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Quoth The Raven: Pro Wrestling
Raven on Pro Wrestling and how ECW changed while he was gone
By Al Isaacs
Raven: "I think what I do is ballet. I think it's every bit an artform as ballet. I think anybody with a brain if they studied it, if they gave it a chance, they would realize that what we do it's an artform, it's a dance between two people. You know, boxing is called the sweet science, this is much more of a science because this is a psychological drama between good and evil and the shadings in between. What we do is we do our own stunts, we do our own acting, we make up our own lines, we don't rehearse, all we do is about 15 to 20 minutes of verbal choreography ahead of time. Can you imagine if a ballet just said 'Hey listen, I'll do a pirouette here and you do that and I'll do this and you do this?" They'd be laughed off of the stage. We do that every night and we do it on live TV. Plus, we travel year-round, we don't have an off-season like any other sport. This is every bit an artform as anything else. I always thought it was funny that I have a 143 I.Q. and yet I have no discernible skill that would ... you know usually people of a high I.Q. would have, or a musical prodigy, or an art or painting or whatever, or some sort of artform in that capacity, and I've never had that, and my roomate kids me, he goes "If you took all the geniuses in the world, you'd be the dumbest guy, you know, I'd be the dumbest guy of all the most brilliant people in the world, which, you know, I have no problem with that. But always, I thought, man where ... is this I.Q. manifest itself? What I've found is in the artform of wrestling. To get people to come to the matches, you have to tell a story you know, and build on it, and build on it, you know, where people are so emotionally involved that they either want to see you get your ass kicked or see you triumphant victoriously. And to do that, and to maintain that ... you'd be shocked how hard it is. It's like writing a good book. I mean anyone can have a good idea, but to bring it to fruition, to tell the story, to keep it spellbinding from start to finish, is a competition that most can't do and very few succeed on and very few are successful at because it's very hard to do. It's not easy. In wrestling, there is no off season.
Isaacs: "I know how we've dealt with it on Scoops, and how our readers have reacted, what do you say to the critics who say [wrestling] is fake?"
Raven: "It is fake, the outcome is predetermined. I think anybody that ... uh ... it shortchanges it by saying that it's fake ... [and that anybody who says it's fake] is just showing themselves to be ignorant, you know, because they haven't looked at the product. Yeah, the outcome is predetermined, but so in the movies the outcome is predetermined, so is in a book, so is in a ballet, you know. We don't claim to be a sport, we claim to be sports entertainment. You know, umm ... you can't just be pure entertainment and we are an artform, because there is athleticism involved. Athleticism of the highest caliber. I mean, some of the stuff the guys can do, you know, is absolutely spellbinding, you know what I mean. So it's sports entertainment, and when you hit each other, we're not hitting each other 100%. In this day and age, you gotta hit each other to a certain extent, there has to be a certain amount of contact, because otherwise it looks fake. And if it looks fake, it draws you out of the suspension of disbelief. It's like watching a movie about gladiators and one guy is wearing a Rolex. You know, if he has a Rolex, he can't be Ben Hur or anything, and so, if you throw a punch and you miss or it looks really bad, you're like "Ohh, you messed up." And it takes you off the edge of your seat and puts you in a "Oh, it's just wrestling." Or they've ruined your moment for you, you understand. And so you have to make stuff believable and so it's much more rugged that it ever was because every year people are expecting more. As you improve they expect The Bell Curve or the bellhop."
Isaacs: "One more question real quick, I guess, since returning to ECW, what big differences have you seen in the ECW locker room since you've been gone, now that you've returned?"
Raven: "There's a lot more guys that ... they're a bunch of people that ... This is what I've focused on is taking the young guys and turning them into stars and part of that is ... is making them characters. A lot of the guys just look like Joe Schmoe off the street, you know what I mean. Steve Corino is a great example, he had long hair and was a real good talker but had no build, no tan, no nothing and didn't look a star. He's a hell of a talker, but didn't look like a star. So I made him go to the gym, put on 15 pounds, and made him get a tan, you know this is a cosmetic business, and made him bleach his long hair white, and grow out his face hair which is actually hadn't ever grown in 'cuz it was sparse ..."
Isaacs: Uh-huh
Raven: "But it came in black. So he's got this white hair now with a black beard type thing and he's tanned and he's got a much better build, and you see him in a bar now and you're like, "I bet that guy's a somebody," and he looks like a star and thats the thing that ... when I was here the last time there was a lot of guys that were stars ... there were a lot more guys that were stars and very few nobodies. Now there's a hell of a lot of nobodies and I've taken it upon myself to make them into stars. That would be my main preoccupation right now is to take all these guys and make them into stars because if they become stars, cuz they all have talent otherwise they wouldn't be starting on the starting roster. And so they all got the talent, but you can have all of the talent in the world but if you don't look like a star, people don't care."
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