PARKS’S TAKE: Joe Hendry and his fans should care that he lost, but these days it’s unfortunately only about having “a moment”

In a previous era – or perhaps in another company – getting squashed at the biggest event of the year in just three minutes, and then getting attacked after the bell for good measure, would be cause for embarrassment in storyline for that wrestler, and a signal that a company has little interest in your upward mobility.

But that’s not this era, and that’s not WWE.

Perhaps never before have wins and losses mattered less in WWE, especially outside the main title pictures. Joe Hendry is the perfect example of this. A surprise opponent for Randy Orton at WrestleMania, Hendry, the TNA World Heavyweight Champion, was disposed of with ease by Orton in just three minutes. After the bell, Orton delivered another RKO to the hapless Hendry. Some took this as a burial of Hendry, some took it as a burial of TNA. In today’s WWE, though, it’s possible it was neither.

The big hint of the latter happened on NXT a few nights later. Hendry inserted himself into an in-ring conversation between NXT Champion Oba Femi and Trick Williams. He talked about having his “WrestleMania Moment,” conveniently leaving out that Orton ate his lunch. When that was brought up, Hendry said that at least he was ON the WrestleMania card.

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Sigh. WWE has created an environment where those “moments” are more important than winning and losing, and there’s no better example of this than Hendry. You even hear wrestlers, leading up to Mania, talk about wanting their Mania moment. Nowhere does actually wanting to win come into the conversation. It’s part of the larger issue of fans investing more in the matches themselves than the wrestlers competing in them; the “This is awesome!” chants instead of actively rooting for one wrestler over another is often cited as case in point. If the fans aren’t given a reason to cheer for someone, if winning and losing doesn’t matter all that much to that wrestler, why should their winning or losing matter to the fans?

At its core, wrestling should be a simulated sport where two foes are competing for victory. Absent that, you have a situation in where fans aren’t invested in outcomes, interference in matches is treated as a matter of course, and titles can change hands without champions being pinned. Frankly, it makes a mockery of the idea that winning should be the A-1 objective of every wrestler that steps through the ropes. Instead, it’s about “moments,” rendering the actually results of matches, and often what happens in them, largely moot.