For me match quality is very important because that's what I want to see. When you watch wrestling for over a decade, it takes very specific things to keep you coming back and that's what typically pulls me in. That's why I go out of my way to see indy promotions occasionally and that's why I still watch old matches from the 70's and 80's. There's nothing wrong with that at all.
However that being said, match quality is seriously not important at all in order to make an event excellent, to make a rivalry excellent, to make a story excellent, to sell tickets, to get wrestlers over, make them and their promotions successful, to further their careers, and to gain respect. Not even remotely. And the wrestlers who actually went that extra mile every single time they were in the ring to cater to fans like me who appreciate serious wrestling clinics, people like Flair, Steamboat, Bret, Michaels, Savage, etc... God bless them. But that's never been what drives the business. Ever. And any "real wrestling fan" understands that, regardless of what they personally get their fix on. If match quality was the most important aspect, ROH, New Japan, and probably even Dragon Gate would rule the wrestling world and that's obviously not the case.
Take for instance, one of my favorite matches of all time is Shawn Michaels vs. Steve Austin @ Wrestlemania 14. Most people wouldn't even rate that match ****, yet it was amazing to me because of everything that went into it, what it meant to professional wrestling, how it changed an era, and the fact both Michaels and Austin were both seriously injured and yet still gave everyone who bought that ppv or attended the event in Boston their money's worth. That was a very special match to me and I don't care what any Meltzer fan boy fuckhead thinks about it. Does that make me any less of a "real wrestling fan" or less-knowledgeable of the product I follow simply because I liked it more than Savage/Steamboat at Wrestlemania III and Owen/Bret at Wrestlemania X? No it doesn't.
Fact of the matter is that match quality is great for furthering the entertainment quality of professional wrestling, but some fans today just get so hung up on it that they want to pretend it's all that matters, when frankly I would go as far to say that it's about 5% of it, if even that. It's very remote. Story is 50% and presentation & spectacle is the other 45%, especially the wrestler's entrance which is a bigger part of the business than any fan is willing to admit. That's why when I saw Big E Langston slapping chalk in his hands on Monday, he really just struck me as the biggest loser in wrestling because it didn't say anything besides "Hey look... CHALK! Ahhhh!" and that's the stupid character the fans see throughout the entire match. A loser. But if all that is as good as it can be, you can have the worst match ever and still achieve a classic. *cough* Hogan/Andre *cough* Hogan/Warrior *cough* and so on. And the whole freaking Attitude era was flooded with terrible matches and they were the best years of wrestling period.
So frankly I think it's preposterous to slander any wrestling fan that doesn't whore themselves out to match quality because quite frankly, they might actually understand the business more than you. If you only like matches that last longer than 30 minutes and receive critical acclaim from marks who do the star ratings reviews, that's fine. But don't run other fans down simply because they appreciate the bigger picture more than match quality. If those same marks ran a wrestling promotion, it would go bankrupt in a matter of months because most of them don't have the smallest clue what makes something about wrestling truly great. And that's something I'm dead serious about. I actually think a 9-year-old who has absolutely no knowledge or reference as to what match quality even IS, who probably can't name more than 4 moves, would stand a better chance of booking a wrestling promotion simply because they're all strictly focused on what's really important and they don't feel obligated to appreciate trivial things that most of us older fans do by nature.
