world revolves around Roman Reigns as the Tribal Chief. The Tribal Chief storyline has been one of the most successful in WWE history and has carried the company through the pandemic to today. It’s pretty much their only successful angle in the past five years. It’s also the angle that WWE fans like to call, “Cinema” and, “Should win an Oscar” when the Academy Awards is for films and not live action television shows.
This push that it’s the best story in pro wrestling and “cinema bro” became an easy rally cry for WWE fans to say that All Elite Wrestling doesn’t tell stories like WWE. This used to just be funny to anyone who watched the products and Being The Elite even made jokes about their own Elite storyline having similar beats to the Head of the Table and Tribal Chief angle before it started. It really doesn’t matter who was first, but it is funny that those similarities are ignored when trying to say that All Elite Wrestling isn’t telling stories like WWE. Or rather, not telling this one story.
That soon mutated into, “All Elite Wrestling is not telling stories at all” and this mutation really came in during the AEW Continental Classic in late November 2023. AEW President Tony Khan booked a round robin tournament similar to the New Japan Pro Wrestling G1 Climax.
It doesn’t matter if WWE actually ran their own round robin in 2020 for the NXT Cruiserweight Championship. All Elite Wrestling running this Continental Classic was some form of psychological leap in pro wrestling storytelling that some people lost their sense of reason for. Why are they doing matches without a story reason? Why is someone wrestling after being eliminated from being able to win? What’s the point? What’s the purpose? WHERE’S THE STORY?
I’ve tried linking to some examples of people saying these asinine things but you just have to take my word that this became a constant barrage in replying to anything AEW did, especially the Continental Classic. And now in March of 2024, a few months removed from the Continental Classic, it is still happening upon everything All Elite Wrestling does.
If it was just WWE fanatics saying it I would probably be okay with it because it’s easy to ignore people who bring bad faith arguments to everything. The problem is it has seeped into every single conversation about anything in pro wrestling. Someone always has to ask what the story is, or pre-emptively explain what the story is before someone asks. It is to the point where if I hear the word “story” about pro wrestling I reflexively shudder. Even when it’s being done to compliment something! The word story has become toxic in pro wrestling discourse.
What’s The Story?
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpXXXipeeqM[/embedyt]
Today I watched Nick Bockwinkel in Southwest Championship Wrestling wrestle a young Terry “Magnum TA” Allen in a seven minute match. At the time, Bockwinkel was the American Wrestling Association World Heavyweight champion. Allen was at the start of his career, maybe a one or two year rookie. There wasn’t some open challenge. Nick didn’t pick on the rookie and get challenged. It wasn’t some storyline where the invading AWA World Champion was picking the easiest challenger for his title to avoid the big star of Southwest. It was just the AWA World Champion coming into the territory and working a young kid in a seven minute sprint. Allen got some offence, looked inexperienced, and Bockwinkel took advantage. He beat Allen with a piledriver and that was it.
A few months ago, the AEW World Champion Samoa Joe wrestled Hook. It was Samoa Joe’s first defence of the World Championship. They built it up for a few weeks. It had a lot more “storytelling” built into the why and the how. And yet people still complained about it being a “glorified open challenge” because “glorified open challenge” isn’t a story to them. Even though this is pro wrestling. Mock combat with drama under the premise that the performers are competitive wrestlers. Remember that definition?
If AEW tried to do what Southwest did back in the early 80s of just throwing their World champion out there with a newcomer it would be torn to shreds. Why is the champion fighting this guy and not a contender? Why is this guy getting a title shot? Why is this on TV? What’s the purpose? Where’s the story.
Pro wrestling is the story. And most of it is told in the ring. And when you ignore the story told in the ring and only focus on how it got there, you miss out on the most integral elements of what makes professional wrestling what it is and why you watch it.
How’s The Story?
I don’t mean for this to come off completely as a defence of All Elite Wrestling. It’s really not meant to be. It’s about how we discuss pro wrestling and how I feel it has completely forgotten what it is. Of course you can’t just toss out the Bockwinkel vs. Allen match today without some push back. I have complained about similar when Orange Cassidy would face lower card guys for the AEW International Championship. I wanted more purpose than what I got. It isn’t the 1980s anymore and that’s a good thing.
But it’s frustrating to talk about pro wrestling today and for it to always go back to a dissection of what stories are being told. The word “story” is abused so much that an “open challenge” is now not a story in pro wrestling. “Fighting to be the best” is not a story. And worst of all, the actual wrestling in the ring is not treated as a story when that is the fundamental story in pro wrestling as a form of athletic theatre.
The reason the “Where’s the Story?” narrative exists is purely for fans of the Tribal Chief storyline to get under the skin of those who watch AEW, to make them constantly have to defend the product, but now AEW fans do it and people who watch all pro wrestling do it. So congratulations to the WWE fans for pushing this narrative constantly because YOU WON. Now everything in pro wrestling is constantly questioned for story. Any wrestler who is on TV it’s now asked what their story is. If they are not on TV, that’s now asked as to why and what’s the story reason. Every match needs a “story” reason, and the story can’t be about competition or money. It has to be about something else. We need to know who every wrestler is going in, we need their back story or else they don’t matter. All of this before the bell rings. The actual purpose of this.
There is a story being told in the ring every time two wrestlers wrestle, just as Terry Allen and Nick Bockwinkel showed in their match. Wrestlers fighting to be the best is a story, even if it isn’t the story you prefer. You don’t need to know every detail, and sometimes, not knowing the details is part of the story. The story being told over time while you watch the program. It’s time to stop asking where’s the story and start asking if the story is any good.
Where’s The Story? If you would just wake up, put the phone down, and watch? You would see it was in front of you the entire time.
