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The problem with guys that look like marks being pushed as world-beaters is that it exposes how fake it is, for one, but also that a smaller guy needs to be better than a bigger guy to get that heat over him. Owens reportedly wanted The Undertaker match. I'm not the biggest Taker fan in the world, but let's assume he was a total pro he wanted to do business -- for him to get beaten down by Owens, he's going to need to concede that a dude half his age but looks twice as bad is better pound-for-pound than he is. That's the only way it makes sense. Dean Ambrose had a bit of a whinge about Brock not wanting to do work with him, but when the dude is built like a retired swimmer, why would Brock want to give him anything?
Wrestling is a work, but a lot of people forget that you're trying to convince people that it is real. I fell into the trap of thinking ironic wrestling could work a few years ago. My thinking was that you can't point out how ridiculously fake it is if it's obviously ridiculously fake, but that's like making a bad movie on purpose so that no one can tell you how bad it is. Give it a real shot and try and make some real money. But no one wants to concede that we can't all be The Rock, Stone Cold Steve Austin, Shawn Michaels, The Undertaker, Hulk Hogan, Andre the Giant, "Rowdy" Roddy Piper, Jerry "The King" Lawler or Terry Funk. Now the mentality is that if you start young, go to the gym every day, bust your ass and don't do drugs -- you too can be a WWE Superstar. But everyone forgets that those guys are Superstars because they are so far removed from your average person is.
That's why a dude like Goldberg, at 50 -- and a performer not known for his versatility -- can walk into a WWE ring in 2016 and legitimately look cooler than everybody else in the world. Because he's actually a) a real man, and b) charismatic as fuck. To clarify a) -- I'm all for social and cultural progression -- I want to work with a bunch of cool dudes that aren't going to make me afraid to be a human around them. I don't necessarily want to see that in professional wrestling though -- which is a testosterone-fueled shit-show. Wrestling is where I want to see my freaks and antiquated cowboys.
Charisma makes the wrestling business work -- you have to be able to lure people into the aura of whatever it is you are doing. Charisma =/= promo ability or ring skill. Charisma can be visual too. People don't seem to get that. There are physical presences that own space. It's not just because they are big. It can be how they stand, what they convey with their face, how they walk, what gears you can and can't see turning in their head when they are out there.
Wrestling is filled with a bunch of normies. If The Rock came back and had heat with Kevin Owens, for example -- Owens can be as articulate or as cool to indy geeks as he wants to be, if The Rock says "Go take a shower, fat boy" it's over. Owens cannot say ANYTHING back to The Rock. "Go back to Hollywood, Dwayne" will be met with "Go back to Best Buy, Kevin."
There are no genuine stars full-time on the roster. You could maybe count John Cena or Randy Orton, but I don't even know if you consider them full-time now. They're going to be that next generation of Rock, Taker, Brock, etc. who just come back when they realize they need someone that going to make people remember when wrestling was good.
Destor is 100% correct when he says part of the booking is that you have guys with no physical charisma being placed into situations where the proposition is "trust us." No, you're supposed to make me a believer in this guy before you put a fake red belt on him and tell me that he's supposedly ruthless. There might be an everyman self-made bad-ass charisma in Owens somewhere. Maybe he could be that one guy on the roster who was told "you don't look the part" so he went, became nasty, trained his ass off, can do things no one else can do, and even managed to find love and start a family while he was at it -- maybe people could see Owens as the aesthetically bland sort of dude fighting to make his kids proud. Booking could bring that out of him. What you can't do is tell me that I'm afraid of him, because I'm not.
The chess player is a problem, but you have a board full of pawns at the moment, and very few people have the attitude to be a star. Goldberg has that attitude and has outshone absolutely everybody. Shove your funny promos and your 20-minute television "classics" -- give me Goldberg Spearing the shit out of Brock Lesnar and looking like a mega-star while he's doing it.
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