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Post by RowdyRobbyPiper on Apr 25, 2015 14:22:12 GMT -5
I am on a facebook group called Professional Wrestling Historical Society. A discussion about the tag rope led one of my fellow members to make this observation.
"in my opinion Lucha Libre is the main cause for the downfall of tag team wrestling in America. When they were given mainstream exposure on WCW Monday Nitro, Wow first being entertaining because it was something new, all of that flippity floppity around switching in and out without tagging soon found its way into the American Tag Team style. The rope is just one aspect of how our style has changed. We now regularly see blind tags or even tags made through the ropes or while standing on the ropes to get additional leverage. All of this takes away from the suspense of a story and takes away those unique factors that may tag team different from standard one on one matches."
I am not sure I buy that. I blame promoters who hate or are ambivalent toward tag wrestling than the rise of Lucha Libre. But, what do you guys think?
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thecrusherwi
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Post by thecrusherwi on Apr 25, 2015 14:51:28 GMT -5
I think it has more to do with the most talented guys not wanting to be stuck in tag teams when they can be a singles attraction that takes all the money themselves.
It certainly isn't Lucha Libre's fault. By the time they were having the weekly no-tag tag matches on Nitro, the WWF tag division was down to 3 terrible teams (and in 1997, the titles were mostly held by mid-card singles wrestlers paired together) and WCW's tag title scene had been on it's death bed for a long time. Sting & Luger had a long reign in 1996. Hall and Nash of course had a ton of long reigns where they wouldn't even bother to carry the belts around. By 1997, their challengers were either the Steiners or a pairing of major singles stars like Luger & The Giant or Flair & Piper. US tag wrestling was on life support LONG before the Lucha guys became mainstream.
If anyone is to blame for the death of tag wrestling, it's Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels. They made every promoter, and probably tag team wrestler, think that you could just split up a team and you'd have a new main eventer. They have proven to be the exception to that rule. Almost no former tag team wrestler in the 20+ years since then has been as successful post-breakup as these two.
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Post by RowdyRobbyPiper on Apr 25, 2015 15:14:57 GMT -5
I think it has more to do with the most talented guys not wanting to be stuck in tag teams when they can be a singles attraction that takes all the money themselves. It certainly isn't Lucha Libre's fault. By the time they were having the weekly no-tag tag matches on Nitro, the WWF tag division was down to 3 terrible teams (and in 1997, the titles were mostly held by mid-card singles wrestlers paired together) and WCW's tag title scene had been on it's death bed for a long time. Sting & Luger had a long reign in 1996. Hall and Nash of course had a ton of long reigns where they wouldn't even bother to carry the belts around. By 1997, their challengers were either the Steiners or a pairing of major singles stars like Luger & The Giant or Flair & Piper. US tag wrestling was on life support LONG before the Lucha guys became mainstream. If anyone is to blame for the death of tag wrestling, it's Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels. They made every promoter, and probably tag team wrestler, think that you could just split up a team and you'd have a new main eventer. They have proven to be the exception to that rule. Almost no former tag team wrestler in the 20+ years since then has been as successful post-breakup as these two. I might add Booker T or Edge to that list, but otherwise, that is a good point. |
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Post by 2coldMack is even more baffled on Apr 25, 2015 15:36:16 GMT -5
The Rockers killed tag team wrestling. Bluntly, when Shawn turned on Marty and got SUPER over, it turned into a situation now where every tag team is just waiting to turn on each other.
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Post by mcmahonfan85 on Apr 25, 2015 16:08:13 GMT -5
Tag team wrestling isn't dead, its just on life support in WWE, which is due to the McMahons. I've heard multiple shoot interviews from people who worked there who've all said the reason tag teams are pushed more is be Vince doesn't like them. Back wheat Shane still worked there he was quoted as saying he hasn't cared for a tag team since Demolition.
elsewhere in the wide world of pro wrestling tag team wrestling still exists.
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Post by CATCH_US IS the Conversation on Apr 25, 2015 17:32:12 GMT -5
The Briscoes are proof that you don't have to kill a team to push one of them to the top.
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Post by RowdyRobbyPiper on Apr 25, 2015 17:37:48 GMT -5
Tag team wrestling isn't dead, its just on life support in WWE, which is due to the McMahons. I've heard multiple shoot interviews from people who worked there who've all said the reason tag teams are pushed more is be Vince doesn't like them. Back wheat Shane still worked there he was quoted as saying he hasn't cared for a tag team since Demolition. elsewhere in the wide world of pro wrestling tag team wrestling still exists. B And yet when he finally got the Road Warriors, he proceeded to destroy Demolition. Thanks, Vince. |
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Post by RedSmile on Apr 25, 2015 18:19:13 GMT -5
I think that there are several things that have contributed to the downfall of tag team wrestling.
I think a big culprit, that hasn't been mentioned, is the trend during the Attitude Era where top faces like Steve Austin, with his don't trust anybody character, would regularly compete against tag teams and even come out victorious. This became a character trait for other top faces of the modern era like John Cena and HHH. I distinctly recall a face HHH laying out fellow faces London and Kendrick one fateful RAW. This was the same London and Kendrick who just had a pretty lengthy and celebrated run as tag team champions. Not even Hogan did this sort of thing. There is no way that Hogan could single-handedly defeat Demolition or the Road Warriors. It is this sort of booking that bury tag teams as a whole, because it isn't like London and Kendrick did anything to HHH in retaliation. Not a damn thing. In my view, that's unacceptable.
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Post by evenbroddt on Apr 25, 2015 20:12:59 GMT -5
I think it has more to do with the most talented guys not wanting to be stuck in tag teams when they can be a singles attraction that takes all the money themselves. It certainly isn't Lucha Libre's fault. By the time they were having the weekly no-tag tag matches on Nitro, the WWF tag division was down to 3 terrible teams (and in 1997, the titles were mostly held by mid-card singles wrestlers paired together) and WCW's tag title scene had been on it's death bed for a long time. Sting & Luger had a long reign in 1996. Hall and Nash of course had a ton of long reigns where they wouldn't even bother to carry the belts around. By 1997, their challengers were either the Steiners or a pairing of major singles stars like Luger & The Giant or Flair & Piper. US tag wrestling was on life support LONG before the Lucha guys became mainstream. If anyone is to blame for the death of tag wrestling, it's Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels. They made every promoter, and probably tag team wrestler, think that you could just split up a team and you'd have a new main eventer. They have proven to be the exception to that rule. Almost no former tag team wrestler in the 20+ years since then has been as successful post-breakup as these two. I might add Booker T or Edge to that list, but otherwise, that is a good point. I'd add Jeff Hardy to that as well |
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Post by Deleted on Apr 26, 2015 10:30:51 GMT -5
I'd like to add when ECW brought to the forefront tag matches where it's basically two pairs of guys walking around the entire arena, throwing the occasional punch, chair-shot or cup of beer, and the referee loses his 10-count after 3 and starts all over again. The match starts in the aisle and they might eventually finish it in the ring, if they're not up in the upper landing being put through a table.
Not entirely the reason tag wrestling fell hard, but it accelerated the downfall. You start removing some of the rules - aka "heat magnets" - then it's eventually just a street fight with no rules save for a pin or submission finish.
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Post by willywonka666 on Apr 26, 2015 10:45:49 GMT -5
The Rockers killed tag team wrestling. Bluntly, when Shawn turned on Marty and got SUPER over, it turned into a situation now where every tag team is just waiting to turn on each other. I agree with this theory. After that, as far as Vince was concerned anyway, tag teams were a starting point for wrestlers in some cases, and one would go on to bigger things, and the other would flounder. Bret Hart and Jim Neidhart wrestling outside of the team kinda predates that. it was kinda like the members of Genesis recording solo albums while they were still a group. When Vince started trying to break up teams that were together for years and obviously strictly a tag team (The Road Warriors) that's when it got out of hand. Then they started slapping established stars together like Kane & X-pac. So, yea, tag team wrestling will never go away, but it's not what it used to be. |
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Post by somsta on Apr 26, 2015 13:27:09 GMT -5
Another factor to consider is when television became more important than house shows. Back in the day the Road Warriors or the Midnights/R&Rs could main event in one town while Flair was in another and both would draw.
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Post by MC Blowfish on Apr 28, 2015 15:41:40 GMT -5
I know I've seen plenty of people say that the WWE just throws single wrestlers together and gives them the titles like this is something new. You can easily go back to the old WWWF days, AWA, and other promotions who did the same thing.
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Post by "Gizzark" Mike Wronglevenay on Apr 28, 2015 16:01:57 GMT -5
No. That is like saying the flippy floppy indie guys kill spectacle wrestling a la Hogan/Warrior.
The greatest wrestlers do more with less, or at least they CAN. If your tag teams are being ruined by cruiserweights having good matches, then the fans don't give a shit about your wrestlers.
As Mick Foley once said, The Undertaker got a bigger reaction jumping over the top rope twice a year than Taka Michinoku gets doing a twisting sakahura every night.
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Post by Saul Goodman on Apr 28, 2015 16:43:27 GMT -5
I had been watching wrestling for over 20 years, I never knew that it is illegal to tag a partner through the ropes.
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Post by flowercity on Apr 28, 2015 23:02:38 GMT -5
I had been watching wrestling for over 20 years, I never knew that it is illegal to tag a partner through the ropes. Bobby Heenan would get on teams if they did that while he was on commentary. Granted, in his WWF run, the tag division still followed rules like this and the tag rope, closely. I never knew it existed until recently either. Not until I started watching Nitro from the beginning did I know it was a rule. Those mid 90s WCW tag matches were sloppy. Really hard to sit through in 2015. |
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Post by Joe Neglia on Apr 29, 2015 20:37:02 GMT -5
I think it has more to do with the most talented guys not wanting to be stuck in tag teams when they can be a singles attraction that takes all the money themselves. It certainly isn't Lucha Libre's fault. By the time they were having the weekly no-tag tag matches on Nitro, the WWF tag division was down to 3 terrible teams (and in 1997, the titles were mostly held by mid-card singles wrestlers paired together) and WCW's tag title scene had been on it's death bed for a long time. Sting & Luger had a long reign in 1996. Hall and Nash of course had a ton of long reigns where they wouldn't even bother to carry the belts around. By 1997, their challengers were either the Steiners or a pairing of major singles stars like Luger & The Giant or Flair & Piper. US tag wrestling was on life support LONG before the Lucha guys became mainstream. If anyone is to blame for the death of tag wrestling, it's Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels. They made every promoter, and probably tag team wrestler, think that you could just split up a team and you'd have a new main eventer. They have proven to be the exception to that rule. Almost no former tag team wrestler in the 20+ years since then has been as successful post-breakup as these two. That becoming a faulty trope is definitely a factor. A couple more factors would be Bischoff and Russo. Bischoff, even with Turner's pocketbook, has been said to have not like the idea of tag teams, and thus paying four guys instead of just two, and if they *did* have to do tag matches, why not just pair up some solo workers, since you're paying them already, in temporary makeshift teams. And Russo was a big follower of the Hart/Michaels trope theory, using teams as props for quick-turn storylines. Something else that I think is a factor is that all of the actual successful tropes of tag team wrestling, the little traditional quirks of it and its formula, just got...old. The hot tag. Ref missing the hot tag. Switching places in the confusion. Wrong guy pinning/getting pinned. Running in to stop a count. Heel double-team while the ref is trying to make face's partner get out of the ring. It's been done to death, and they never got around to finding a lot of ways to freshen the whole thing up. Another, what I consider major, factor in the decline of tag wrestling are factions/stables. Before the mid-90s, most promotions would often have a very few of them at a time, and even then, a lot of them (like the Heenan Family) rarely worked *as* a unit; they were simply individuals working for/with the same guy. The rise of stables as not only a common thing, but absolutely gluttonous (NWO, DX, Wolfpack, Hart Foundation, LWO, Horsemen, Corporation, Kai En Tai, Ministry, Dungeon, Oddities, NOD, etc., etc. all co-existing within the span of, what, a year and a half?). Tag teams were no longer special. They had been replaced by even bigger and larger "teams". And then we got promotion-sized "teams" with the Invasion, where pretty much every worker on the payroll became part of one of two factions. Going back to the temporary makeshift teams thing, that played itself out a bit too. The whole "can they work together" formula of forcing rivals (especially rival babyfaces) feels old hat now. |
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Post by Cranjis McBasketball on Apr 30, 2015 2:15:46 GMT -5
No one has really innovated tag team wrestling in years and years and years and E&C, the Hardyz and Dudeleyz don't count. They were tag teams, but they were no rules. Legal man became a thing of the past, tag ropes you had to hang onto were gone, no 5 seconds in and out of the ring, hell, all 4 guys would be the ring at once and the ref didn't care.
JR rants and raves about it, but there's no rules anymore, so you can't get heat. The old formula of back and forth, usually the more talented face of the two gets stuck in the ring, heels make illegal tags which the ref never notices, faces make a legal tag the refs never notice, more beatdown, hot tag, guy who just spent 7 hours getting beat on becomes Superman, finish is too tired. If you had 2 or 3 tag matches on the card, they all followed this formula.
Maybe we could have new formula, but as has been pointed out, Vince hates tag teams, so it's dead. People could innovate, but no one gets the time anymore.
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Post by A Platypus Rave on Apr 30, 2015 13:04:53 GMT -5
No one has really innovated tag team wrestling in years and years and years and E&C, the Hardyz and Dudeleyz don't count. They were tag teams, but they were no rules. Legal man became a thing of the past, tag ropes you had to hang onto were gone, no 5 seconds in and out of the ring, hell, all 4 guys would be the ring at once and the ref didn't care. It's not mentioned but the Tag ropes still exist and the partners do hold them during the matches. The ref does count to five at least for most matches to... until the match undoubtedly breaks down and the ref tries to regain control. Though again it's never mentioned... partially because the commentary is terrible. |
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Post by Deleted on May 1, 2015 8:23:09 GMT -5
This thread makes me miss the old Crockett Cup Tournaments. I loved the idea of all these tag teams from around the (NWA's) world facing off to see which ones (from JCP) were the best.
(Odd thing was, out of the three winners, only one actual concept team won the damn thing, and they beat a make-shift team that was a nice little story.)
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