When did “dramatic wrestling” become so popular?
By Scott Keith on 10 April 2021
Hey Scott,
Long time blog reader and commenter, first time emailer.
In recent years, something that seems to becoming more and more popular is “dramatic wrestling”, by which I mean wrestling matches where wrestlers will really over-emote and act in the ring, cutting promos mid-match and speaking the story of the match out loud.
We saw it when Adam Cole told Kyle O'Reilly he “made him” as he beat him up at Takeover. We've seen it loads of times throughout Roman Reigns' title reign, especially against Jey Uso.
When did this become so popular? Is it a pandemic thing to fill in the lack of crowd noise? Was it during Johnny Gargano and Tomasso Ciampa's rivalry a few years back? Was it Shawn Michaels telling Ric Flair he loved him before retiring him? When do you think this first became a popular big match occurrence?
I think it's really the pandemic that has triggered it as a mechanism. I really noticed they were doing it a lot in the early Performance Center shows, where they'd be talking trash to make up the dead air from no crowd.