Ahh the joy of being in a stadium. Filled with a rush, 
joined by thousands of fellow supporters,
spilling beer, dropping popcorn, horrible viewing,
shouting over eachoth-
It’s a mess.
I don’t know how people did it but it seems like so much 
work now,
looking back at it like it was a distant past.
There is however, one sporting event I cannot wait to push 
myself headfirst into.
That being, pro wrestling.
I mean, who wouldn’t want to be able to a live wrestling 
event and get to do this, 
and this
or this?
Being a part of a wrestling audience is an experience in and
 of itself, separate from,
dare I say, any other sport or an art form.
In that wrestling demands its audience to take active part.
To begin this essay, I’ll start by demonstrating a 
comparison.
Imagine you’re in Broadway, seated in a big theater with a 
single point of view, 
focused at the stage, where actors perform a choreographed 
and rehearsed story.
Now imagine the wall behind them disappears and a row of 
seats more or less same in numbers as your side are added.
Now both sides of the crowd begin actively cheering for the 
lead actor who is rightfully confused and distracted.
 The audience, including you, sense this and now start 
heckling the actors, sending the play’s director backstage 
into a fit
who is now frantically asking the writer to come up with 
something that will calm down this thunder of emotions
as the actors improvise over the notorious “What” chants!
Yeah, uhh..fun! Right?
In my previous video, I mentioned how the core of 
professional wrestling is laid in storytelling.
Stories that leave the fans feeling a lot of emotions in the
 same night
ranging from anger to sadness to disgust to delight.
It is because of this that fans become an integral part of 
wrestling.
Calling them integral might even be an understatement. I 
might as well go on to say fans
"make" wrestling!
They are actually active participants.
It’s a weird dynamic, fans and wrestling.
 Promotions will often conceive stories around the desired 
audience reaction.
And a lot of factors play towards that end. 
High-flying or flashy move-sets are cheered for and will be 
reserved for wrestlers that are perceived
to be the good guys, babyfaces.
While grounded or technical style is often used by the 
baddies, or the heels,
because they do not bring out excitement in a traditional 
sense and literally ground the enthusiasm of the audience.
When wrestling promotions like WWE tour all over America for
 their shows,
In cases like these, wrestlers read the room and cater to 
the audience
In cases like these, wrestlers read the room and cater to 
the audience
and might temporarily behave in ways that are 
uncharacteristic of them.
And, that is absurd when talking about sports.
You will never see someone like Virat Kohli play a defensive
 or an aggressive game
based on how the audience reacts. It is unnatural and it 
will never work.
But because pro wrestling is a universe of itself, it’s 
completely legit.
If there is a match that is a perfect example of what I 
mean,
a masterclass in showing what fans mean for wrestling it is 
this.
CM Punk vs John Cena at Money in the bank pay-per-view in 
2011.
The last time there was this much hype for a wrestling match
 in WWE,
it probably would have been Undertaker vs Shawn Michaels at 
Wrestlemania 26.
CM Punk was entering into this match, a legend.
After going unscripted on mic on an episode of Raw to put 
the company and its chairman on blast
in an event now famously known as the pipebomb,
Punk was set to seemingly fight his last match in the 
company for the company’s top title,
WWE championship, in front of his hometown crowd in Chicago.
The story was in place to stop him in any case, to leave the
 building with the title.
The stadium was filled with an energy long before Punk even 
made it to the ring.
The man tasked to stop him was the face of WWE and top-notch
 company man,
John Cena.
Poor John Cena!
No stranger to a rabid crowd, Cena adapted to his role.
He enters the arena with a belt on his waist and a company 
sized chip on his shoulder as failure to win
would lead to him being fired by Vince.
Because wr-wr-wrestling!
 The moment Cena’s music hit, the crowd roared boos at him.
On this night, being a Cena fan was blasphemy.
There were no usual excited jumps and crowd salutes by Cena 
who headed straight to the ring as Michael Cole put it,
“Cena is in enemy territory tonight”.
Both Cena and Punk knew their roles here. Punk tried to chop
 the big man down 
by targeting an already injured neck and knee
while Cena tossed Punk courtesy of his signature power.
It was a night where fans held the key to making a great 
match epic. And they did just that. 
Every move by Punk was met with thunderous cheers while 
every time Cena hit Punk with his finisher,
an air of fear was felt across the stadium.
The flow of the fan reaction started as a welcome to a 
people’s hero. 
Through the course of the match, the tension in the arena 
rose as
even Vince Mcmahon came out to ensure the right man doesn’t 
walk out as champion
in a tactic that called back to the infamous Montreal 
Screwjob of 1997
where a beloved hero was screwed out of a match in front of 
his hometown.
On top of it all, Cena could never be fired from the 
company. 
The guy was the face of its brand for better half of a 
decade. It was a dead giveaway of the only outcome this 
match could have.
It was the plan.
Punk was good, but WWE never saw him as a top guy
in the vain of The Rock or Stone Cold or John Cena.
Had the fans not blown up with support for Punk over the 
months,
the end probably would have been as expected.
Had they not, but they did.
The match became much more than just a title match. It 
became a testament
to the power the fans hold and what could happen if a 
company just listens to them.
Punk and Cena had more matches and arguably better ones than
 this one but none got the rave reviews that this one got,
even getting rated a perfect 5 star by renowned wrestling 
journalist, Dave Meltzer.  
The first WWE match to do so in over 14 years.
The next time WWE managed to capture lightning in a bottle 
was
during Daniel Bryan’s meteoric rise to the top in 2013,
who had to once again, go through,
you guessed it, top guy John Cena to even be in the 
company’s eyes.
Fans and Cena have had a pretty weird dynamic over the 
years. It is sad as only less than half of it seems to be 
Cena’s fault.
Sure, he has squandered young talent foolishly on occasion
and has remained stale as a Superman figure during a time 
pop culture was drastically taking a shift towards
the unconventional.
It is what made Naito’s rise to the top eminent as discussed
 in the previous video.
 But most of it can be a direct result of the company not 
listening to what fans wanted.
The biggest itch that everyone seemed to have with Cena 
still is the fact that even after all the backlash, 
he remains a babyface character.
That all it will take for fans to love him is if he started 
to show some edge,
some heelish characteristics.
We are sometimes unreasonable, yes.
One of his more disappointing campaigns occurred at 
Wrestlemania 30 
against the rising star, Bray Wyatt, a mystical cult 
leader-ish character who spent months trying to turn Cena 
into the hateful side.
This match, sadly became the antithesis of the Punk match in
 2011.
Not only were the fans built up to expect Cena to finally 
for the first in a decade turn heel,
but also, were excited to see a top star like Cena
put over an extremely charismatic young talent like Wyatt at
 the company’s biggest event.
Wyatt winning was the only logical thing to do. But WWE had 
other plans and when a company and the fans does not see eye
 to eye,
it often leads to situation where the company “books itself 
into a corner”.
Cena left shortly to pursue a career in Hollywood.
The damage was done. Bray Wyatt never felt like a big deal 
again.
Well, until
Since this video is about the relationship between fans and 
wrestling
I’ll fight myself to keep myself from talking about Bray 
Wyatt’s genius in a later video.
But anyway, the way he reinvented himself in the summer of 
2019 exceeded expectations and legit broke the wrestling 
world.
His dual personalities, one being a jovial kid-show host
 and the other,
his demon side locked within him, that he calls The Fiend 
left fans salivating for the character. 
His popularity became so unprecedented that it broke the 
traditional bounds of storytelling
when he fought for the top title, the Universal Championship
 against Seth Rollins in the now infamous match at Hell in a
 cell.
Arguably, when sitting through a movie or any performance,
we rarely ever root for the bad guy. Right?
 It’s only when the bad guy has a seemingly justified reason
 or a compelling redeemable arc
that we would ever support an antagonist.
Well when sympathetic babyface Seth Rollins overcame his 
fears and faced a literal devil man with magical powers
and red lighting,
wrestling fans decided there is no bigger chump than him. 
Instead cheering loudly for The Fiend
and heavily criticizing with audible disgust when he failed.
WWE had once again booked themselves in a corner
and once again screwed Bray Wyatt.
If you’ve been watching this video with the same emotion 
that I’m making this,
you’re probably wondering why people still bother with WWE.
 I think it is that aspect that makes being a wrestling fan 
special, in my opinion atleast.
Once, just passive viewers, wrestling fans broke through an 
invisible glass and from mere spectators, 
became a community, a goddamn universe.
And wrestling invited us in and gave us a special role at 
that.
To invest in the performers who dreamt of breaking their 
backs for a chance to get to tell us a story.
 Be it New Japan’s subtle crowd that would clap for their 
performers in encouragement,
or a rabid PWG audience that narrative the beats of a 
wrestling match in its intimate setting
or even WWE that has a legacy with which a lot of fans have 
grown
and excitedly passed on the knowledge to future generations.
Every kind of a crowd plays a specific role in making 
wrestling, in building the ethos of a wrestling company.
It is also bizarre to see what happens when such an integral
 nerve of pro wrestling is cut off
Earlier this year when the pandemic began, a lot of 
wrestling companies decided to shut down for the foreseeable
 future 
while bigger companies like WWE and AEW decided to stay on 
but with zero crowd.
While the move to stay open is debatable and rightly so 
criticized,
the changes that the programs forced upon themselves are 
different in essence.
What would you do if there are no fans to navigate through 
the beats of a match? 
What happens when there are no fans to even book yourself 
into a corner?
Well, in all sincerity,
you go unhinged.
Enter Cinematic matches.
Matches that are pre-recorded and heavily edited to make 
action look more like a cheesy movie, than a live event.
This year’s Wrestlemania was different in the way that it 
was the first ever Wrestlemania to be held without any fan 
attendance.
This year’s Wrestlemania was different in the way that it 
was the first ever Wrestlemania to be held without any fan 
attendance.
WWE to their credit, adapted.
My favorite thing about cinematic matches in WWE is that the
 company 
instead of giving us a full-blown action comedy, inserted a 
redeeming factor.
There was one match between Undertaker and AJ Styles which 
happened to let Taker,
a legend retire in a fashion more respectable and suited to 
him than this
The other cinematic match is WWE straight up apologizing.
The Firefly Funhouse match took place between The Fiend
and John Cena
inside Bray Wyatt’s mind palace. It is as mental as it 
sounds, trust me.
The entire match is a backtrack for all the times they did 
not listen to fans in the past.
Be it giving Cena a heel turn or an edge, or more 
importantly,
giving Bray Wyatt his long-awaited win over Cena at 
Wrestlemania, literally undoing the damage.
It's a sign that course-correction will always be a special 
and unique factor about wrestling.
Cena could have rode out into the sun. He has accomplished 
more than what wrestling probably offers.
But to come full-circle by giving the fans what they wanted 
all along became the best sign-off from a bonafide legend 
that we could ever ask for.
I have rambled long enough, but I am still not over how 
grateful I feel being
a part of such a community, where what I say, might even 
matter.
Wrestling is weird,
wrestling is over the top,
wrestling is drama,
wrestling is fun,
wrestling makes me cry.
Wrestling is bizarre.
This is the second act, signing off. I hope to see you again
 in future parts. 
