WWF In Trouble?

Check out this article. WWF may be out the door.

dailynews.yahoo.com/h/bpi...mat_1.html

Unlikely 8-) I've been watching wrestling for a long long time. I was watching Jesse in the AWA...lol I even remember when Bobby Heenan got his "weasel" nic. There were also the good ole days with Bulldog Bob Brown and the other "extreme"(in there day) wrestlers out of KC. Yep I was even watching when the WCW actually BECAME WCW. Long time watchers can recall the great amount of hype surrounding that.

I mention all of that because regardless of the organization there have indeed times when viewership and sales slip. That being said if history does indeed repeat itself then we should see the current industry rebound like never before.

Story lines grow stale, the viewer is no longer shocked, rivalries lose their luster. There's lots of reasons. One thing that they didn't mention was the "superstars" that are not currently participating. People like Triple H, Chris Benoit, Sting, Hulk Hogan(and several other WCW stars), as well as Chyna. Those are people that sell tickets, are keys to any storylines, and have a collectively huge impact on ratings.

Sure the WWF has seen losses but I wouldn't consider them to be in trouble....not by a long shot. J

I believe Wrestling comes and goes with the times. The other thing is that People are growing tired of it.

Comes and goes? It's been around a very long time. I also don't neccessarily agree that people are getting tired of it.

Storylines come and go. Eventually they are rehashed with different characters. It is the characters and the drama of it that keep people tuning in week after week.

Note also that despite the originating article in this thread that arenas are sold out week after week after week. The merchandise sales may have dropped off a bit but again that is something that they can fix.

Now some may agree with what I'm about to say and some may not....lol hey it's a free world and if we all agreed it would be a boring place.

Look at what has changed in just the past 20 yrs in the business. We now have more PPV events than ever before. The WWF in particular is holding nearly four times the number of PPV events that they did in the past. At anywhere from $30-$50 per pop that gets old.

The exploitation in marketing also gets old. We have wrestlers writing books and showing up on morning talk shows to promote them. It works though as they've ended up in the NYT Top 10 repeatedly. Still people tire of it.

They tire of music plugs, plugs for satellite, plugs for of all damned things BBQ sauce.

The WWF also hurts itself IMO by not allowing story lines to develop, by not gradually milking the drama as was seen in years past. It doesn't help that nowadays you can see what used to be PPV events with some commonality every Monday on Raw and Thursday on Smackdown.

A few months ago they held the last Nitro. They had a vintage match pitting Sting against Rick Flair. It was "old school" wrestling and not the flash and pomp that it is now. Seeing old Rick Flair begging for mercy in the corner knowing full well that he was trying to catch a break made me miss those days gone by. Maybe the WWF needs to return to some "old school" ways of doing things in order to rejuvinate itself. J