The Long, Hard Goodbye To The Attitude Era

There is a phenomenal group of crazies lurking through the world these days, covering their tracks with the pepper of the internet and preserving their anonymity through the gross mystique of message boards and blog sites.

These jackals pride themselves on pretense and pun, but forgo punctuation and spelling for the sake of sarcasm, forming insatiable bonds with their like-minded brood, while scourging those who oppose. What they lack in substance, they more than make up for with a grossly exaggerated view of themselves. You will find them at every turn, with every URL clicked "go" on your internet browser. You must beware.

More and more I find myself on the run from these crazies, like the unfortunate Season Hubley in Escape From New York (Don't go into the Choc Full Of Nuts!). But in wrestling, it's hard to avoid these kind. They find you and preach the same critical nonsense about the state of current affairs in WWE. They repeat the same phrase, Attitude Era, as if they were Darwin preaching evolution for the first time. Imposters.

True it was a phenomenal era. A brilliant era. A time when it was expected to be as much a fan of wrestling as it was Star Wars or Jerry Springer. NWO shirts and crotch chops became part of the culture. Even bowlers were emulating it. And disgruntled employees found certain solace in giving the middle finger to their boss, thanks to Steve Austin.

McMahon revived wrestling by pushing the envelope in a time when everyone pushing back might as well have been the poor saps trying to corral John Rambo. And he did it through a three pronged rotation of a feud with Austin, Degeneration X, and Divas stripping to near nothing. They fueled the resurgence between 1998 and 2001.

It wasn't so much the wrestling that was noteworthy but what WWE surrounded it with. Increased violence, sexuality. Whatever they could get away with by hanging the TV14 logo in the corner of the screen.

The Hardy Boys became poster children and ambassadors to the next generation of kids who were inspired to leap from ladders and balconies. The same for Mick Foley, whose fall from the top of the Hell In A Cell became the snapshot image of breathtaking and sacrificial.

Sable, Debra, Trish. How far could a good tease go each week with bikini contests, bra and panty matches, and mud wrestling?

The teenage super hormone experience.

It was the hallmark of the late 90's. An America at relative international ease. A post-grunge culture that began craving less classically defined white knights in exchange for antiheroes. Even a presidency less defined by actual policy and more by under the table fellatio.

But then the new millennium came, and everything changed.

It is no incredible coincidence that a conservative White House and 9/11 uprooted a passive American feeling and made everyone sober up from the drunken complacency of the 90's.

It was also the same year that WCW folded after a determined effort to reach new lows in the wrestling business. The epic Monday Night Wars were over. McMahon had bested his competition, and in turn cast aside nearly all of the talent he had purchased.

And then a slow gripping fact became too evident to deny any longer: the Attitude Era was over. Within five years, John Cena was elevated to the front man, the face of WWE. Not long after that, the TV14 logo dissolved into PG. Profanity, violence, blood, sexuality, all extinguished. Even Austin's hand gestures so prominent in yesteryear were camouflaged by blurred editing.

Nothing but blasphemy explodes from the crazies on this point. They seal themselves away in their own bomb shelters and take endless amounts of LSD in the form of classic wrestling DVDs and live in a vacuum of the Attitude Era and the eras previous.

When not stuck in their own drug induced stupor, they return to their primary mission of marauding any fan discussion of the most recent Monday Night RAW with dismissive Attitude Era references.

But the fact remains that WWE has completely pulled away from that direction and mentality, as further evidenced by their corporate website, which so proudly states that their programming is "suitable for all ages." Sponsorships with K-Mart and Mattell, issues stances such as stopping bullying with children and even a proud partnership with the Make A Wish foundation.

This course of action is not so easy for McMahon to deviat from, now with a steady lull in television ratings and stock profits not so bullish. This even fuels the reluctance to turn the very stale Cena character heel because of the alienation of the very fan base McMahon has pulled into his WWE Universe and desperately clings too.

But this is all obvious and clear on the surface. It's the ripple effects of that era years ago that today are sad reminders of what once was and cannot be again.

The great elephant in the room of WWE discussion: Chris Benoit. WWE practically wiped his existence away after the tragic events of 2007. What Benoit's murder-suicide unearthed was not only once again the steroid issue in professional wrestling but further put under the microscope the violent aspects of the business day in and day out on the wrestlers.

Benoit's style was as vicious and rabid as his monicker once proclaimed. Chair shots, high risk impact blows to the head. These were staples of not only Benoit but so many wrestlers in the Attitude Era, which undeniably fed the popularity of wrestling. But Benoit's death brought a scary reality to the effects of such in-ring offense and created a chain reaction of wrestling prohibition all the way down to the extinction of the classic wrestling pile driver.

On another level of tragedy is the continued downfall of the Hardy Boys. Which brother has fallen further is a debatable subject of sibling failure, but equally their personal troubles in the area of substance abuse can be linked to the post traumatic effects of the aforementioned "caution to the wind" style they adopted in the Attitude Era.

There is a scene from Easy Rider when a dejected Peter Fonda utters the line "we blew it." Film critics pointed to this as a failure of the 60's movement, as did Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream. Although a surreal, tripping experience, the journey proves to illustrate how the generation succumbed to substance abuse over change and revolution. Did McMahon feel the same way when the tragedies of the Attitude Era became fence posts of criticism for his wrestling product?

Nevertheless, he still found ways to tap into the popularity of the Attitude Era. Most recently, he has built a program around The Rock and Cena, which stands to be an epic, mega main event at the upcoming Wrestlemania. The blatant undercurrent is Rock representing the Attitude Era and what it stood for and Cena representing the PG era of WWE. Ten years ago was the same scenario when Hulk Hogan represented the golden era of professional wrestling against the younger Rock at the time, whose victory was viewed as a passing of the torch of one generation to another. The Rock will more than likely do the same job for Cena, as Hogan did for him before, which will tie the final loose end of the Attitude Era. Just like the mortally wounded Shane riding off into the sunset.

The crazies will find this jobbing absurd and further lock themselves away from WWE, possibly even take the cyanide pill that is TNA Impact, which will leave the rest of us with DVRs set for 9pm on Mondays and reserved seats at sports bars on pay per view Sundays.

We'll watch the the matches, listen to the promos and anticipate the story lines. And that is when a cruel reality settles in and we'll realize that the plastic surgery we administer on our sagging, wrestling faces can no longer hold what lies beneath:

We are the crazies.

Because deep down we are the ones who want the Attitude Era back. We miss the middle fingers. We miss the weekly teases. We miss an adult oriented WWE product. We see Hornswoggle and Santino and shake our heads. We roll our eyes at Cena and mock his five moves of doom. The best we get is the Pipebomber of Promo, CM Punk. There's a reminescence there. A nostalgia factor. A throwback to when WWE had, well, attitude. He's not Austin. He's his own man. But it gives us a similar reason to watch as it did long ago.

But in the end, the Attitude Era is like Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon, and we're all Sam Spade forced to accept reality and move on with our lives, living with cold showers of McMahon's PG era to get by day to day.

As much as we want her to come back, we know we can never have her again.

Who blew it?

We blew it.

Because us, crazies, thought it could never end and won't let go of the thought that it will come around again.

Maybe the biggest reason we can't let go is because of the tragic, inevitable conclusion none of us have come to accept: that we are getting old. And that wrestling might have passed us by.

The long, hard goodbye to the Attitude Era...

"Myths and legends die hard in America. We have them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men's reality. Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it, that the tyranny of 'the rat race' is not yet final." - H.S.T.