We all start at different points as fans. Each of us gets on board this roller coaster ride for different reasons, but we all come to the same place to enjoy this form of entertainment because it connects each of us. Even if we disagree on what it is, and often so, especially because we disagree on what wrestling is and what it can be.
That’s just a byproduct of the eclecticness of wrestling. This takes form in how we perceive it, and how we perceive it determines how promotional owners organize and operate those promotions. Especially if that reaction causes them to change course. As fans, viewers, critics, or however else you’d like to frame it, we are a huge, important component of the experience.
We are the connective tissue that makes it all work. Certainly it’s all a composite and all important, but without fans and that experience, wrestling is just adults grappling, doing cool stuff, and talking smack for their own amusement and on the whims of their bosses. When it’s near perfect, it all works together to create something unique that creates memories. Wrestlers feed off us, we feed off their energy and it loops infinitum.
When that experience is at its best, executed by someone who understands the importance of the audience in the overall presentation and they lean into that connection — wrestling is fantastic. It can’t be manufactured, it cannot be imposed, it just is. That’s the exact reason why it took forever for Roman Reigns to actually become widely embraced, and it had nothing to do with the “Big Dog” persona and Vince McMahon.
“Connection” is not tangible, it just is. We can’t explain it, you just feel it.
The Power of the ‘Common Man’
Dusty Rhodes understood that. Forty years ago this week he delivered his Hard Times promo ahead of his NWA World title match against Ric Flair. Their Starrcade ’85 match didn’t pay off their feud, but the build to it was near perfect.
“Hard Times” was built off Rhodes’ connection to the fans. Their love and admiration for him — in story — is what helped pull Rhodes through his ankle injury he suffered months prior. During the promo he didn’t hold back in outlining how unless you’ve actually felt economic hardship that comes with losing, you can’t understand the people he represented. Although that aspect of the promo was gripping and still resonates 100% to this day, its relevancy to modern times is only the precursor to the interactive moment when he reaches out to the television screens at home through the camera lens and tells fans to place their hand up against his. To him, we’re all in this together.
The prevailing theory in wrestling has us believe that larger than life is better 100% of the time, however I’ve always believed that although it’s important it’s just part of the bigger picture. It’s a piece of the plot, but not the whole of the story you can tell.
Dusty Rhodes and Ric Flair against each other on paper doesn’t mean much. Rhodes and Flair had been in the ring together before. Both were former NWA champions at the time. Those aspects on their own don’t truly create that connective element that grabs us. However what sells this match to me is the disparity between the image Flair represented as a wealthy, prestigious champion, and the down-to-earth, blue collar mentality Rhodes embodied. Where WWE conditioned a generation of fans to believe bigger is better, Flair and Rhodes — specifically Dusty — created something more granular that holds up today against the best promos.
Hard Times
As important as the content of the promo is, what we remember most is that moment Dusty reaches out his hand and asks you to reach out and touch the television. It’s a loaded moment because that is Dusty telling you a number of things all at once: he’s telling you you’re not alone, Dusty is telling you he sees you and appreciates you, and that we’re all there in that moment connected together through his words and actions. That was Dusty reaching out across the towns, cities and countries to say that we are in this together and he understands. The moment he reaches out is him saying “thank you” for being there for him when he was down and out, while concurrently being gracious for the time to come back and be with us through wrestling.
The promo is very quick at three minutes, but its weight makes it timeless. The mastery of it is when he comes back at the end to us and delivers the very personal message that he is going to take what Flair holds dear and deliver hard times to the Nature Boy. He said he will do that for himself, and mostly he will do it for us — the fans — because that championship is ours and it rightfully belongs to us. Not him nor Flair, but each of us.
Hard Times is an important moment and we remember it because in three minutes Dusty Rhodes presented a raw, level, personal message to each fan who cheers, buys a ticket, and pays a cable bill (or streaming service fee now). As important as the vision for a company is, that perspective is not the end all and be all. Wrestlers are both heart and soul of the industry. Promotional owners are fans, but are mostly businesspeople with cashflow. An arena doesn’t matter, it’s a composite of walls and seats. The same can be said for our living rooms, or the chairs you’re sitting in reading this, or you could even just be sitting or laying on the floor like I am. It’s inconsequential where you are, but what’s relevant is all of us in the heartbeat off the moment absorbing what we’re watching, reading, or listening to and appreciating that passion in the present.
It’s a small thing, but Dusty’s promo is an interactive, timeless instance where a little bit of magic creeps its way into professional wrestling. Forty years later we still talk about Hard Times because of its impact in content and tone, and as well the mastery of its execution. Hard Times was a moment where we understood our stories can all be very different, but the heart of our experiences are the same.
Things evolve and change over time, but the core is immutable and what we get back is equivalent to what we put in. For Dusty, he may have injured his ankle, but in return his character understood his impact as a representative of the fans to be their voice and conduit in the past as we look back, in the present as we revisit his legendary promo, and the future as we look ahead to tomorrow.
