Marks/Smarks

By Scott Keith on August 23, 2012

I was just thinking about something I saw written on a message board (perhaps even you or someone on your blog made this observation but I can't remember for sure) a little while back and wondered what you thought. Wrestling might be the only sport/form of entertainment/business that openly derides its fans for liking their product. They basically lump you into two camps; mark or smark and neither is flattering. If you like the product, get behind the storylines and buy stuff, they call you a mark. If you look at the product with a more critical eye and don't automatically accept what they give you, you're thought of as some basement dwelling, Hot Pocket eating, Mountain Dew drinking, no sex getting Lewis Skolnick. Could you imagine any other business doing that to their fans? For instance, if Mark Zuckerburg openly came out and said, "I can change Facebook all I want and the marks will still keep coming back!" or if Roger Goodell said, "Stupid smarks. They just want to bitch about everything when all I'm trying to do is prevent concussions. I'm not running this league for a bunch of internet geeks anyway." Interested to see what your take on this is and what the other Blog of Doomers think.

Mark Zuckerberg has basically been doing exactly that for a couple of years now.

I think that to a certain degree they're getting better about it because the current generation of guys came along after the carney mentality had basically been flushed from the business by WWE's in-the-bubble indoctrination system. That being said, have you READ most of the comments on the website or Twitter? Wrestling doesn't exactly attract a highbrow, well-spoken crowd. Wrestling has a weird fanbase dynamic of self-hating outcasts following a sport made up of self-hating outcasts, and it always has.

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