KEYS TO PROFESSIONAL WRESTLING - Sept.11, 2004

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEYS TO PROFESSIONAL WRESTLING.

Jose has been a fan of pro wrestling for a long, long time. He first got into it at around Wrestlemania 2 (Note: Though he accidentally taped over his friends copy of it with a Voltron special. Jose felt really, really bad about that.) and quickly became a student of the sport’s history. The countless hours Jose spent watching tapes of old events and reading Pro Wrestling Illustrated are lost to him forever, though the piles of magazines with stories such as psychoanalysis of Mr. Wonderful Paul Orndorff (he’d switched from face to heel three times, quite odd at the time) remain forever.

Jose and his friends developed their own elaborate wrestling leagues and sets of characters that were far more lively and interesting than anything the WWF could come up with. There was Persian Gulf Championship Wrestling featuring stars such as Israeli heavyweight Devastating Dion and the evil Iran John. Ivory Coast Championship Wrestling featured lengthy feuds between Daniel the Devastator and The Ultimate One (a heel with a God Complex) and a memorable first blood match between Tashu the Bloody Dragon and Elway the Bloody Bronco that ended in a draw. (Note: Do NOT have first blood matches on an island without shower facilities. Ketchup is sticky and unpleasant over time.) Who can forget when the 212 pound monster Anthony the Giant bowed in a hair cut match? And we all knew that WWF was in serious trouble when they introduced a manager named Johnny Polo (later Raven) who was a pale imitation of the great Polo Pete.

Perhaps the greatest moment came when Jose and his friend Dan were working a match that was so realistic that Jose’s mother, Susan Melendez, became concerned that her son was being brutally beaten and responded by crushing his opponent with a rolled up newspaper. As Jim Ross would say, she beat him like a government mule. (Note: Jose does not think the government should beat mules. It just seems like a bad use of taxpayer dollars.) That was a DQ loss that hurt.

Jose’s mother, who worked in sales for an office supply company at the time, then went on to win a contest at work for best use of a Sharpie marker for the Southeast Asian Wrestling Federation’s Tag Team Title belts. Take that Terrell Owens. How many Sharpie contests have you won?

So Jose feels more than qualified to tell Vince McMahon how to run his business.

The WWF has gotten stale. (Note: Jose will never call it the WWE. If it is the WWE, than the wildlife advocates have already won.) Wrestling is a cyclical business, Jose understands, and the WWF will reemerge once its young stars catch fire. Pushing Randy Orton and West Newbury’s own John Cena is a good start, but it will still take time.

In the meantime, what wrestling needs is better storytelling. The soft core porn is nice, but it takes too much away from the plotlines, as does the continued efforts to force untalented actors into comic bits. To Jose the salvation of wrestling will be satire of "traditional sports." This hasn’t worked in the past (see The Goon and MVP), but it just might now. In this spirit, Jose offers three humble plotlines to save wrestling.

1. The WCS (Wrestling Championship Series)

One of the most persistent complaints in all of the sports world is that college football lacks a playoff system that determines a national champion. Instead, its champion is determined by the icy calculations of a super computer. In college football, this is a joke, but in wrestling it would be a funny joke.

Imagine a face, let’s say the Rock (Note: Yes, Jose knows he’s only part time now, but he’s the best example) defeats a heel like Triple H for the World Championship at a pay-per-view. Then, on Monday Night RAW the next night, Vince McMahon comes out and announces that the championship system is primitive and unfair. Instead, the championship will now be determined by a system of highly technical computer rankings called the Wrestling Championship Series (WCS), based on the next month’s wrestling. Over the course of the next month, The Rock wins grueling match after grueling match against top flight opponents: Chris Benoit, Randy Orton, Eddie Guerrero, but loses by disqualification to one of Triple H’s lackeys, say Batista. In the meantime, Triple H destroys a series of prelims, Jamie Noble, Rosy, etc. in minutes. At the next pay-per-view, the Rock barely beats Olympic gold medalist Kurt Angle, while Triple H crushes the Brooklyn Brawler.

On the next RAW, Vince McMahon comes out and announces that according to the WCS the new champion is Triple H. The Rock protests and a match is made for that evening. The Rock beats Triple H and goes to grab the belt…but what’s that? It’s Mr. McMahon’s music. McMahon announces that yes, the Rock may have won the match, but according to the WCS, he is still not the champion. According to the computer, Batista, who beat the Rock earlier in the month, is the new champion.

This series of screw jobs would proceed for months until the Rock and Triple H met in a hardcore match wherein they would fight their way into the room containing the WCS computer and destroy it. With nothing but match outcomes to go by, Vince McMahon would be forced to return the title to the Rock.

2. Steroid Controversy

Because wrestling is so clearly steroid riddled, this would be risky but really funny. McMahon would introduce a strict new drug test policy and then use it to ban face after face. This would yield countless skits of wrestlers talking about peeing in the cup and ultimately lead to Mr. McMahon having urine thrown at him by angry wrestlers. What’s not to like. You know, if you’re a freak.

3. Football player goes to wrestling

Plenty of pro football players have become wrestlers in the past, Bill Goldberg (Note: Not the World’s Most Perfectly Sculpted Jew) most notably in recent years, but never quite like this. With Brock Lesnar leaving wrestling to try to make it in the NFL (and failing), the WWF should recruit a poor, desperate, washed up football star and chart his effort to make it in the WWF. Basically, he would just get his ass kicked constantly, and talk about how much easier football was. In other words, make wrestling look good by tearing football down.

OK, Jose know the WCS is really the gem of these ideas, and clearly it is the most developed of them, but they could all spice up a wrestling industry that has lost the ability to gain viewers with scantily clad women, blood and "Suck it" crotch chops that one can see immediately following any Derek Lowe post season save.

I’m Jose Melendez, and those are my KEYS TO PROFESSIONAL WRESTLING.