We talked about Samoa Joe’s MMA style match with Kurt Angle at Sunday’s TNA pro wrestling PPV earlier this week. In the same conference call he had some thoughts on MMA and its potential impact on pro wrestling:

Many of the media involved in the call asked Joe about mixed martial arts and its influence on professional wrestling, an influence that Joe says while not evident now will definitely have an impact over time.

“That is a very complicated question that I have put a lot of thought into it. I think over time it will have a tremendous shaping effect on all aspects of combat sport, not just pro wrestling. It is a mixed bag. I think soon MMA will eclipse boxing and a lot of other sports and be the dominant combat sport in the world.

Actually, even if you factor out the influence of Japanese pro wrestling on the very existence of the sport you’re starting to see some MMA inspired changes. Historically, pro wrestling promoters here in the US considered losing by submission as a sign of weakness. A popular ‘gimmick match’ was the “I Quit” match–the premise was that the match would continue until one wrestler verbally said “I quit”. Often a microphone was hung inside the ring to better facilitate the process–and, of course, it *never* ended up being used as a weapon.

In MMA a submission–while clearly not the ‘best case scenario’ for a fighter–isn’t a sign of weakness or ‘bein yella’. The once humiliating “I quit” has evolved into the less humiliating ‘verbal tapout’. The concept of the tapout itself is also now very common in pro wrestling.

Additionally, many wrestlers are using MMA inspired moves as submission holds. You won’t find a bigger star in pro wrestling than The Undertaker and he now uses the gogoplata as his finisher. Despite this, in a typical Vince McMahon fit of dubious logic WWE announcers aren’t permitted to *refer* to the hold as a gogoplata. This makes the WWE announcers look like clueless dweebs since they have to act as if the hold doesn’t have a name (and why they haven’t come up with some ‘in character’ name like the ‘Choke from the Crypt’ is beyond me. BTW, Vince, if you *do* end up using ‘Choke from the Crypt’ I expect you to cut me a check.). Since the WWE has done a good job over the past few years of alienating any post pubescent fans it might not be a problem, but assuming that any adults still watch the WWE having your announcers not know about a hold that most MMA fans would recognize immediately makes them look, well, pitifully stupid.

Then again, back during the ‘Hulkamania’ era of the WWE’s national expansion the announcers weren’t permitted to refer to the previous experience of a debuting wrestler who’d jumped from the NWA or AWA. Sometimes this wasn’t a big problem–back when Vince Sr. was running the company promoters from other territories would ‘trade talent’ with New York and vice versa. That meant that even stars closely identified with NWA territories had appeared in the WWE (then the WWF and before that the WWWF) at some point. The opposite was also true, as this video clip of then WWWF champion Bob Backlund wrestling on Georgia Championship Wrestling demonstrates:

This was done as a promo for a Backlund v. Flair match at the Omni in Atlanta pitting the NWA title vs. the WWWF title. Just the fact that such an arrangement existed is about all of the evidence you need that this was a different era.

Anyway, if the “Hulkamania” era announcers were lucky a debuting wrestler had a prior run in the WWE so they could talk about that. If not, however, they had to pretend like they’d never seen him before. IIRC, Ricky Steamboat was one such wrestler. Even worse was when an “unfamiliar” wrestler came in with a lame gimmick–as a result, WWE announcers had to pretend that they’d never seen Terry Taylor before (who was straight off a run with the widely syndicated UWF promotion run by Bill Watts) and that he presumably really *did* think he was a “Red Rooster”. Maybe the most egregious example of this was the “lovable” Aussie tag team “The Bushwhackers”. They were basically a gimmick “comedy” tag team in the WWF, which required the announcers to completely ignore their entire career to date–since anyone with a room temperature level IQ who’d watched cable TV or read a wrestling magazine knew them as the bloodthirsty and vicious “Kiwi Sheepherders”. In this promo clip from the Puerto Rican WWC promotion you can see lovable “Butch and Luke” break a guys hand using a folding chair and the Kiwi flag and other acts of poor sportsmanship:

But I digress….this was originally a post about MMA and pro wrestling. Sorry about this tangent. It’s a sign of intelligence. Or else its a sign of undermedication, one or the other…

Other pro wrestlers are also using MMA style finishers–Samoa Joe (remember him from the beginning of this post?) uses a rear naked choke. Kurt Angle has used the ankle lock for years, as did Ken Shamrock during his pro wrestling days. Arguably the best technical wrestler in the world, Bryan Danielson uses MMA style elbow strikes as one of his gazillion finishers. Danielson also has the best name for a finishing hold in the sport for another submission move called the “Cattle Mutilation”. Fast forward to the 2:00 mark to see the MMA elbows:

Pro wrestling is a business driven by imitation–if Samoa Joe and Kurt Angle’s “MMA style” match goes over well you could see a more “realistic” product from both TNA and possibly the WWE.

Samoa Joe Q&A at Slam! Sports