Pro Wrestling Jobbers - Pro Wrestling News Daily

Professional wrestling, as a staged art, involves having winners and losers. Your job, when you are to win, is to make yourself look good. You job when you lose is to make your opponent look good. Those wrestlers who almost never win and whose primary job is to make other wrestlers look good are called jobbers.

Pro wrestling jobbers are one of the most important things in professional wrestling. They are truly the unsung heroes of wrestling, and in that vein, I salute them. Jobbers have brought us some of the most entertaining moments in the history of pro wrestling. This is because they are free to do humorous skits without having to worry about damaging their character. It's awesome.

Jobbers have a long and diverse history in pro wrestling. There have been jobbers for as long as pro wrestling has existed. They have always been there to put other people over by jobbing. Some of the most well known jobbers of all time include the Brooklyn Brawler and Al Snow.

The art of being a jobber is essentially knowing how to sell very well. Selling is the art of making it look like the moves your opponent is doing to you hurt very much. This involves taking big bumps and flatbacking simple moves, like punches. Often times, a simple right handed blow will send a jobber flying back into a ringpost or out of the ring. In this way the opponent ends up looking like superman.

Some jobbers were entertaining not because they wrestled, but simply because their presence was odd or amusing. One example is Lodi, a guy who was in Raven's Flock in WCW and never seemed to do anything other than hold up signs and generally act as Raven's cheerleader. Another good one is Vincent/Virgil, a guy who made his payday by being named after the guy in control of the opposite company than the one he was in, be it WCW or WWF.

The next time you see a pro wrestling jobber on TV, make sure to salute them. Whether it's Tommy Dreamer, Colin Delaney, Funaki or Santino Marella, be aware of how much entertainment value they add to the television program and finally give them the respect they deserve.

Pro Wrestling News: Why WWE Brand Split is a Failure

If you're looking for Pro Wrestling News, you've come to the right place.

In 1997, pro wrestling was flourishing. WCW and WWE (then the WWF), in hot competition on Monday nights, were both pulling amazing ratings with viewership in the millions each show they put on. They were selling PPV's. More importantly, it was captivating, entertaining television.

You could flip the TV back and forth between The Rock and Hulk Hogan on the same night, considered the two biggest pro wrestling draws of all time. You could watch Undertaker's Ministry at one moment, then flip over and watch the nWo storyline progress. Both organizations had remarkable depth of talent on their rosters and both had amazing storylines to back up their in-ring product.

Then things started to change. WCW started becoming less and less entertaining, the downward slide beginning with the infamous "fingerpoke of doom" in which Kevin Nash dropped the WCW Title to Hulk Hogan only a matter of seconds into the match when Hogan "poked" him with his index finger. Nash dropped to the canvas and was pinned. Fans felt ripped off. There was also an incident where Eric Bischoff spoiled the end of a taped Raw live on Nitro, telling everyone that Mick Foley would win the (then) WWF Title. Many switched over to watch Foley win the title, and that was the start of the WCW ratings decline.

WWE remained relatively entertaining simply due to the talent of its roster, including The Rock, Steve Austin, Kurt Angle, The Undertaker, Chris Jericho, Chris Benoit, and the list goes on and on. The booking was at times horrible (anyone remember Katie Vick?), however the product remained strong. WCW continued its slide and eventually collapsed to be bought out by WWE.

Then WWE ran the catastrophically awful Invasion angle, where WCW and ECW stars were feuding with WWE stars in an admittedly clever way to assimilate them into the roster. However many of the former WCW 'stars' were quickly demoted to jobber duty, such as Diamond Dallas Page and Scott Steiner. WWE was now without competition, but instead of the ratings going up, they went down.

Bad booking made for boring television, and many former ECW and WCW fans were upset to see their favorite wrestlers mistreated (I still feel that WWE could have used Raven much better than they ever did). I still watched WWE though, at the least for its great in-ring PPV wrestling. And for The Rock. That guy is just awesome.

The invasion angle died with a whimper, and the WWE introduced the Brand Split in April of 2002. Different stars would be exclusively featured on each of their two shows, Raw and Smackdown. At this time they had just absorbed the WCW and ECW rosters, so this worked well for a while to add intrigue and make storylines more interesting. Lesser stars would get more time on their individual brand because there wasn't a top card traveling from show to show.

However today, the WWE roster is fractured. No more Rock, no more Steve Austin. The WWE only has perhaps 10 wrestlers that you could reliably put a World Title on, whereas they may have had 30 or even 40 back in 2002. They just don't have as many entertaining wrestlers any more, and their roster is spread far too thin between three brands. I tend to watch Raw for Jeff Hardy, Chris Jericho, and to extents Mr. Kennedy and Santino. I don't watch Smackdown right now, it just isn't good enough. I don't want to see Vicki Guerrero. I don't want to see Mark Henry. I don't want to see Big Daddy V. The only redeeming qualities of Smackdown are Edge, Rey Mysterio, Undertaker and MVP, but they aren't enough to make me want to stay in on Friday nights.

Collapse the three brands into one unified roster. Unify the IC/United States Title, The WWE/World Tag Titles, and the World/WWE/ECW Titles. Get all of your talent on all three shows - whether or not they want to work Tuesdays.

You know, I'd probably watch Smackdown for Hardy and Jericho.

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