[The CyNick]

Originally Posted by Tom Guycott Their own fault, really. When you reinforce for years and years that nobody should give a shit about a cruiserweight/light heavyweight/smaller guy in general, then you *suddenly stress* that they are now supposed to be taken seriously, people aren't going to buy it overnight. Hell, look how long of a gap between having passable matches in the Trish (after she improved remarkably) and Lita era of women and the current product with multiple women who can actually go and are allowed to. A chunk of that time was spent relaying the message that you weren't important to the show unless you had a penis, and as a result, we had horrible 1 on 1 with shit workers and 12 on 12 clusterfuck tag matches that half of the participants just stood on the ropes "looking pretty" (which may or may not have actually been the case). The only times I can recall the division being presented as serious pants business is when a) WWF tried to build a LH division around TAKA... and then seemed to forget about it in a couple of months, and when Gregory Helms was a champion without a division... so it fizzled out in a couple of months. Historically, "cruiserweight" calibur guys quickly descend to jobber, a comedy act, or Heat/Jakked/Metal/Superstars duty (or essentially all the same hell), and decades of that has conditioned the crowd to think that only. Now, youre suddenly asking everyone to not only take them seriously, but devote an additional hour of an already self-saturated market to watching them. Its a big ask.

Yeah cuz they never treated Rey Mysterio or Eddie Guerrero like top guys. Take a lap bud.