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GUEST EDITORIAL
By Mike DeRosenroll
PWTorch.com Reader

Over the past few years, much has been written in the Torch about the deteriorating prestige of tag team divisions. The recent jobbing out of Raw tag team champions Ted DiBiase & Cody Rhodes to John Cena in a handicap match set another new low in this years long decline.

Having grown up watching The Hart Foundation, The British Bulldogs, and the other great WWF tag teams of the 1980s, I would love to see tag team wrestling return to its earlier prestige. However, I don't think this will happen until another staple of 1980s WWF wrestling makes its return as well: the squash match.

Ever since squash matches went out of style in the 1990s, tag team matches have become formulaic and boring. In the middle part of the match, one member of the babyface team gets isolated from his partner and sells for the heel team. Eventually, the babyface gets a hot tag to his partner. This changes the momentum of the match and leads into the finishing sequence.

When was the last time you saw a tag team wrestler get isolated for his partner and, rather than eventually get a hot tag, get worn down and pinned or made to submit? I'll wager it was the last time you watched a tag team squash match. In the pre-Monday Night War era, when most matches on free TV were squash matches, this is how every televised tag team match went. This got over the idea that a wrestler who found himself isolated in the corner of a good tag team was in real jeopardy.

Today, there is no sense of jeopardy when a wrestler is isolated on the opposing team's side of the ring. Fans are conditioned to mentally check out, maybe go to the fridge or washroom if they're watching on TV, and wait for the hot tag. It's a foregone conclusion that the hot tag is coming, and only then does anything meaningful happen. If most tag team matches were squash matches, where the hot tag never comes, it would make hot tags special again. An underdog babyface tag team would seem to be in real jeopardy when one of its members was isolated in the heel team's corner. The hot tag would a real accomplishment worth cheering.

Wrestlers today try to compensate for the formulaic nature of tag team matches by resorting to gimmick brawls where tags are irrelevant, like TLC matches, or ever more extravagant finishing sequences in regular tag matches. Occasionally, great performers like the Motor City Machine Guns, the Briscoes and the Dragon Gate wrestlers that ROH uses as special attractions, manage to transcend the otherwise formulaic nature of their matches with outstanding innovation and athleticism. But the fact that these rare matches are the only tag team matches worth getting excited about these days makes them the exceptions that prove the rule. Ordinary tag team matches are just boring now.

Until the majority of tag team matches are squash matches, most non-squash tag team matches will remain formulaic and boring. There is no way to make a hot tag exciting when it happens in every match. So long as squash matches remain a part of the past, the prestige of tag team titles will remain in the past as well.

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