The Thread Killer

Depending on what they're going to pay, the new XFL and any other opposition to the NFL could potentially really hurt the CFL. The CFL already gets most of the guys who are either too small or not quite good enough to make the NFL. In some circles, they are viewed as a minor league for the NFL. If the new XFL and any other potential new leagues start up, it's conceivable that guys still hoping to make it to the NFL will head there instead.

I'm all about Bruce being combative and being a WWF apologist. It's his gimmick, it's what makes his show a "work" and as I said - if he wanted to try and defend pretty much any of the other stupid crap the WWF/WWE had done, as a fan I'd totally get that. But he has stated he disagreed with some stuff over the past year, and this one particular issue to me is indefensible. I am expressing my disappointment that he either didn't break character on this issue, or he legitimately is trying to excuse it.

I just can't understand why he wasting his time posting here. The man clearly has a gift which needs to be shared with the world. He is so incredibly eloquent, his posts are so poetic and prosaic, I am amazed he hasn't been contacted by a major publishing house and offered a book deal. I can see it now, his first book would be entitled: "oa n cao ak aprpr erorp gofir"

If his Shoot Interviews are any indicator, I can see why Ken Patera isn't in there. I have to give that guy credit, he manages to come across as perhaps the most obnoxious and unlikable Pro Wrestler I have ever seen, when out of character. And that covers a hell of a lot of territory. If he gets in, I want Billy Jack Haynes in too. I will be glued to my television screen with a big bowl of popcorn for THOSE acceptance speeches, let me tell you.

I'm not stupid, I know half the shtick of this show is Conrad busting Bruce's balls and Bruce digging in and being stubborn. I get that. However, I don't think when you're discussing a blatantly (and admittedly) racist angle is a particularly good time to pull that stunt. It means one of two things, either Bruce is using what was a racist angle to sell his own "WWE right or wrong" act or he is actually so thick-skulled that he actually believes what he is saying. Either way, he comes off looking stupid at best and incredibly ignorant at worst. I'd have much rather he tried to justify Katie Vick or HLA, to be honest. I don't care when he pulls his pig-headed routine about Meltzer, or fans second guessing booking, or even pretty much anything else. Why he chose this as an issue to dig his heels in is beyond me. He had to know there would be a backlash, especially in today's social media environment. You could say that he knew this episode would create a buzz and generate controversy (which it definitely has, if Twitter is any indicator) but once again, IF that is the case I find using an angle like this to help promote his show to be poorly thought out, and in poor taste. He should be better than that. He has been, since this show has grown. It annoys me to see him take a step back like this. Yes, he said he didn't agree with the "nappy headed" comment and even implied that was ad-libbed and not written for Triple H. But put that in one hand, and then all the other things he said in the other, and see what general impression you come away with after listening to this episode. If you can honestly listen to this and not come away thinking he was trying to excuse the entire angle, then I don't know what to tell you. I understand what both of you are saying, and I respect your argument. However, my counterpoint to that argument is that this issue is bigger than just what Booker T thought of the angle, if he did or didn't "give permission" for it, or have a problem with it, or even contribute ideas to it. Look at it this way, over the years I have had friends who are black. (I am not going to say African-American, because I'm Canadian, and once in an effort to be sensitive and politically correct I used the phrase "African-Canadian" and my friend almost died laughing.) So anyhow...if one of my black friends told me he didn't care if I made what were clearly insulting and racially insensitive comments towards him in public, even in front of other people - would that make it okay? If somebody else heard me and got upset, would I be able to use the excuse: "He told me I could say that?" No, of course not. That to me is the definition of specious reasoning. It's a question of intent, plain and simple. If you say something which is clearly intended to be racially insensitive, I really don't think you can get around it by getting "permission" - especially if the remarks are made on national television with the intention of being seen by other people. Quite simply, I don't think Booker T has the authority to excuse that type of thing on behalf of everybody. Just because it didn't bother him, it doesn't mean they all didn't know it wouldn't bother somebody. That's not even getting into the hypothetical scenario of what would have happened if Booker T had said he wasn't comfortable with it. I think we can all speculate how that would have worked out for him. Hell, look how it worked out for him when he went along with it. He got a big payday, sure. But I don't think in the larger picture that angle did his career any good, either.

When Anthem hired Scott D'Amore and Don Callis, I was cautiously optimistic that good things might happen for Impact after the new team was in place and got their feet under them. Then the infamous Callahan/Edwards bat incident happened, and I was discouraged. Now, I am wondering if these guys might actually be able to pull something off and make Impact compelling again. They definitely have the brains and experience to do it...I'm still not sure if they will. But stuff like this is a good sign and is the kind of stuff I was hoping to see once they got settled.

Equally sad is when Conrad brings up the fact that it took 25 seconds for Triple H to cover Booker T after the pedigree, and Bruce blows a gasket and actually pulls out and plays the "you've never worked in the business so you don't understand" card. In the realm of Pro Wrestling and Shoot Interviews, that is pretty much the equivalent of Godwin's Law as far as I'm concerned. Exactly. I wish Conrad would have brought up that the next year, two babyface champions won/retained and celebrated in the ring, together to close the damn show.

Those are my exact feelings as well. I can't stand the Young Bucks, I don't really get why other people like them, but you'd be a fool to deny that they are popular. To me, they're the Pro Wrestling equivalent of Nickelback. For the sake of Pro Wrestling as a whole, I think it is actually pretty important that this show succeeds, or at least isn't a total failure (which at this point I don't think it will be.) I doubt I'll ever live to see the day where there is actual viable competition against WWE, but it is extremely important that there are at least visible alternatives. One thing I don't understand, is the hatred of Cody Rhodes by some fans, which in many cases approaches inexplicably vitriolic levels. I've even seen some examples of it here at PWO. Why? Was he pretty bland and mediocre in WWE? Yes. Is his older brother more talented than he is? Probably. Are his in-ring skills average at best? You can make that argument. I can see saying he's passable but unexceptional. Okay. But this is a guy who wanted to be more than what he was, who wanted to honor his Dad (and imagine for a minute trying to fill those shoes) and to push himself and reach the top. Because of his Dad, he probably had a WWE midcard job for life, ala Dolph Ziggler. But he wanted more, so he walked away from guaranteed money to make a name for himself. Whether you like him or not, you have to admit that by all accounts he has succeeded, and that took serious balls. Not to mention, his bleach blond heel "American Nightmare" persona seems infinitely more interesting than anything he did in WWE. But I've seen so many fans crap all over him, because HOW DARE HE think he should be more than a WWE midcarder. I say, if he manages to overachieve, more power to him. I don't have to think he's the second coming of Ric Flair to admire him for trying, and I certainly don't want him to fail.

I don't have a huge issue with the ads on Prichard's podcast, honestly. The have the right to make money from this thing, and it's not like listening to the show is costing me money. It's free entertainment, and if I have to listen to a couple ads then so be it. As a fan of the show, the past few weeks have been rough for me for different reasons. I actually forced myself to listen to the entire Shawn Michaels in 1993 episode, and by the end I wished I hadn't. The first problem is mine, I suppose. I don't get Shawn Michaels. I am not for one minute saying he wasn't talented, you'd be a fool to say that. However, I do think he is vastly overrated. Yet for some reason, there are those people (and Bruce Prichard is one of them) that think this guy is actually the greatest Pro Wrestler of all time. As a result, we get almost 6 hours worth of Prichard's show based on only three damn years of Shawn Michaels' career - and you can make an argument that 93, 94 and 95 weren't even his best years. I think that much content would be overkill if he was talking about just about anybody, never mind somebody I don't like and don't want to hear about. I ended up tapping out, I couldn't listen to the second half of the show, the 94/95 episode, I just don't have the stomach for it. I can put up with a hell of a lot of Prichard's spin doctoring, but not that much and especially not for Shawn Freaking Michaels. The SNME watch-along was just okay. There were some repeated technical issues which I found annoying, but it was inoffensive if not unremarkable. Even if you didn't like it, what it lost in quality it made up for with expediency. I don't think it was even 2 hours long, which for that show is a sprint. However... If you want a good laugh, you have to listen to this week's episode on Wrestlemania 19. During the show, Conrad Thompson questions Bruce Prichard on the now infamous build-up to the Triple H vs. Booker T match at Wrestlemania 19. If you don't know what I'm talking about, Booker T won a Battle Royal for the right to challenge Triple H for the World Championship at Wrestlemania. Triple H then cut a promo on Raw where he claimed that nappy headed people like Booker T were only good for dancing, and "people like him" (wink wink) were beneath being WWF Champion. A couple weeks later, Flair tells Booker T to put on a chauffeur cap and carry Triple H's bags, and Triple H throws a dollar at him. This (justifiably) caused a huge backlash online, so much so that WWF.com had a columnist (under a pen name I assume) write a column defending the WWF for delicately tackling such a controversial subject as racism. The WWF.com article noted the long history of racist angles in wrestling history, and pointed out that Triple H was a "bad guy" and was going to do that kind of stuff...but it didn't matter because of course he would get his in the end. Which, of course he didn't. Quite the opposite. WWF.com later pulled down the column defending the angle. I had a copy saved on my Hard Drive for years, along with my response in what ended up being the very last wrestling column I ever wrote, back when I wrote at 411. I lost that too, when my portable Hard Drive died. But the WWF.com column existed, even though they erased it. Point is, the angle happened and it was unquestionably racist. There really is no way any sane, sensible person could have seen the build for that match and think the story wasn't race related. On this week's show, Conrad Thompson brings this angle up and even reads Triple H's infamous promo word-for-word. Guess how Bruce Prichard responds? a ) Claims the quotes are "taken out of context" (even though Conrad read the promo in it's entirety) b ) Claims people didn't understand the angle. See Triple H was talking about former WCW wrestlers, not black people. (All WCW wrestlers were "nappy headed?") c ) Totally ignores the fact that the WWF admitted at the time that originally the angle was definitely written with racist overtones. d ) Claims wrestlers like Booker T were perfectly fine with these kinds of angles, and may have even suggested them or contributed lines. e ) Claims Booker T couldn't beat Triple H and get revenge for any of this - because Lesnar was going over on this show, and they're both faces. f ) Dances around the issue like a motherfucker, refusing to admit it was awful. g ) All of the above. If you picked "G" you win. I was mildly surprised to see Prichard go into full blown WWF apologist mode for this, simply because he has admitted on this show that he hated when Bischoff simply handed Triple H his own World Championship months before, and he was quite detailed in his description of how he didn't care for the Katie Vick storyline which had happened not that long before this either. I figured if he's willing to admit that Triple H shouldn't have been handed World Titles for no reason, and that the Vick angle was repulsive, maybe he'd admit how horrible this was...but nope! You really have to hear Prichard try and argue with Conrad about this. I'm half convinced the whole thing was staged, because he can't possibly be that clueless.

There were theories about heat between Conrad and Flair?! Those guys love each other...and Conrad is marrying Flair's daughter for gawd's sake!

I had literally never heard of this before reading about it here.

Yes, I just recently watched the Kayfabe Commentaries "Supercard" shoot interview about Wrestlemania 2, featuring King Kong Bundy. In that interview he mentioned casually that they contacted him about going into the Hall of Fame and he gave the impression that he has no interest in it at all. I got the impression it was a while ago that they asked him, as well. The two things that come across loud and clear in that interview is that Bundy has some serious issues with Vince McMahon still, and that he really doesn't care about Pro Wrestling in general. He mentioned how he felt McMahon lied to and took advantage of the wrestlers back in the 80's, paying them only a fraction of the money they were earning for the WWF. Bundy has a list of financial grievances with McMahon where he feels he was prevented from earning all the money he could have, and claimed McMahon did it out of spite. He also talked about how he got into wrestling because he had wrestled as an amateur and because he was big, but he never followed the sport growing up and didn't love it like a lot of other guys did. He gives the impression he basically got into the sport to make money and that was it. He's an interesting interview, but his memory is pretty bad. He couldn't remember details about a lot of things you'd have thought he'd be able to remember since he was involved. I think it was because he honestly didn't pay that close attention because he didn't really care. Also, he is one of the prototypical "you have to be over 6 feet tall and weigh over 300 pounds to be a wrestler" guys, so he shits all over people who are smaller than he is like Chris Jericho and Randy Savage, for example. He's a funny guy, but you can tell he gives exactly zero fucks about Pro Wrestling or getting into the WWE Hall of Fame. I'm sure if they wrote him a big enough paycheck he'd show up, but I doubt they would.

That was even more frustrating in Canada, because when I did see a good match on an NWA show we never got to see the end because WE'RE OUT OF TIME FANS! And they didn't run house shows here, so I didn't see my first NWA show until 1990.

I'd like to think most fans with half a brain now see that Reigns is damn good. As has been discussed (at great length) most of the fans who boo him now don't even really have a legit reason to do it. Sure, I can see booing Cena, who is stale, formulaic, stale, wooden, and quite lame. And also stale. But at this point, I think people who are still booing Reigns are just doing it out of stubbornness. I don't think they're going to stop booing him, no matter what. Unless WWE starts booking him correctly. Which they won't. That promo last Monday was pretty damn good, and he did turn a portion of the crowd, no doubt. But I don't think WWE has finally figured out how to book Reigns as a face, because I really don't think they know how to book a babyface anymore, at all.

If I plunked down $30.00 for a house show ticket and got a 30 second Main Event, I'd be pissed. I don't care what the justification might be or if it's part of the some planned "booking." It's bad business, plain and simple. If people paid money to see Brock Lesnar wrestle live, and got a 30 second match they got ripped off and you shouldn't rip off your customers. It's very possible this was for some cutesy reason that WWE intends to work into their new "Brock is lazy and is just here for a paycheck" narrative to get Roman Reigns over. But what message does that send to the fans who bought tickets for that show? WWE can get away with doing stuff like this because they have no competition and a core fanbase that will put up with stuff like this no matter what, and come back for more. But that doesn't make it right. Then again, the other side of the argument is that if you paid your hard earned money to see Brock Lesnar fight Kane and you were expecting to see anything even remotely entertaining, you may have brain damage and you deserved to get ripped off...but still.

Exactly. You have to appreciate it in context. I only started watching WWF TV in the early 80's and even then, the shows were pretty much nothing but the big names against enhancement talent and lots of interviews with the occasional good match thrown in. And even in those cases, it was usually done to start or advance a feud or story of some kind. I never watched the weekly shows on Saturday morning expecting to see good matches. But those shows did sell me on going to Maple Leaf Gardens every three weeks, for years. It's actually quite interesting how the whole business model of wrestling has changed over the years, where the main purpose of TV used to be to get people to go to house shows, where they could see the real matches. Now they give away practically everything for free on TV or for a minimal charge on the Network. I'm amazed they get any house show business at all.

I think his post is actually an improperly formatted haiku.

It's not just Loss that pushes this idea, though. The one thing that has cemented me on the "Vince McMahon is behind everything" theory, is listening to Something to Wrestle with...Bruce Prichard. Nobody has had more experience working with Vince, nobody has had more exposure to the WWF/WWE creative process and nobody has told more of the secrets about what goes on behind the scenes than Prichard has. If I've learned anything about the way that organization works (aside from the fact that Hogan Must Pose) it's that what Loss says is true. Nothing makes it on TV unless it has Vince McMahon's fingerprints on it somewhere. Sometimes it's minimal, sometimes it's total, but it's always true. Just last night I was listening to Jim Cornette's Drive-Thru, and Cornette (another person who has experienced Vince's management style up close) was talking about the three month period in 1995 that Bill Watts worked in the WWF. Cornette claims that everybody was told that Watts was brought in to run the "wrestling" end of business to free up time for Vince to run the business end. Apparently this is not the first time Vince has been convinced to try this, in order to avoid spreading himself too thin. Vince supposedly just couldn't resist micro-managing Watts to death, to the point they both agreed to get the hell away from each other ASAP. Loss is 100% correct on this theory. There are too many former talents and agents/producers who have confirmed this theory for it not to be true, in my opinion.

Oh my brother...

The whole "availability of the WWE Network in Canada" issue was quite a debacle for a while. We discussed this back here if you check that post and read onward, you will see that as a Canadian WWE Network subscriber, I too thought that I was limited to just the TV channel, (which for a long time, I was.) Then WWE finally got off their asses and made the full Network available to all Canadian customers just like they do for everybody else, with the added bonus that the live stream is available as a TV channel via your cable provider. So I get the normal network through my laptop, the stream as part of my TV service, and some (very) limited On Demand content via my cable box. I never even knew they upgraded the service for Canadians until a fellow PWO member (The Duke) let me know in that thread. Now I watch whatever is on the live stream live on my TV when it happens, but for most of the On Demand content or to do a watch-along with a podcast or whatever, I use my laptop.

Did you hate it so much that you're doing a live blog about it over at Segundo Caruda?

I am pretty sure Meltzer also made a specific quote in 1994 that Sabu was better than Bret Hart (at that time) which I remember upsetting a lot of people.

Thanks. I don't mind a watch along once in a while. One of my favourite thus far, because it was one of the funniest to me, was actually the XFL. If you say it is good El-P, I will go back and check that one out. I am still slowly working my way through the archives, and I tend to shy away from the earlier episodes. I have listened to a lot of the older episodes, but not all. The XFL is one I have not yet heard. If you say it was funny, I am going to check it out.

You know what, you may be right. I assumed that I ended up seeing it on Coliseum Video (as I did with a lot of big shows back then if I couldn't see it on Closed Circuit we had to wait for the video) but in retrospect, thinking back I'm pretty sure I remember what happened. Of course, this is 30 years ago now. Damn, I'm old. I remember reading in the newspaper (no online news back in 88) about the Royal Rumble being in Hamilton, plus they talked about it on the syndicated weekly WWF TV shows, but we couldn't see it in Canada, and I specifically remember myself and my friends in the time bitching that we couldn't see it. I had a friend in High School who had a Satellite Dish, which was crazy rare back in 1988. This was back when having a dish took up half your backyard, seriously. He was a fellow wrestling fan (we met because he came up to talk to me when he saw me wearing a Jake The Snake t-shirt) and told me that because his family had a satellite dish, he could get wrestling from all over the United States. He used to lend me tapes of World Class and Mid-South (UWF) which was amazing at the time, because the only exposure I had to them was through the Apter mages. I remember how awesome it was to see the Von Erichs live for the first time, World Class was so different from the 80's WWF. You're right, I'm pretty sure the way I ended up seeing the first Royal Rumble was through him lending me a tape of the USA broadcast, not from Coliseum Video. I do know for sure there was no way to see it on television here in the Toronto area.

This is embarrassing. Turns out it was a Firefox problem. There was an automatic update, after which I could no longer view art19, and (as it turns out) the WWE Network for some reason. Wasn't even my ad blocker either, I already had those disabled on those sites. I'm not even sure what extension or add-on is doing it, but when I checked art19 using a different browser, it worked fine.