“Surprise, Surprise”

The Internet Wrestling Community is one of the rare groups of online fan bases that have adapted an almost uniform "damned if you do, damned if you don’t" opinion of the product it watches. With any kind of publicly displayed entertainment based product comes the opinions of its most loyal fans that will waver from "I hate it" to "I love it." That’s granted, and clearly comes as no surprise to anyone. But the Internet Wrestling Community seems to be its own unique form of beast, with opinions boasting damnation whether any given promotion makes a left or a right.

So is the current case with Ric Flair in WWE. I’ve been reading many online opinions concerning the way Flair is being booked on Raw right now, and have been sent many emailed opinions from WZ readers and the consensus is that most are unhappy with how his current angle is playing out.

"Surprise, Surprise." -Gomer Pile

There is also a certain sect of the IWC that prides itself on being a conspiracy theorist, and every move made by every promotion is secretly being done to bury the talent or it’s a result of some kind of backstage political power move. Certainly talent cannot be booked a certain way simply because the creative team thinks the angle is good, right? No way, that would be too easy.

I purposely made little to no comment on the Ric Flair booking this past Monday night during my Raw review, because I wanted to save my comments on it for this week’s column, and I feel, realistically, that anyway the company were to book Flair right now would draw heat from most IWC fans.

Instead of looking at how The Nature Boy is being booked, let’s first take a look at how he’s not being booked. Monday night’s "calling out of Orton" segment could have gone in a much different direction than it did. Orton could have answered Flair’s challenge, come out to the ring, and proceeded to get a beat down from the 60 year old veteran. Good thing he didn’t or my Inbox would have been flooded with emails complaining that a retired Hall of Famer just beat up WWE"s much younger Champion. The argument would have furthered that WWE is making a mistake by booking guys like Flair to look better than younger talent and thus are making the same mistakes WCW did during its downfall and persistent booking of the old over the new.

Instead, to my shock, (which I suppose is contradictory to what I wrote in the onset of this column since nothing should shock me from the IWC at this point) the overwhelming majority of opinions I’ve read have suggested that WWE is in the wrong for booking Flair as the apparent underdog in this situation.