Shane Helms Should Leave Social Media

For your own good, shut up.
Photo Credit: Share TV

"TMZ, a site that profits off the mistakes and downfalls of human beings. How proud they must be. What a bunch of maggots." - Shane Helms, post Matt Hardy's arrest, via Twitter

I read both reports TMZ released about Matt Hardy's arrest and firing from Impact Wrestling. Believe you me, I have no great love for the Thirty Mile Zone, but there's no doubt that sometimes, they do good reporting. This is one of those cases. I get that Helms wants to defend a friend from attack, and believe me, there are some baseless attacks on Hardy out there, but at the same time? He doesn't seem to treat the trolls any differently from people who have constructive criticisms.

"I'm just saying don't JUDGE someone you DON'T EVEN KNOW over a situation that YOU DON'T KNOW ABOUT! Maybe worry about YOURSELF first." -- Helms.

Hmm... sounds like potentially sage advice. I think Helms should follow it himself, given that he wrote a screed about a situation he pretty much knew nothing about, at least firsthand (even if he probably does know both Matt and Nick Jackson since he worked for PWG this year).

Seriously, it's okay to pontificate about respect, but when someone shows a blatant lack of respect for innocent people (and let's not get pedantic here, just because Hardy crashed into a tree and there was no one else on the road at that exact moment doesn't mean that he magically had respect for everyone else by driving impaired), we have to shut up because it's his friend? I'm not buying that. While his intentions are probably decent, Helms just comes off terribly here because he's lashing out at the wrong people. He's acting like a know-it-all, and here's a guy who's had his share of dust-ups that seriously damage his credibility. Whether it's trying to justify the situation by bringing up the fact that he was hit by a sober driver when he was a kid or retweeting someone trying to deflect from Hardy because of the bloodshed sparked by the overthrow of Moammar Gaddafi in Libya, all he's doing is bringing more light and heat to a situation that really doesn't need any help garnering attention.

The thing about drunk driving/impaired driving is that more often than not, odds are someone who comments is someone who has been affected by it either way. One of my dad's friends got nailed for drunk driving after getting into a pretty bad accident by driving the wrong way on an exit ramp onto I-95. Admittedly, my parents were both kinda ticked at the punishment he got, which was light even looking back at it now, but all things considered, I'm glad he did have to go to jail. It turned his life around. But he still really fucked up the lives of a whole family. Other people have been impacted by a drunk driver killing or injuring people they know and love. So, I'm pretty sure that this is a situation that people know a lot about, even if they don't know Hardy personally.

"Just because you support someone doesn't mean you agree with EVERYTHING they do. It just means you're there for them." -- Helms.

I don't want to seem like a heartless asshole here. I sympathize and empathize with Helms here. He wants his friend to get better, and I think his heart may be in the right place here. That being said, his head is certainly not. If he wants to truly help his friend get better, he should stop combating with "keyboard warriors" as he's saying and really put the pressure on him to get the help he needs. Then again, are we sure Helms has gotten the help that he needs himself? I mean, he's still recovering from a nasty motorcycle accident that was caused by his own negligence through impaired operation of a moving vehicle. I'm not sure he knows that what Hardy did was wrong, because it's not clear whether he realizes what he did in the past was wrong.

That's why I feel like he needs to quit Twitter and Tumblr and focus on getting his life back into order as well as helping his friends get their affairs in a row. Three of them have problems (counting Jeff Hardy in this bunch as well) with substance abuse, and if they don't help themselves and help each other, they're going to hurt someone real bad, whether it's themselves or someone innocent. Stop worrying about "the dirtsheets". Stop worrying about "respect". Stop worrying about "having boundaries". Stop worrying about your careers. Start worrying about your health.

Until then, all they're doing, Helms especially it seems, is riling up people for no other reason than to get riled up all while ignoring their own problems as they slowly claim their lives and livelihoods.

Wrestling High School, or Why I Don't Wanna Hear about Who Disrespected Whom

Centers of a firestorm that I wish I'd never known about

There's a reason this is the first time you're going to be reading about the supposed disrespect shown by the Young Bucks towards Booker T. It's the same reason why I don't follow Joey Image on Twitter anymore, or why I bristle at people who retweet his "YOU NEED TO RESPECT THE BUSINESS" BS rhetoric. I hate hearing about treating this mythical thing like the "business" with a fake layer of respect that's been propped up by guys who never fully left high school. I also don't want to hear about how people I generally like - and I like both the Young Bucks and Booker - bristle and act like assholes over feeling entitled over respect or being portrayed as disrespectful, whether right or wrong.

Granted, I haven't come to say that these wrestlers need to grow up and that they need to get out of this mold that respect is earned through tenure, not through deeds and demeanor and whatever other happy horseshit code they abide by. It's as old as wrestling itself, and hey, if that's how they want to conduct their business, then hey, good for them. I don't want Undertaker coming to my office and telling me how to conduct business there. Even if I think how they conduct their locker room code of ethics or respect or whatever is pedantic and childish, it's their business. What they do behind closed doors is what they do behind closed doors, and there's a reason why I'm an engineer and Booker Huffman and the brothers Massie both went into the wrestling business.

But that's the thing. If Booker didn't take to Twitter to put the Bucks on blast, then I wouldn't have known about it. If Rob Van Dam hadn't slammed the Bucks for "disrespect" before they left Impact, I wouldn't have known about it. If the Bucks and their brother Malachi hadn't responded in kind on social media, I wouldn't have known about it. Now, we're inundated with this wave of "he said, he said" accounts to incidents that maybe shouldn't have been big deals in the first place. Furthermore, you get Booker and Malachi carrying on to the point where I unfollowed both of them.

It's bad enough when the dirtsheets report on this kind of thing like it's news, but they can be ignored because hey, unless they have primary, neutral sources who are able to be named transparently, it can be dismissed. But when you have the people themselves taking to Twitter to fight in an attempt to curry favor with the masses, it gets right in your face, and you have to deal with the reality that people you enjoy on television can be assholes, or at the very least, they can be fool enough not to keep their dirty laundry contained within the confines of their locker room.

That's what gets me about people like Image. They want it both ways. They sanctimoniously preach about how we fans need to stop being disrespectful when we refer to wrestlers by their real names or (in what is the most hilariously preachy and wrong example) when we predict how a match is going to go, (and it's not just Image who does this, a lot of mainstream wrestlers do too) but then they carry on in public, either airing dirty laundry or weighing in on dirty laundry. I mean, if referring to a wrestler by his real name is disrespectful and invasive of their privacy, what does it say when they throw those otherwise private issues into my face? I would say that airing your own dirty laundry, or even worse, commenting on someone else's is far more damaging to this imaginary respect than would be if I referred to these men by their real names₁ (which aren't exactly secret anymore). When Shane Helms is posting passive-aggressive blogs piling on the Bucks, detailing why "RESPECT" is so important, that's giving everyone a peek into the backstage world of these people, one that by all accounts, we should not be allowed to see. So, which way should it be?

Personally, I would much rather try to stuff the toothpaste back into the tube and go back to a world where the wrestlers handled their business internally and didn't blab to interviewers or take their fight to Twitter. Especially in the case of the Young Bucks and the people they may or may not have disrespected, I don't know whose side to take, mainly because it's all based on hearsay. When you have disputes between two parties, and no one's really there to witness, that's all it is. I don't know either party in this case personally either, so why should I feel the need to judge like I do? For all I know, RVD and Booker could be onto something. For all I know, RVD and Booker could be full of shit and have really fragile egos, taking something innocent the Bucks did and misconstruing it because they feel like they're owed something. But the thing is I don't know, and I'll probably never know.

And the whole not knowing thing? I think I liked it better that way.

1 - If you take that as an explicit endorsement to refer to guys by their real names, congratulations, you've missed the point completely.

Photo Credit: Scott Finkelstein - Please visit his site to view the plentiful amounts of pictures he's taken for DGUSA, ROH and other indie feds: Get Lost Photography