The Undertaker says modern wrestlers are great athletes but they “forget storytelling”
While speaking with Chris Van Vliet, WWE Hall of Famer The Undertaker was asked, “What’s that piece of advice you give to up-and-coming wrestlers now?” Here was Undertaker’s response…
“I try to get them to calm down a little bit in the sense of all of the crazy—I’ll call them flippy-dos and stuff like that. Wrestling is dangerous enough. Within the course of any match, you’re always just a couple inches away from something really catastrophic happening. And when you start doing double back flips off of things and landing on people, that risk goes up exponentially.
This level of athlete that’s out here today is by far the greatest in the history of our industry. But what happens is they kind of forget—they forget storytelling.
Storytelling just isn’t about the angle that the booker comes up with. Storytelling is how you do your matches and the things that you make a priority. I try to focus on getting them to do things athletically, aggressively, but also make sense if you’re a fan watching it.
‘Cause there’s a lot of things you watch and you just go, ‘They lose me.’ Because they’re trying to do something that they physically can’t. And even if they can, our audience is so fickle sometimes. Like, after you’ve seen a—let’s say I’m going to make this up because I don’t know what the name of it really is—but you see a double back flip half twist gainer onto somebody on the floor and you’ve seen it two or three weeks in a row, and then you’re kind of like, ‘Okay, I’ve seen that. Now, what do you got for me?’
You make your job harder as opposed to making the character means something. You know, trying that—get the character to evoke some kind of emotion, whether good, bad, or indifferent. That’s the key to long-term, is having people invested where they want to see you win, lose, beat somebody up, get your butt kicked, you know.
There’s a fine line, right? There’s a fine line between the athleticism and the storytelling aspect. I try to get the young guys to just think a little bit more about the storytelling.”