Jeb Lund was right.

From August 26, 2004 to February 1, 2006, I wrote a total of 56 Byte This! recaps. That’s roughly 56 hours of retarded interviews, 56 hours of the wrestlers still being mostly in-character for their segments, 56 hours of sitting on my ass in front of my computer watching a streaming video from WWE.com. And hell, over half of those 56 hours features some combination of Josh Mathews, Marc Lloyd, and/or Steve Romero. If you can think of anything sadder than that, I’m all ears.
 

I’d still be doing those recaps today, I think, if BT hadn’t gotten the axe. (Excuse me… according to WWE.com, it’s still on hiatus.) I don’t know why. I enjoyed writing them, although I enjoyed mainly being able to make fun of them. Randy Orton made it all too easy.

Anyway, I spent most of 2006 just doing my PPV picks and the stats that go with

it. That was, until Big Danny T and Jeff Snider stopped doing their SmackDown! recaps, and I decided to pitch myself for the job. I got it, and I wrote 11 counting this weekend’s.

Wow… looking at the numbers of that, it doesn’t seem that much of a time commitment, does it? 56 BT recaps, 11 SmackDown! recaps, a RAW recap here or there… it’s far less than 100 articles, not counting the stats or PPV predictions. And yet, those less-than-100 columns took me over two years to write. Damn…

All right, I’ll say this upfront before I go any further: I acknowledge that I’m making “too big of a deal” about this. I’m sentimental, I suppose, and whether or not my contributions to Online Onslaught have been anything of notice, I know I’ll miss writing for it in general. A farewell column would make more sense from one of the writers who had been here longer than me, but so be it.

The thing is, if I was just leaving due to complications or schedule conflicts in my life, I would have privately told Rick and that would have been the end of it. It’s true that my life has indeed gotten more complex since I started here two years ago. I’ve got a day job on top of my freelance work at IGN Entertainment and high school officiating, I’m taking college classes now, I’ve got my own apartment… this isn’t a big deal to the majority of the readers, but everything on top of each other… Well, let’s just say I’ve got more interests than just writing about professional wrestling. Something now has to give, and I’m afraid it’s OO.

Why shouldn’t it be, though? The fact is, writers write for two reasons only. Actually, for that matter, pretty much everyone does anything (excluding pure survival) for two reasons: the paycheck, or the passion.

None of the writers for OO get paid for their work here. We’ve all got additional day jobs or school or whatever. We write about WWE just because we’re big fans of it, and we want to see it become better. Through all the bitching and whining and alternative ideas to stupid concepts like Diva Search this and Tough Enough that, it’s all out of a love and passion that we want to see the industry improve. Simple and plain.

I had that passion in 2004 when I first came to this website. Jeff Snider in fact pointed me to it without realizing how close Rick and I were geographically. Jeff just mentioned that OO was the best site out there for pro wrestling news, and I shrugged off the first few links because, come on… I had seen The Torch and NoDQ.com (then The Mayhem), what could possibly be different? There are only so many ways to report news, right?

I won’t bother telling you how impressed I was at the writing when I finally decided to check it out; the fact I’m going through the trouble of writing this column is explanation enough. However, I will point out the first article I read here: “Learned Disappointment II: Whither Burnout?,” linked at the very top. The article sticks out in my mind because 1) it was, indeed, the first OO article I read, 2) I actually responded to it and got Jeb’s personal reply back, showing me that OO wasn’t full of egotistical uppity assholes who were removed from their readers, and 3) the dialogue between Jeb and Rick in the coming week made me think more about wrestling than who knows how many years before it combined. I came across the column the moment my burnout was at the other end of the spectrum, when my burnout had finally subsided and I was ready to watch wrestling again after taking a long time off.

Jeb wrote the column intending to diagnose a problem and/or phenomena among fans, writers, and wrestling in general. He said that the three main reasons for burnout are: volume (WWE takes a large time commitment with all its shows, amounting now to 5 hours a week plus the Internet shows), the quality ratio, and relentlessness (wrestling has no downtime). I already touched on the volume one, and the relentlessness is something I’ve grown accustomed to. That is, I know WWE operates without an off-season for 50 weeks out of the year. I don’t care.

The quality ratio is, in fact, the central reason why I’m stepping aside from writing about WWE. The fact is, WWE has done everything in their power to piss me off and turn me away from the product. I still watch it, I’ll admit that; I probably will for awhile. But it’s no longer fun to be a fan for WWE for me, no longer worth my time and effort to try to pen some depth of humor in recaps when the source material is so horribly dry.

This is where passion-or-paycheck comes into play. Why did I spend 56 hours watching Byte This!? Why did I spend nearly eight hours on the famous ECW episode of Byte This! to ensure all my quotes and everything were right? Then, I was a fan. When the ECW episode aired, I was feeling like it was 1997 again. It felt great, exciting, electrifying to be a pro wrestling fan! I had been away from it for so long (several years), and I was just remembering why I was attracted to this form of entertainment again!

I always have been a mark at heart after all… I consider Rock/Hogan from Wrestlemania 18 among the greatest matches ever. Technically, it was horrid, of course. But I didn’t (and still don’t) care. I was never into the in-ring action as much as the personalities and stories. Hell, I didn’t even really start to examine the psychology and such until I started writing for OO. And to many extents, I still don’t factor it into my grade for the overall package.

Two years… time quickly changed WWE’s appeal to me. I’ve made it public that I was a Cena apologist for as long as possible, only starting to stop caring about him earlier this year. I was a mark for Christian, mentally begging WWE to give him a shot with a top title. I kept waiting for Rock to reappear and drop one more elbow. And even if Austin/Hogan was going to be even technically worse than Rock/Hogan, I was still pretty excited to see it.

And seeing Bret Hart on WWE TV again in nine years? Bliss.

But those are really about the only good things I can think of, and even those were mostly hopes. (I “knew in my heart” they would eventually correct Cena’s direction.) So now, even with the reemergence of Degeneration X, even with the Brothers of Destruction reforming, even with Ken Kennedy getting way too much of my love over on SmackDown!, I just can’t keep committing more than the bare minimum every week to pro wrestling. It’s just not worth my time, and I’m finding myself more interested in playing Marvel: Ultimate Alliance or Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter on my Xbox 360 than spend two hours or more writing a recap.

It really didn’t occur to me just how removed I was from my former passion until I started consciously checking the dates between my columns. Do you realize that I wrote my first six SmackDown! recaps consecutively, but then went over a month before the next? Then I wrote two in three weeks, did two in a row, then skipped another month? I was looking for any excuse to get out of writing them… yeah, school work is a good excuse. Having Rick go on hiatus is not, especially when he gave us all explicit orders to keep doing our respective columns.

A month between recaps, and I didn’t miss it. I remember it upset me when I missed a Byte This!, and it still bothers me that I missed the last one because I decided I’d “do it later.” (Although I recapped the last published BT, one with Rob Van Dam, WWE had the Heartthrobs the next week. Whatever they did, it led to them getting fired, and the episode and show overall getting the plug pulled. I still have no record of what happened then, and I never will, just because I chose not to watch it live.) I watched each episode of SD I didn’t recap, so it wasn’t totally a question of my schedule. I simply said “fuck it” and went on with my day. That’s not fair to you guys, or anyone who has wanted to do the SD recap here for OO and basically been ousted by a guy who, when given the opportunity, blows it off.

Speaking of ECW, it was really the ECW experiment that disillusioned me the most. I loved the ECW BTs, and the first One Night Stand was beautiful even if WWE’s people got needlessly involved. I was one of the myriad of fans who really, truly was primed for ECW to be its own brand, deliver its own style, and entertain me in ways the core WWE couldn’t.

I’ve watched it every week since it debuted, and other than a biological attraction to Kelly Kelly, I’ve had enough to stop watching it permanently. The final straw was Lashley winning the ECW title, an angle Rick explored earlier. It’s not ECW, it’s not ECW-flavored WWE, it’s not WWE-flavored ECW. It’s just WWE’s fifth hour on television with a different acronym, and every moment it’s on, it pisses on what Extreme Championship Wrestling stood for years ago, when “Big Three” was a current event. 

I’ve been thinking hard about my burnout since I decided to last week to step away, and I realized yet another really bothersome conclusion. Aside from recapping the first Kane/Undertaker vs. MVP/KK match, the most fun I’ve had writing for OO in the past year was my Internet angle feud with Canadian Bulldog. Yeah, we pissed off a lot of people, but Rick was cheering us on, and we were having fun, which was really the point… Fuck those who can’t take a joke. And besides, we managed to get people talking about it on the boards, an achievement in and of itself.

Looking at that purely in comparison to my OO “duties” though, it’s rather disturbing that I prefer writing up second-grade insults to a man I’ve never met aside from the Internet rather than actually do some good by writing analysis and commentary to a show that is one-half of the reason they come to the site in the first place. My passion, or lack of it, is really not going to change in the near future unless WWE really pulls a Christmas miracle out of its collective ass… but either way, it’s too late for me to care enough to keep going.

I want to conclude by thanking all the writers of Online Onslaught for their banter over the years, and their participation in the PPV game that kept giving me something to do even after BT bit the big one. My thanks especially go out to Jeb (who inspired me to write for the site in general), Rick (for giving me the chance), and Bulldog (for being the best sport and columnist rival ever). And of course, I’ve got to thank all the readers, even the ones who got the pissiest during my feud with Bulldog. Couldn’t have done it and gone this long without you.

I’m sure I’ll be back here eventually, if the situation calls for it, if OO gets too short-handed or if WWE magically makes it fun to be a fan again. Until then however, I’m going to fade into the Internet sunset (whatever that is), and leave the pro wrestling writing to those who are far more qualified – who are far more passionate about the subject – than I am.

Thank you all for reading.