OO Column: The Obtuse Angle by Jeb Lund (Pro Wrestling News, Analysis, and Commentary... WWE, WWF, WCW, ECW, The Rock, Brock Lesnar, Triple H, Rob Van Dam, Hulk Hogan, Undertaker, Trish Stratus, Lita, Stacy Keibler, Divas, RAW, SmackDown, WrestleMania, S

THE OBTUSE ANGLE
The Salesfan, Part One:
The Indie Evangelist
August 4, 2005

by Jeb Tennyson Lund
OnlineOnslaught.com/CitizenScholar.net

There are lots of wrestling ads on wrestling TV. Just taking WWE as an example, there's the Boot of the Week, the Slam of the Night and the Bort of the Month. Voice-overs encourage us to see 10 different upcoming live shows. "Moments Ago" moments have less to do with updating those who just tuned in and more to do with trying to persuade us that what we just saw actually mattered. Don't forget WWE ShopZone, or announcers babbling in an endless loop about how what's going on is electrifying.
Compared to TV, the internet isn't so bad. In order to avoid WWE ads, pop-ups, banners or emails, I simply don't go to WWE.com or sign up for anything from it. You can avoid almost all wrestling advertising online, if you take a few basic precautions. There's really only one thing you can't avoid: people dressing up — knowingly or unknowingly, mostly of their own free will — as walking, talking,
writing, posting, PMing and emailing advertisements for promotions. Scant hours after the end of this year's Great American Bash, wrestling fans were rightly voicing their displeasure on message boards and websites. Amid the questions asking whether it was an insult to viewers, bad booking all around or the worst pay-per-view of the year came the proud voice of the advertiser, peddling something unrelated to the issue: "If you hated this pay-per-view so much, you should be watching TNA or Ring of Honor." Thus spoke the salesfan. Perhaps you have met this animal. WWE doesn't have many of these for the simple fact that WWE doesn't need them. Indies, however, need all the exposure they can get, and the salesfan takes it on himself to provide it. He talks about his promotion or its wrestlers whether or not the topic at hand has anything to do with them. He sends columnists unsolicited columns and reviews. Sometimes he sends a poorly thought-out harangue: "You suck and you're a tool of the WWE. You're a dumb mark who doesn't know real wrestling. Print my column." Typically, his message-board avatar is a picture of someone you can't identify, and his signature file is usually a banner ad for ROH or TNA that has been hyperlinked to one of three things: • His latest article praising (or praising in the guise of "reviewing") a TNA or ROH show. • His archive of TNA- or ROH-related articles on a website (usually his own). • The results page for a message-board search for all threads started by him with the words TNA or ROH in the title. Because all roads, for this person, ultimately lead back to his favored promotion, he fails to grasp that comments on WWE wrestling do not necessarily have a single thing to do with another promotion. He doesn't understand that, if you hated "this pay-per-view," you hated this pay-per-view. This was not a cry for help on your part. You did not say that you would like this pay-per-view any better if you immediately spent money on tapes or shows from another company. At no point did you disclose or even imply that your frustration with this pay-per-view indicated that you gave a damn about another company. The indie salesfan doesn't realize this, because all his focus is on making the thinnest possible connection between your attitude or comments and whatever indie promotion he happens to be voluntarily shilling for. Discussion about whether Orlando Jordan is a poor U.S. Champ (he is) will provoke comments like, "He'll never be as good as Lubo McBungus. Lubo's starting a one-man revolution with ROH'S Fuckyweight Title." Orlando Jordan is about as captivating as a potato. But marginalizing him in comparison to some other potato who happens to do flippy-floppy shit for a promotion whose fans happily wolf down potato (simply because it works for that promotion) wastes everyone's time. Darling status in a small crowd is often non-transferable to huge crowds. WWE fans may occasionally buy t-shirts with logos on them, but they don't wear the promotion on their sleeves. Ultimately, that is the most important distinction. The salesfan esteems — or seems to esteem — much of his promotion's shows and workers not because they are innately good, but because they come from that promotion. Surely, the salesfan didn't start out that way. He probably loved the promotion because he loved its content. Over time, however, his attitude or his rhetoric about the promotion inverted the cause and effect. Originally, he loved it because he loved the shows and wrestlers he saw. Now he loves the shows or wrestlers because they come from that promotion. Even if this isn't exactly true, even if it's only the language the salesfan uses that creates this impression, it basically comes to the same thing for the outside observers. We have only the salesfan's words to go on. What those words usually show is a chronic misunderstanding about other people's fandom. Since he seems to love TNA or ROH's content simply because it comes from TNA or ROH, he paints WWE fans as people who love WWE content because it comes from WWE. That's nonsense, of course, but it informs a lot of message board arguments. "You hate what WWE is putting on, but you keep watching it, because it's WWE. You'd get the exact same stuff — only better!!! — somewhere else… like ROH!!!" At this point, I'm not even sure what I'm angrier about: that feedback portions of websites or threads on message boards I like get clogged with amateur huckstering for indie promotions I don't give a damn about… or that the huckstering is so often wrongheaded. I suppose it's a combination of the two. I loathe strangers trying to sell me things, but I doubly loathe it when they do it poorly. I don't appreciate being thought of as a brand slave. I didn't sit down one day and decide to become a fan of the WWF. I watched shows by the WWF, WCW and ECW. I settled on the WWF because I liked it. What appealed to me was the programming. I never had any focused intent other than, "I enjoy this." The salesfan's rhetoric and encouragement tends to bypass desire and enjoyment and go straight for intent. The idea seems to be that the average wrestling fan sits at home and asks himself, "What promotion do I intend to become a fan of?" Then the average fan sits and watches that promotion until he learns to like it. I prefer my way: watch a promotion until I learn that, hey, yeah, I guess I'm a fan of it. Like I said, I'm not a brand slave. I castigate WWE for every stupid and misbegotten storyline and wrestler. Sometimes I don't bother watching, because I'd rather do something else. WWE doesn't own me, but neither does an overarching desire for The Answer, The Solution to Wrestling. I believe that promotions, writers and wrestlers err. My acceptance that a percentage of wrestling content will be poor content is something generally not shared by the indie salesfan. To him, there is an apotheosis of great wrestling — some perfect formula of workrate and storyline — to which every promotion can aspire. To him, the goal of the fan is to find the promotion that best exemplifies that potential for ascension into wrestling perfection, buy stuff from that promotion, sell others on that promotion, and hopefully get enough fans for that promotion so it can have enough money to create a Ring of God on Earth. All you have to do is watch, buy, sell, buy, get more fans spending more money and make everything perfect. That WWE, with gobs of money, and TNA, with mid-range money, still manage to fuck up good and proper on a pretty regular schedule never seems to enter into the divine equation of Promotion I Like + Lots More Money = The Sublime Everafter. It's flawed reasoning, naturally. But it doesn't stop the salesfan from making his pitch. In fact, very little will. This is because the salesfan, by hoping to elevate or popularize a promotion, has invested himself in it. The lines of distinction between fan and product blur to the extent that prosperity for the promotion becomes prosperity for both. Successfully hounding another wrestling fan into watching TNA or ROH invests in the company and in the salesfan. In some rather repellent cases, this assumption is born of a two-fold hubris. The salesfan has bought into the niche product and enjoys the exclusive/sophisticated cachet of being someone who quaffs the niche product. He embraces the sense of superiority born of "exclusive taste." He forgets that Boone's Farm, Mad Dog 20/20 and RobitussinDM are all also exclusive tastes. To him, exclusive or marginal tastes are always elevated ones. A niche product, when beheld by its salesman, is perfect always. It can never err. If it did, how could he sell you on it? What is being sold is something non-mainstream, something that could be looked down upon by outsiders as not normal. Because of that, the niche product has to be flawless and exemplary. Why risk the masses' scorn for something of normal quality? You wouldn't. You'd be a fool to do so. Thus, in order to sell you on being a fan, the salesfan revels in the possible mainstream scorn. "Sure," he says, "people will look down on it, but that's because they won't understand it. Or because they're too afraid to confront how totally awesome and better it is." The second occasional hubristic aspect of the salesfan is more pernicious and more damning. It is this: if he sells his indie promotion better than anyone else, he will be the heroic trailblazer. Like any salesperson, this behavior is results-driven. Some wished-for results: • Scores of people want to know about this amazing promotion. Converts that the salesfan has won immediately refer new converts to him, making him the nexus of new fandom. In short: it's a pyramid scheme of liking a wrestling promotion. • Hundreds of people read the gospels of this new promotion, as written by the salesfan. He becomes the authority on that promotion for a message board (or multiple message boards), and gains internet wrestling fame. (Note: anyone who uses the term "internet wrestling fame" with a straight face should be backed away from slowly.) • People who run important wrestling websites notice the pioneering genius of the salesfan and make him a regular columnist, thus granting him internet wrestling fame. He was an expert columnist before anyone realized how dearly they needed experts. • The promotion, once successful, recognizes the stalwart efforts made by one salesfan in converting thousands. He is given a spot on the booking or marketing committee and charged with the job of making a perfect show even more perfect. Like I said, the niche snob and the fame-seeking indie salesfan are repellent examples, and they are by no means the majority. The salesfan is certainly aggravating at times. He's single-minded; it's impossible to argue anything WWE-oriented with him now and again; his banner-ad sig file is ugly and flashes too much, etc. But most indie salesfans are okay people. They have their hearts in the right place. That's usually what makes them so zealous to begin with. The thing to remember about the indie salesfan is that he's basically an evangelist. He wouldn't extol the virtues of the promotion if he didn't truly believe in it. He wouldn't ask you to invest your time and faith and devotion in this plucky little company if he hadn't already given all he could himself, and given it willingly. He believes: that's why he thinks you could too. The trouble with this well-meaning guy is that, like all evangelists, he has the potential to be a bad evangelist. The bad evangelist fails to remember that there are many varieties of religious/wrestling experience. He gets caught up in his own conversion tale ("WWE had forsaken me. I was lost. I found this new promotion. It gave me something to believe in. Now I'm reinvigorated when I watch wrestling. My heart is full") — so caught up in it that he forgets that not everyone will approach the promotion in the same way, and that some people will never be converted at all. Thus he goes about his day, his zeal making him a little tedious or obstreperous in message-board threads, reader responses or letters to the editor. Maybe he grates on nerves. But all he's really trying to do is "save" others. Even if they don't want to be saved, don't need the help or like what's being offered, it's still a nice gesture. That, in the end, sets the indie salesfan above and apart from his noxious, disingenuous and smug counterpart in internet wrestling sales.

E-MAIL JEB LUND
BROWSE JEB'S ARCHIVE

Part two of "The Salesfan" will be printed on OnlineOnslaught.com next week. Readers are encouraged to email Jeb and share stories of their enounters with the Indie Evangelist and with any other breed of Salesfan.

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