Wah, wah, I got sand in my e-box

One of the things about retiring from active e-fedding is that I really don't have any accountability to anyone anymore, so I don't have to watch what I say... well, that's a lie. I don't want to alienate people, but really I don't have to work with them either. That's why you shouldn't unbookmark this thing. In addition to Project Discovery Channel, I'll still have some goodies up here, mainly me reminiscing, ranting, raving or doing the fantasy-fantasy booker thing. Even if RPing isn't fun anymore, talking about it sure is!

And boy, do I love talking about things. Why else would I have started this if I didn't? Sure, I had the news and show-opinion hookup, but I really started this just to ruminate on abstract concepts and trends (or as Katz once said, comparing the pros and cons of kumquats). I wanted to talk about things that I liked and things that I didn't like. Today, I'm gonna talk about something that probably pisses me off the most of anything that can piss someone off in e-wrestling - publicly carrying on about results.

I had to deal with this in a BIG way back in 2007 with the WfWA's petty bitchiness about how their guys finished in the TEAM ToC. Honestly, if you were around for that, and most of the readership here was, you knew how big a clusterfuck it was. If not, well, basically it boiled down to that entire community pretty much bitching me and my judges out because their guys didn't finish 1-2-3 in the ToC. They blasted guys like Nova, Tchu and Ravager midcarders. The only person who was gracious about the whole thing was Christian Light's handler, and that was because he placed 4th. I was accused of playing favorites, only inviting them to make "my circle" look good (which was ludicrous because at heart, my "circle" is A1E, and the final didn't even have a FW-related handler in it), demanding privately that I give "valid reasoning" for why I ranked them so low, and then arguing with it when I gave it. It was a nightmare.

It would be nice if the people "buying into their own shit" was limited to communities that didn't have prior working relationships. The more things change, the more things stay the same. Honestly, I would have expected better, especially since the miserable in this situation was from the PTC circuit, but then again, the last time there was an all-out e-fed meltdown, it happened from someone who came from the FW/A1 side of things. It goes to show that there are assholes on both sides of the coin, right?

But just in case you've been living under a rock, which I admittedly have been doing for a couple of weeks, someone else, the handler of Chris Bagwell, just went off about losing in his TEAM Invitational Tournament match. It was in response to a light-hearted blog post by Billy Ferrero. It degenerated into basically the guy named Shane (why do all the people who blow up go by that name?) and all the FW heavyweights, Russo, Brunk, even Shinder himself. I responded too. It wasn't nice, and I'm not going to be nice here.

Basically, the worst thing you can do is bitch about your match publicly. For one, you're a bad sport if you do it. Why you'd want to be immature and ruin something that's supposed to be fun by throwing insults and accusations around is beyond me. Two, you put the booker on eggshells. You make them think that they're not being fair, and then it skews the results in the future. More future results are in doubt now because the booker is possibly influenced by your bitching. Three, it causes massive public dischord and people are then repulsed. Why should someone go to a place where people aren't happy with results?

Basically, what this Bagwell guy did was damage the integrity of TEAM. Even though I've retired and handed the keys over to Shinder, it still pisses me off that someone would have the gall to submarine the integrity of a place I helped build, especially over something as trivial as a tournament match. Here's a fucking newsflash. This is a competition. People win, people lose. This isn't a circle jerk. It's also subjective. One man's offal is another man's feast. If you lose, oh well. Put your big boy or big girl pants on and deal with it.

Am I saying you should be happy with losing? No, that would be hypocritical of me. I don't like losing, and there are times when I take it pretty hard. There were several times that I looked at a match result and I thought that there was no way I should have lost. It happened most of the time when I was up against Housefly in A1E battling for the A1E Championship or against Trip X in EPW. Did I complain about those losses in public in a way that was accusatory to the people deciding the matches? No, I didn't. I vented to friends, I inhaled and exhaled. I got over it, and I realized that the A1E voters and Brunk had their reasons for their decisions. And in the end, I was cool with it, because let's face it, it's not like Housefly or Stevens are slouchy characters, nor are their handlers bozos. They're two iconic characters handled by two talented men.

Why this prick can't realize the same for his match is beyond me. Why he couldn't have just vented to his friends who would have sympathized with him, I don't know. Why he couldn't have just left it to the PMs he sent back and forth with Shinder, I have no clue. But he had to go and take his beef public. What does that accomplish? Who does he get to rally to his side? The FW people who've been there before with the WfWA fiasco? The people there who've been in internal FW OOC dramas? People who actually thought that Duke Williams beat him, Duke Williams, who is handled by Al Larcher... hardly the picture of a FW stronghold? Please.

He says he's putting TEAM on ban. Yeah, okay, that's really going to hurt the fed. Seriously, TEAM doesn't need him, and really, if he's going to react to losing that badly, he doesn't need TEAM, because his blood pressure would rise every time he lost a match in TEAM. This game needs a lot fewer self-important douchebags like him and more people like Ryan Aston. Here's another guy who was unhappy with his loss in the first round of the same tournament, but outside of an offhand reply to the blog post in question, he took it in stride. That's the sign of a guy who gets it.

In the end, this isn't serious business. It's a fucking game. If you can't have fun playing a game, then you need to get your head checked. If you can't take losing to the point where you think it's a vast right-wing conspiracy if you don't win, you should hang up the e-boots and take up needlepoint, because this isn't for you.

In closing, Katz, I don't think you ever thought kumquats could get this vitriolic, could you? ;)