The Changing Art of Pro-Wrestling Commentary

Commentary has always played an important part in the presentation of professional wrestling. Unlike many sports, it's actually perfectly possible to follow a match without any commentary at all. But good commentary can turn an average match into a great match. Conversely bad commentary can severely hurt a good match.

The commentary team for professional wrestling is loosely based on the normal arrangement for commentary in America TV, a play-by-play commentator and a "color" commentator. However the color commentator in wrestling is a role that has usually been held by a heel character and was used to both further the storylines and to rile up the audience at home by cheering on the heel wrestler.

For many years this formula was followed pretty closely with play-by-play focusing on the details of the match and the color commentator trying to justify the heel's actions. It was a formula which worked very effectively and was close enough to what you would expect to see in any other sports event that it helped further the illusion that wrestling was real.

Play By Play

When the Wrestlemania era began, that started to change. Increasingly the emphasis moved from sports to Sports Entertainment. With that change in emphasis came a change in commentary. The change which took place over several years was to increase the emphasis on play by play announcers "telling the story" rather than calling the match.

That move to "tell the story" gradually came to dominate match commentary, to the extent that commentators often now spend as much time talking about what will be happening next week as they do about what is happening in the ring right now.

Compounding this problem was the increasing push to make each show seem more impressive than the last (a trend started by the Monday Night Wars). This has resulted in announcers losing all credibility as they claim that a perfectly average match is the match of the year or that that a tedious beat down is the most horrific thing they have ever seen.

The play-by-play commentator is supposed to be the audience's identification point. By slowly turning him into a blatant shill for the company both WWE and TNA are damaging their connection with their own audience.

How can we possibly believe anything Mike Tenay says when we know he is going to claim that every PPV he hosts is the best PPV ever? It isn't a believable claim. In fact it's outright silly.

Jim Ross has a similar problem in that he's selling every beatdown on RAW like someone is having their teeth extracted without any painkillers. Nobody believes it any more. While Ross is one of the few people who can slip in the odd criticism of the product it seems that even he has trouble openly disagreeing with the company line any more.

Color Commentators

The situation with Color Commentators is a little different. Their primary role has been to get the audience riled up. However over the last few years there has been a move away from the heel commentator so that now they are tweeners at best and in some cases (I'm thinking someone like Taz) they're clearly a face.

That change has radically altered the dynamic of the commentary team, and not for the better. Now the heel doesn't have a proper voice making his case while the match goes on. There's no one there to point out when he is wrestling well and help get him over. Nor is there anyone to try and justify his heelish actions and make the wrestling story work properly.

Right now the only heel color commentator on national TV is JBL, who shows considerable promise and could easily become the best color commentator in the business given some time and experience. One of the reasons he works so well in my view is because while he defends all the heels, he does it without pretending he likes every single one of them. When the heel does something stupid he says so, when it's smart he explains why it's smart.

Don't Talk Down To the Audience

The fundamental problem I see with wrestling commentary currently is that there is a complete lack of respect for the audience. It's not just that the companies think they can actually get away with telling their audience what to think, its that they think we won't even be aware that they are doing it.

Insulting your audience's intelligence is one of the quickest ways to get them to turn off.