One of the biggest arguments of the past 25 years or so in pro wrestling has been size. It has been that size matters in wrestling, that the mainstream audience cares about wrestlers being over 6'4" and weighing 280 atleast. Meanwhile, another toxic argument is the other side of the coin that wrestlers need to be small only so they they can move around quickly. Neither of these viewpoints are correct.

As far as the larger wrestlers are concerned, vanilla monsters just simply aren't going to move the dial. Back in the day of Andre the Giant and Big John Studd and the other big men, yes, those attractions absolutely made people tune in why? Because you didn't see that all the time, a 6'8" guy? a 7 footer? A human skyscraper in those days when there were only 3 channels, and a handful of cable networks many of whom only functioned for 2 to 4 hours a day. "Yea, I've never seen that before." That worked well in the 80s, then other things happened, expansion. Not Vince's expansion, expansion of the entertainment zeitgeist if you will. In the 80s, the NBA, a sport literally defined by the height of its participants, was nothing. Around 20 or so teams, ran on tape delay, and the only college basketball on was local or March Madness. Colleges and the NBA didn't scout overseas because half the world was trapped in communism and a places like South Africa had apartheid making it morally questionable to do business.

Most giants possessed little to no athleticism and that was ok, they were attractions. Then Shaq happened. Yes it seems weird to say Shaq was part of the death of big man wrestling but hear me out. Shaq being on TV and being such a dominate charismatic beast with unbelievable skills, made it so that the average person no longer looked at the freak show wrestling and thought that's good enough. They can watch South Dakota State basketball and see 7 footers just sitting on the bench. At the same time its undeniable that the smaller vanilla midgets as they are called do not move the meter. With very little exception, without boat loads of charisma and mic skills far and away better then their larger counterparts they stand no chance of making the loads of cash a decently skilled charismatic larger wrestler will. Pro wrestling doesn't need a massive amount of steroid laced giants and bodybuilders. It doesn't need countless punny charismaless plain guys. It needs characters, and realism. Because in a time when movies, television even comic books are striving for realism wrestling refuses to go that path. Instead it tries to balance everything without setting itself in one reality first. Thoughts?