TERRY TAYLOR Shares His Thoughts on Today’s Wrestling Audience

Fans have access to many behind-the-scenes happenings more than ever before, which is much different than the pro wrestling world Terry Taylor and many other greats broke into. Gone are the days of watching professional wrestling and not knowing the in’s and out’s of what was happening behind the curtain.

Today’s blurb is brought back to life from a long-dead Geocities site (who remembers this host?) called

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Remembering “The Glory Days”… A Tribute to Terry Taylor.”

As pro wrestling history nerds, we tend to scour even the deepest parts of the Internet to find interesting discussion from the past. Perusing that site should bring some of you straight back to the good old days of browsing the Internet around the turn of the millennium!

In the interview, which dates from March 2001, Terry Taylor made some comments that are just as relevant as they were years ago:

“There was a time when people watched to be surprised, to be disgusted, to be moved emotionally…and it seems that the bar gets higher and higher.

What will it take tomorrow to please the audience? It isn’t enough to excite them – they now have the means to find out the happenings behind the curtain, they’re let into the locker room…and ultimately the innocence is lost.

They become jaded from things they were never before allowed to know. Do they have a right to have that access? I think not. They are the audience – they are not part of what we do. Hence the term ‘audience’.

When ECW and some guys – wanting the smart marks to put them over – allowed the audience to become part of the show, the illusion of what we did disappeared in its original form. The audience now dictated what we did, instead of reacting and enjoying what we were offering.

The nature of what we did changed forever.”

With the Internet steadily evolving and access to information quicker than ever before, professional wrestling juggernauts like Vince McMahon have tweaked the product to keep up with the changing times. Whether this tidal switch has been good or bad for the business is up for discussion. Do you feel jaded?

*To enhance your browsing experience on the Geocities interview, we recommend dusting off your old Windows XP desktop computer using an outdated version of Microsoft Internet Explorer!

Related: The Omni Coliseum: Where It All Happened 

Quote above compiled by Matt Pender and shared here with thanks to our friends over at ‘Wrestling’s Glory Days’ Facebook page

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