Jesse Ventura says there’s nothing intriguing about today’s era of professional wrestling.
During an appearance on Talk Is Jericho, Jesse Ventura explained why he’s not a fan of today’s world of professional wrestling. In the past, Ventura has said that he doesn’t stay up-to-date with the product and he now tells Chris Jericho that a lot of his disdain for it is related to the lack of rules now.
“When I watch WWE today, and it took me a while to determine why wrestling today, to me, doesn’t have any intrigue whatsoever to it. And I’ll tell you why. There’s no rules. Now when I say that, here’s what I mean. In my day, when you broke a rule, you could lose a match. In my day, when you broke a rule, the referee would make you break up the hold. In my day, the rules meant something. If a guy was thrown out over the top rope, that was considered so dangerous,” Ventura noted, “that was a disqualification. And with those rules, it allowed you to get heat. Because when you’d win by breaking the rules, people were angry legitimately. Today’s wrestling — Chris, tell me a rule that can’t be broken.
“I could start the match off, hit my opponent, knock him out of the ring and run his head right into the steel post, and the match goes on. Now in my day, you’d be disqualified for that. You had to hide it. You had to be creative to cheat. Today, the performers don’t need any creativity. They can blatantly cheat because again there’s no rules. And that’s why I can’t watch,” Ventura proclaimed. “There’s nothing there that intrigues me.”
Ventura went on to note how the lack of rules affects the babyfaces and heels in different ways, pointing out that fighting is a starting point now instead of wrestling.
“A heel can’t get my respect because he’s not showing me the ability to perform and break the rules and get away with it, because there’s no rules to get away with. And the babyface, well, they start off, they don’t even to bother to show they’re a superior wrestler. It’s beating the guy right in the head and cutting meat right from the opening bell. When do you see a hold? When do you see a guy go back to a hold? I guess the major difference is, in my day, it was still wrestling as a basis. Today, street fighting is the basis,” he said, “because there’s nothing you can do that can disqualify you. If I went out and kicked the guy right in the nuts, would I get disqualified?”
Ventura recently spoke to Sports Illustrated and said that he’s at peace with wrestling being in his past, but feels like Vince McMahon will be a fixture in WWE until his dying day.
“I have my share of fond memories,” Ventura says. “For me, it was a long time ago. When I left the wrestling business in the early, early, 1990s, I never looked back. Wrestling, in and of itself, became the past for me very quickly.”
“I had the good fortune of working with Larry King, and Vince is just like Larry King,” Ventura says. “Vince will work until he dies.”
