Unless you count Biker Taker, Mark Calaway spent most of his 30-year wrestling career never breaking character. However, a recent interview saw The Undertaker loosen his timeless gimmick and discussed the current trends in professional wrestling.
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The Deadman joined Pastor Ed Young as part of the latter’s “Wrastlin” series and opened up about in-ring psychology. To Taker, a successful career is about making a connection with the audience through story and character, not high octane moves.
“Wrestling and sports entertainment it’s not really about the moves. It’s about being able to evoke emotion in one facet or another. You have to either make them love you or hate you. It doesn’t matter really, some people like to be hated, and others like to be loved,” he said.
Taker elaborated that young wrestlers who opt for big spots will eventually run out of ideas and create riskier moves in order to appease the crowd.
“But if you can’t bring that emotion out of your audience, you’re not going to have them for long. A lot times what happens with the young guys is they’re so athletic they’re so gifted like they’ll do some back crazy backflip off the top rope land on somebody on the floor and that’s what the audience takes away from it: ‘This guy does crazy stuff,’” he said “Well, you can only see that so many times before you’re like: ‘mmhmm. I’ve seen that. I need to see something new.”
The shelf of a high-impact wrestler may be limited in a number of ways, but Undertaker believes that to last in WWE, you must be able to evoke emotion.
“So characters guys like The Rock, Cena, and Flair — all those guys like that you know. They had the ability to either make you love them or make you hate them,” he said.
The Undertaker went out of his way to highlight Cena as the perfect example of this, as was the first to consistently garner opposite but equal, reactions from the WWE Universe.
“Cena is such an anomaly because you don’t know one night to the next if they’re going to go ballistic and crazy for him or boo him out of the building. He is probably the most polarizing guy to come along in a long time because his fanbase is — it’s crazy. But what happens? He sells tickets. He works in front of full arenas, the same thing with The Rock but that’s the key. We tell stories. We use wrestling moves to tell the stories, but it boils down to the character and being able to bring that emotion out of your audience, you know?”
[H/T Ringside News]
