David Hunter
The term Smart Mark (or Smark) relates to somebody who thinks they know the business while being a mark (or fan) of the product and is most commonly associated with the wrestling business. The roots trace back to the carny days when con men would look for marks to fool and take their money.
I came upon AOL’s Wrestling area around 1995 and by 1998 I had become a “smart mark” thanks to various sites with their own breaking wrestling news usually copied from Pro Wrestling Illustrated or Dave Meltzer’s Wrestling Observer. My days as a fan thinking that guys really hated each other and that the wrestlers were legit competing with the referees acting as the enforcer of the rules or lack thereof had vanished by the time I was 10 in 1995 and eroded completely by the time I was in my mid-teens.
So with almost 15 years of experience as a “Smart Mark” here is what I have decided are the top 4 flaws as a result of transferring over to the dark side of the fandom.
Number 4: You spoil yourself silly
This was more frequent when the WWF would tape shows and air results but is still prevalent today when they tape Smackdown on Tuesdays and air them on Fridays. I would read spoilers for every single show, read up on every cameo and ‘surprise’ appearance, as well as future angles. What I ended up losing was the sense of true surprise and being floored when something happened. As a fan, I wasn’t surprised that Steve Austin was going to win the WWF Title in 1998 because I was ‘smart’ to the business and knew Shawn Michaels had a bad back and would likely retire. So there was no drama at all during the match. I’d lose out on surprise returns for the Royal Rumbles and surprise draft pick changes (back when the brands were split) because I was hip and had read them via spoilers. I’ve gotten away from reading spoilers for actual shows now but still have my nose sticking into news.
Number 3: Workrate and the 5* Match becomes the end goal
A lot of the internet and smart marks have long appreciated the talents of wrestlers such as Dean Malenko in WCW and the ‘Smackdown 6’ era (Eddie Guerrero/Chavo Guerrero Jr/Edge/Rey Mysterio Jr/Kurt Angle/Chris Benoit) and tend to laud those talents as the be-all end-all of the wrestling empire. They applaud the wrestler who goes out there and brings the in-ring ability at the expense of the big man who can’t pull off the technical feats due to sheer size. They laud the ‘psychology’ of the matwork and trading of holds over the sheer all out ECW style brawls that go around an arena.
They ignore the fun characters of a Crash Holly as Hardcore Champion or the great characterization between AJ/Paige in their current feud because those two are divas and divas automatically can’t wrestle unless they are in Japan. They favor the solid workmanship of a modern day Undertaker and deride his performances in the early 1990’s because his gimmick didn’t ask or demand that style of wrestling.
I’ve always been a fan of the characters first and even as a mark I could appreciate a great match (2 Cold Scorpio/Chris Benoit from a SuperBrawl was one of my earliest memories of this) but at the same time I unabashedly loved the Shawn Michaels and Hulk Hogan and Ric Flair type entertainers solely for their ability to talk and their showmanship.
Number 2: Opinions of certain writers become ‘law’
Once you get onto the internet, there are people who have reviewed matches and rate matches and score them with star ratings such as our own Sage Cortez or your Dave Meltzer’s and Scott Keith’s. As a “smart mark” you lean on the big names to lend credence to matches due to their star ratings and the herd quickly ascertains that a certain match sucked or was fantastic based on whom they follow rated it. I’ve seen great matches given just *** and awful matches given **** or even higher. Very rarely do the “smart marks” grade their own matches on their own scale of enjoyment. That word of law also extends to wrestlers where liking somebody like a John Cena can set off a storm on a message board or disliking somebody like an Eddie Guerrero is tantamount to kicking a puppy and throwing it down a well. The opinions tend to all blur and homogenize together into one of cohesiveness for the community while ridiculing any outliers.
This also extends to backstage antics and lets what happens on television get colored due to backstage news that broke such as Shawn Michaels supposedly refusing to put Vader over at Summerslam 1996 just months after he won his first ever World Title and after a huge storyline was played up that it was Shawn’s dream.
Number 1: You can’t ever become a mark again
You can cut out the spoilers and the news but you can never, ever become a mark again. If you’re lucky, you may be legit surprised sometimes and get taken with a wrestler on the screen because you don’t know they are an utter jerk backstage. At the same time, you can’t enjoy it as much because there will always be that niggling thought in the back of your head that ‘this isn’t right’ or that the angle is ‘too good to be true’ such as Daniel Bryan’s title win at WrestleMania. When something appeals to you, you start looking for clues that it could all be sabotaged at the drop of a hat and wins and losses suddenly matter. Maybe your favorite superstar wins a huge pay per view match but then loses a couple weeks straight on Monday Night Raw. Suddenly your favorite star isn’t just a wrestler who’s losing on television now, he’s become a guy who’s gotten his “push” cut off at the knees or is getting “buried” by being paired up with a particular wrestler whom keeps getting wins over him. Nothing is ever going to be what it was. That, by far, is the biggest flaw to becoming a Smart Mark.
