Mark Henry fooled me

19th June 2013 by Scott Keith
Rants
I'm one of those WWE fans who starts hitting the DVR fast-forward as soon one guy is thrown from the ring and Michael's Cole's voice hits that certain inflection. In other words, it's really difficult to surprise or fool me because I understand the WWE formula. But last night, Mark Henry pulled it off.

Naturally, anytime WWE.com is promoting someone's "real" tweets, you have to be suspicious. But Henry retiring "for real" seemed like a possibility.

In retrospect, I should have seen it coming when John Cena was hanging around for too long. But give Henry all the credit in the world for selling that promo. HE WAS CRYING! The emotion seemed so real, I suspect Henry really is getting close to the end, and he was doing a promo from the heart. Either way, Henry cut what was, to me, the best WWE promo since "the pipe bomb". The whole time, I was thinking, "Man, Mark Henry used to suck, but I'm happy he had a great run at the end of his career, and this is a fitting sendoff." Then, "NO WAY!" Hook. Line. Sinker.

And what made it all the more interesting, was it seemed like the culmination of David Shoemaker's (aka The Masked Man) idea of The Reality Era in WWE. Twitter is ostensibly a "real" medium, one that exists outside the confines of WWE story lines. Sometimes this is true and sometimes, obviously, it isn't. Big E Langston's jokes on Twitter are clearly his, because WWE writers aren't that funny. Having the curtain pulled back slightly, via Twitter, shows us the "real" Big E. Or least the one he wants us to see. And at the same time, this intimacy and sometimes false sense of reality lures even the most jaded fans (like me) back into kayfabe. The con man must first earn his mark's trust.

Henry exploited a real situation (his on-going injuries and retirement talk) via a sometimes real/sometimes kayfabe medium (Twitter) and injected it into the WWE realm. And it was all executed brilliantly.

Now, this isn't the first time a WWE wrestler has trolled Twitter users for story-line purposes (Y2J's return comes to mind), but my question is, do you think this is a viable strategy? In other words, 99% of the time, have your wrestlers use social media, radio appearances, etc., to "pull back the curtain" and let people see "the real" Daniel Bryan? And then, 1% of the time, you pull something over on the fans using "real" media? As a fan, if that's what it takes to genuinely surprise me, I'm totally fine with it.

Your thoughts on this method? And did you love the promo as much as I did?

It was an awesome segment. It made me giddy with delight, so that's something special. I was watching it thinking "This is a really touching farewell promo, and the only thing that would make it better is if Henry's character gets tired of Cena's condescending support and turns on the motherfucker." And then HE DID. It was just perfectly timed and incredibly well executed.
As for the social media thing, I'm probably one of the least social media people on the interwebs and I still have no idea what the endgame of the whole Twitter/Facebook…thing…is, and I don't really know how to use them outside of bitching on Facebook and mirroring stuff on Twitter. I don't really follow anyone on Twitter outside of a few people, in the sense that I check Twitter maybe once a week and I have an app on my phone that tells me when someone directs a question to me there. So I'm clearly not the guy to give you a good answer on whether what they're doing is good/bad/indifferent/whatever, sorry.