THE MIZ IS MEDIOCRE
I had to laugh at the outpouring of support for The Miz following Kevin Nash’s recent “attack.” Reconvene Nuremburg. Put Nash on trial for crimes against Twitter.
The Miz IS mediocre. Period. His facials and promos are horrifically overwrought. His ring work is OK. As personalities go these days, he’s average. It doesn’t matter if you’re a world champion who didn’t draw, or some fat slob who did color commentary on Nitro for 15 minutes: That is not an outrageous opinion to have.
By the way, I think of Nash as a major constructor and conductor of the biggest-money angle in wrestling history, and myself as somebody who lived YOUR dream and has a big house on the big side of town to show for it. But I digress.
I KNOW The Miz won’t have the career Nash did. That seems obvious.
Anyway, I was talking to some strip-club bouncer in Las Vegas about why marks might think of The Miz as better than average. No offense to The Miz, but I just don’t see anything special. I don’t see anything horrible, either. Just nothing special.
And the strip-club bouncer said, “The marks just say guys like him are good to justify watching wrestling. Viewership is down. UFC is dominant. Wrestling isn’t cool. But the marks don’t want to admit THEY’RE not cool. So they like The Miz.”
This guy might be onto something. (Maybe you’ve figured out who he is. He was better than The Miz, which isn’t saying much. And don’t start yelling about who had what belt, blah, blah, blah. The Miz couldn’t have even got on TV during the wrestling war of the ‘90s.)
Wrestling just sucks. Major stars like Austin and The Rock left the business. They weren’t replaced. Major stars like Hogan stuck around too long. Booking has inexplicably embraced what doesn’t work at the expense of what does.
This is a bad product. When you consider the lack of alternative product in North America because of WWE’s ever-increasing stranglehold, it might be near an all-time low. TNA ain’t WCW. ROH ain’t ECW, or even Smoky Mountain. Mid-South, Mid-Atlantic…anybody with a decent sense of wrestling history could peruse the last 40 years and pick out regional promotions that had better products than WWE has right now, and for lengthy periods.
Why? Reasons too numerous to list here, really, but the main reason might be motivation. Those smaller promotions needed to succeed to survive. WWE has so many locked-in sources of major revenue, and so many ancillary methods they can milk according to need (tours of Europe, for example) that they can do things willy-nilly and still prosper.
Things like making The Miz WWE champ, for example.
