We have met the enemy, and he is us.

Hi folks;

I don't like golf.  I hate people that play golf.  I hate people that watch golf.  In short, I’m a rabid golf hater.

Consequently, I don't play golf.  And I don't write columns bashing golf.  And I certainly don't devote hours a week to watching golf, just so I can construct conspiracy theories about Tiger Woods "holding down" the other golfers.  And I don't go in to Trekkie Geek Mode over golf, dissecting every round in order to construct half-assed critiques for the benefit of my fellow golf haters.

That said, I ask this question:

WHY DOES SCOTT KEITH EXIST?  (Note: can you spot the perfidious lie on the cover of Scott's new book?  Here's a hint: It's the part where he describes himself as a, get this, "wrestling fan."  Scott cracks my ass up sometimes.)

When I first started the Smarkies, I did it because I’d started to feel like I was the only wrestling fan left on the planet.  Most of so-called “fan” sites on the net are really nothing more than festering cesspools like theSmartMarks, where sub-literate mutants congregate to regurgitate whatever idiocy they’ve read on the Torch that week.

Sure, there were small islands of sanity- ITVR, DrOp’s “and Marking Out” column over at Weinerville, and so on- but for the most part, I’d come to believe that most wrestling fans were sexually frustrated losers, sitting around on their ten thousand pound asses whilst clutching their hearts in homoerotic joy every time Benoit hit a groin-to-ass Suplex on Kurt Angle.

But a funny thing happened.  As my columns started going up, I started getting eMail.

Now, I get a LOT of eMail.  Not surprising, given the nature of the Smarkies.  However, what is surprising is the fact that 99.9% of the eMail I receive is positive.  In fact, I’ve only ever received two, count em’ TWO flames.  And both of them said the same thing:  “You sound like a Triple H mark.”

Ignoring the fact that being a mark is a GOOD thing, let’s address the specific charge.  Am I a Triple H mark?

Let’s look at it this way.  I picked a Raw at random from earlier this month.

Number of times Triple H spoke or wrestled: 3.

Number of times Scott Keith mentioned Triple H in his recap of said Raw: 12.

Oddly enough, Christian appeared more often than HHH in the episode in question, yet Scott barely mentioned Christian at all.

Okay, now you tell ME who's the Triple H mark.  Personally, I think Keith keeps a poster of Helmsley taped over his bed, with a quart of Jergens located nearby.

Over at theSmarkMarks.com (a board that’s somehow managed to attract every lunatic and gibbering moron on the net), Triple H is almost the sole topic of conversation.  Even when Helmsley gets less screen time than Trish Stratus, they go into veritable convulsions of extemporaneous vitriol every time the guy appears on the screen.

And what’s funny is this- from Scott Keith all the way to the most illiterate pre-teen at the Torch , (That’d be “Bruce Mitchell”, in case you were wondering) every HHH basher out there is a WAY bigger HHH Mark than I could ever dream of being.  Hell, they believe every word that comes out of his mouth!   If HHH cuts a promo saying Jericho isn’t main event material, they’re on the net in 0.2 seconds, writing these huge-assed epistles about how HHH is ‘holding Jericho down’. 

Or, to quote Generic Torch Loser #3,653:

“It's almost common knowledge that Vince's daughter Stephanie and her "boyfriend", Hunter, are the ones pulling all the strings backstage at the moment.”

Uh, okay.  These guys have repeated the same lie so many times that they’ve actually started believing it.  Notice that not a single one of them give HHH and Stephanie credit for how great Smackdown has been recently- apparently HHH and Steph only “pull the strings” for BAD angles and matches.

Smell the irony:  Smarks try to tell us that HHH wants to be the sole object of attention in the WWE, and yet it’s Smarks who spend all their time thinking (and writing) about NOTHING other than Hunter Hearst Helmsley.  Hell, to hear Smarks talk, you wouldn’t even know that there’s a little show called “Smackdown” that’s not only 100% Triple H free, it’s also home of some of the finest wrestling ever shown on free TV.  Benoit, Eddy, Rey, Kurt, Noble, Kidman, Lesnar- one of the greatest lineups ever assembled, and who do geeks the "theSmartMarks" spend -all- their time obsessing over?  You guessed it- the man, the myth, Triple H.

Let me explain to all the Smarks out there why HHH and the Undertaker are still main eventing:  It’s because most fans like them.  Yeah, hard to deal with I know.  But see, Vince really can’t spend all his time catering to Smarks.  Since you guys are never happy anyway, it’d be a losing proposition at best.

The WWE makes money from three main sources.  Television, Stadium tickets, and PPVs.   You’d be surprised how little money they make from fat, bitter geeks that hate wrestling but insist on bitching about it out of some weird masochistic compulsion.

Now, regardless of what Smarks repeatedly try and tell us, arena crowds love Taker.  How many times have we read some Net Smark telling us how “dead” a crowd was for a Taker match, when it was obvious to anyone who was actually there (or who had the sound enabled on their television) that the crowd was actually going nuts for the guy?

Hell, Scott Keith just wrote an entire “No Mercy” recap devoted to telling us how stupid and wrong we are if we enjoyed Taker vs Lesnar.  Yeah Scott, it really SUCKS when wrestling fans enjoy a match, doesn’t it?  I don’t know why any of us even bother to watch- we should just read Scott Keith. That way he can tell us whether we would have enjoyed the matches or not.

Another charming personality quirk of Smarks is their conviction that a wrestler is only as good as his position on the card.  Ask any Smark, and he’ll tell you that it doesn’t matter at ALL that Benoit, Angle, Eddy and Rey have been having some of the best matches in the history of wrestling.  No, all that REALLY matters is that these matches aren’t consistently occurring in the last 15 minutes of the show.  Because after all, being in the middle of the card makes you “mid-card”, and god knows that being “mid-card” means your matches aren’t worth shit.

It’s amazing that Smarks, who constantly remind you that the “know wrestling is fake”, spend so much time worrying about who’s hold a fake title, and what part of the show wrestlers are  appearing on.  Me, I can watch Rey vs Angle and enjoy it based just on the fact that both guys are amazing athletes at the top of their games.  But not Smarks.  Nooooo.  They’ll see a Kurt/Rey match, and instead of seeing a great match, all they see is that neither guy is wearing the Championship Belt.  Or that the match is happening at the top of the second hour.  Or if all else fails, they use Scott Keith Bullshit Reason for Hating a Match #7:  They quote the elapsed match time, and then say “Too short to mean anything.”   They’d say this even if the match took six weeks and spanned all fifty states.

In any event, I’ll be back to quoting random smarks in next week’s edition.  For now though, I just wanted to offer a big “thank you” to the majority of wrestling fans, who watch the shows because they enjoy wrestling.  I’d also like to offer my middle finger to the creepy freaks of nature who only watch the WWE so that they’ll have something to whine about.