Ricky Steamboat Breaks Down On What Goes Into Wrestling Psychology

WWE Hall of Famer Ricky Steamboat was recently interviewed by Ring Rust Radio. You can check out the full interview at this link, and check out submitted highlights below:

Ring Rust Radio: You've been praised throughout your career for the psychology of your matches by making sure things were done that made sense and fit the narrative of the match. When you watch matches today, is there somebody you feel does a great job following in your footsteps?

Ricky Steamboat: Well you know, we have a lot of guys at the training grounds there and we have a lot of guys that even fight on the independents circuit. I’ll say there’s a lot of good athletes out there, but the key thing that I see missing is being able to put it all together in order to tell a story. In every match you can tell a story. There’s a lot of guys that do a lot of stuff over the course of a match and none of it ties together or makes sense. I’ll be doing a seminar on Saturday and a lot of my focus is on telling these guys how to tell a story in a match to which storytelling in a match get your fans involved. If you can get them involved in what story they are trying to tell when your match, it just makes it all the easier. All of us are in the entertainment business, regardless if you’re doing wrestling or rock ‘n roll or whatever, you’re out there performing and you work for the response from the fans. I know a lot of guys that get responses from the fans and it’s only because it’s a spot and doesn’t tie into the story. I feel that makes you a real pro in our business if you’re out there to get the response from the fans but at the same time you go out there and are able to tell a story in your match, I focus a lot on that. I’ll give you real quick example: I have two guys in a championship match on an independent show. They came up to me for some advice and I said, “Look you are the two best at this company has to offer. I want you to go out there and tell a story that this is a championship match. At the end of the match you come back to see me and I’ll let you know.” So, at the end of the match they came back and there were standing there with their chest stuck out, walking into the locker room and they asked what I thought? I told them their match was all over the place and that it was not a championship match. The guy says to me, “Whoa, what do you mean by that?” I told him the object of the game is you have the good guy here, the babyface is the champion, you’re the heel, and the promoter decided to change the championship, switch the belt, and put it on you. So, I look at the babyface and tell him that what you are trying to do in the story is you’re telling us that you’re trying to hold onto this championship and you the heel your trying to get it from him. There were several times during the match in which you drop some big bombs on the guy but you didn’t cover him. Like the Jake Roberts’ DDT and respect to Jake Roberts, if you do a DDT to a guy and you’re trying to win his championship and everybody knows that that was a finish hold from one of the best psychologists in our business and you don’t even cover him? What kind of story are you trying to tell in that moment? They looked at me and thought, “Wow, that’s right. I did a big move on at him and I didn’t even cover him like I was trying to beat him.” It’s all about that when I teach: why you do it, when you do it and the reason behind it. So those guys walked away and they did do a match that there were so many holes in it and I pointed them out to them and I hope at the end of the day moving forward, they would apply some of the things that we talked about.