Ottar the Viking

Oh God, no! Look, wrestling's narrative tools are limited. Very, very limited. Maybe more limited than any other medium of fiction in existence. It does not have the weight necessary to embrace high artistic concepts. And even if it could, does anyone actually want to see that? Do you even really want to see that? I think it's more than just limited narrative tools. Two other things: 1. a match is SHORT, especially in terms of the narrative tools available. Short fiction relies on conventions of its genre to basically pull from a larger palette than it really has available. 2. there's a suspension of disbelief issue. The farther from everyday reality you are, the more important it is that you follow the rules consistently. Finally, absurdist / Dada / surrealist theater is often pretty far from entertaining. It places demands on the audience, making them work very hard to interpret what they are seeing, or making them give up on interpretation itself. The wrestling equivalent - wrestling stripped of reason and structure and the conceit of an athletic competition - would be interesting as a sort of two-person semi-improvised gymnastic free-jazz odyssey, perhaps. Once.

OK, I'm clueless - how can I get a copy of the Buddy Rose set?

This brings up something else that Buddy was great at (although I think it was more common throughout the industry 30 years ago). He uses the promos to talk about what happened in the ring during the last match, and to focus attention on what will happen in the ring in the next. This is in contrast to the current fashion of using promos to express intensity, or to provide some reason for wrestling beyond 'because we are professional wrestlers'. Buddy is compelling to listen to no matter what he says, and while he's got your attention for that 2 minute promo, he's going to make sure you really watch the stuff he's doing in the 20 minute match.

Is it realistic? Depends on how you define realistic. Wrestling is not simulating a fight between bar patrons, but a match between top-ranked experts. By virtue of being in a professional wrestling setting, we are to assume that the combatants are the best of the best, and quite closely matched. They can, apparently, think up some strategy that will set up an eventual win (which a normal person could not), they can execute that strategy (which a normal person could not), and most importantly, they have to, because they are not facing a normal person. Logic by itself is rarely enough. Wrestling is sports fiction, so analogy to films like Major League, The Natural, Slap Shot, Rocky, &c are appropriate. A really accurate movie about a boxing match would not be Rocky, and a really accurate movie about a Little League game would not be The Bad News Bears -- but if those movies had half-assed the sports side of the story, they would have been the less for it. There is a place, though, for a pure logic story. Not all genres can support them; it depends on the audience. Mysteries, thrillers, certain kinds of science fiction : the author can put the balls on the table and take his shot, and click click click, they all drop. The market for the wrestling equivalent of that is probably quite small, but overrepresented in places like this.

Hi, I'm new here. I was a kid in the Portland area for most of Buddy's prime years here. I think the thing that Buddy does better than everyone else, is that he has a very deep bag of tricks - little things he can do to tell the story, make the crowd love him or hate him, or his opponent - and he can do any of them at any time. He was years ahead on studying his own video, which helped a ton - and Portland's weekly circuit was amenable to working the same match three times in the same week, which also had to help polish and fine-tune his skills. Last time I saw Buddy was in about 2002, when he appeared and worked at an ECCW show in Vancouver, Washington (which is near Portland, not Canada). When Buddy got on the mic, he talked about his deep connection to the area: "I've lived in Vancouver, Washington! I had an apartment in Vancouver, Washington! Hell, I've been in JAIL in Vancouver, Washington!" Fantastic stuff. He was easily 380 lbs by that point, and I feared for his ring attire. He was still surprisingly athletic, but worked a limited match, still very effective because of a hundred tiny details.