Undertaker is an old man who says lots of old man things on his Six Feet Under podcast. Sometimes that’s a good thing, but other times it’s like he’s trying to tell younger wrestlers and fans to get off
his lawn.
On this week’s podcast, the Dead Man said he’s proud of where the wrestling industry is today compared to how shitty things were during his day in the 1980’s when he was trying to break into the business. For example, he was constantly fighting against backstage politics early in his career when so many top stars tried to hold him down, and that’s less of an issue in today’s WWE locker room.
There’s also the WWE Performance Center, which breaks new athletes into pro wrestling the right way. However, the PC is a something of a modern luxury that largely removes that overwhelming sense of struggle many wrestlers from his day had to suffer through. Undertaker thinks the end result is that more wrestlers today lack grit and are missing an edge.
“There’s times where I’m sleeping in my car. I’m bouncing in all of these clubs, and busting heads, and doing all this stuff, just to scrape up enough money to go to wrestling school, and go to these shows where you lose money. That gave me an edge, though, because I had to struggle. I had a real, real struggle to get my foot in the door, because I wasn’t a legacy.
…Obviously we don’t need that kind of struggle, but there is something that I think is missing with the edge of when people do get up here. A grit. Grit is a good [word for it]. I don’t know how you create that. Maybe you don’t need to now in this day and age. But to me, a lot of times you can see it in the product, right? Just the little bit of struggle that you have to go through, it translates to what you do.”
I think plenty of today’s wrestlers make very difficult sacrifices and endure struggles to make it in the industry, even if it’s now quite a different experience from how The Undertaker broke into the business. What this ultimately sounds like is Undertaker trying to find a nicer way to say that he still thinks today’s wrestlers are too soft and too pretty.
Do you think Undertaker makes a good point, or is he an out of touch old man on this topic? Let me know in the comments below, Cagesiders.
