The Thread Killer

I agree with you. I've never seen Corgan as a money mark. I always considered a money mark to be somebody who had a lot of cash to pour into a (usually ill conceived and poorly run) wrestling organization and then got conned out of their money by people a lot wiser to the business than they are. (See: Carter, Dixie.) Like him or not, Corgan is no dummy and he came into this process of getting involved with wrestling with his eyes wide open. And even if he didn't originally, he ran his own indie for a good while, and his experiences with Panda Energy should have awoken him to the rampant lies and unbelievable con-man level bullshit in this line of work. On top of that, he has spent years dealing with people in the music/entertainment industry, which actually gives Pro Wrestling a run for it's money when it comes to the number of lying con-men per square foot.

Way for Impact to put the statement "You couldn't pay me to watch this crap" to the actual test. I find it hard to believe Anthem is teetering on the brink of insolvency when they make fiscally sound decisions like this one.

Absolutely. If I was in Vince McMahon's position I wouldn't care what New Japan was doing, regardless of who they signed. If those Long Beach shows were any indicator of what New Japan considers as putting their best foot forward in order to make a dent in the American market, WWE has nothing to worry about.

Really? I would imagine that Vince couldn't care less. I can't imagine that he sees New Japan as any kind of competition. In his mind I am betting he thinks they're a professional wrestling promotion which caters to a very selective niche audience, whereas he's in the Sports Entertainment business and "makes movies." He's never cared about what happens in Japan before, has he? I know NJPW is trying to make inroads into the U.S. market, but realistically speaking even if Jericho makes a huge impact there, I doubt it will move the needle much in North America for NJPW. One thing that has really come across from listening to all those Prichard shows is that (if Bruce is to believed, which is a big "if") Vince usually had no clue what was going on in other promotions, nor did he care when he found out. I doubt he's changed his opinion as he's aged. If anything, all signs appear to point to him being even more out of the loop with what goes on outside his bubble.

It's not the tweet that bothers me, it's the mentality that produced the tweet to begin with. What kind of guy actually manages to get signed by WWE, and then decides that it's a good idea to make any kind of joke about somebody (who has been with the company much longer) losing their job? That just demonstrates an almost astounding lack of common sense. There is a good stand-up comedy special out there by Craig Ferguson called "Does This Need To Be Said." Ferguson does a routine where he suggests that before saying something to your wife that could potentially blow up in your face, you ask yourself the following three questions... - Does this need to be said? - Does this need to be said right now? - Does this need to be said by me? If only poor Lio had this dialogue internally before tweeting, all of this could have been avoided. It's pretty much a well known fact outside the wrestling industry, never mind by people who work in the industry, that WWE is fraught with unspoken internal "rules" and political landmines. Knowing that, how could Lio Rush not think making any kind of comment beyond "sorry to hear you got released, all the best" was going to do anything than make him look like Enzo A'more 2.0? Top that off with the fact that his apology wasn't even really an apology, and throw in the fact that poor Lio appears to be borderline functionally illiterate (as humorously pointed out by Jack Gallagher.) I have no sympathy for Lio Rush. Let's dismiss the multitude of stories about his backstage attitude and stupid behavior which are already floating around online as "rumor and innuendo" that cannot be proven. This is the same guy that no sold being powerbombed off a ladder through a table in one of his last independent wrestling appearances, just because he could. The fans didn't like it, his fellow wrestlers didn't like it, but he knew he was going to NXT so he didn't give a shit. The guy is clearly a moron. The actual evidence to prove that fact is piling up.

Yeah, they show some interview clips of him talking about it during the Monday Night War episode that covers Hogan's debut in WCW and his first match with Flair. He basically claims he doesn't know why he and Flair never faced off in the WWF or why the Main Event of WM8 was changed. As I recall, he says something about hearing "rumors" about the reason but claims he doesn't know for sure. Shockingly, I think he might be lying.

I didn't see Raw. Is it true that Finn Balor (who beat AJ Styles at the PPV on Sunday) jobbed to Kane?!

I don't think Jarrett ever went into rehab. Rumor has it that Anthem put the brakes on the Impact/Global Force merger after Jarrett showed up at Triplemania in the proverbial "no condition to perform." The hope was that he'd get his shit together and come back, but he apparently doesn't think he has a problem. After he showed up at that Canadian Indy show this past weekend drunk, and then burned the promoters and skipped out on them, Anthem decided to cut bait and let him go altogether, totally giving up on Jarrett and the whole idea of the Global Force merger. Jarrett has apparently been telling people since that Anthem is broke, which is why they killed the merger and let him go. I think Anthem does have some serious money problems, but I think that just means they are going to relocate Impact to Canada and run the company very frugally under the Fight Network umbrella. Anthem reportedly still wants to use Impact as a means of providing original content for the Fight Network, and they still have the deal with Pop TV. The problem is, they generate next to no revenue. But I think the issue with Jeff Jarrett is that he is having some serious personal issues wrestling with the all too familiar "demons." I think people are starting to become seriously concerned about his behavior lately.

That's a good guess Matt, but for the match to be truly Russoesque, something would have to be suspended on a pole as well.

Booker T just compared Alicia Fox to The Missing Link. Wow. And Gulak only had 277 slides! It wouldn't have been too long!

I can't believe they're cutting Drew Gulak's PowerPoint presentation! This is a bullshit backstage conspiracy!

Maybe Undertaker. Did Austin and The Undertaker even ever work against each other on PPV?

Jack Tunney was obviously never really the President of the WWF. He was just a suit Vince McMahon used as an on-air figurehead during the 80's, when Vince didn't want the fans to know he was really the owner. (The fact Vince was the owner was public knowledge but it never got talked about on TV until after the Montreal Screwjob, really.) Jack Tunney and his uncle Frank were the local WWF promoters in Toronto and used to have an office across the street from Maple Leaf Gardens. I met him a couple of times when I worked for the guy who had a wrestling poster concession at Maple Leaf Gardens. I didn't like Jack Tunney when I met him. I was only 16 or 17 but I remember he was rude and dismissive to my boss, the employees I saw him interact with, and he was even rude to the fans, which is really stupid for a wrestling promoter. I am pretty sure he came from the school of thought that all wrestling fans must be stupid gullible marks. Jack and Frank Tunney also did everything they could to put any and all independent wrestling promoters out of business in Ontario. That's what that book that I link to in my signature is about. There was an outlaw promoter here in Ontario named Dave McKigney and Frank and Jack Tunney were always trying to put him out of business. They were very spiteful and petty about it, too. Jack Tunney was reportedly a notorious cheapskate too, I think the reason Nash disliked him is because the WWF used to always draw huge houses in Toronto to Maple Leaf Gardens, but the payoffs were always suspiciously low. (Having said that, I don't think the WWF ever sold out Maple Leaf Gardens when Diesel was champion.) The guy I worked for told me that the wrestlers all hated Tunney because he was so stingy with payoffs. There were rumors that he used the payoff money to pay gambling debts, and that as soon as Bret Hart became champion in the WWF he used his stroke to get Tunney fired. Tunney had the exclusive contract to run Maple Leaf Gardens for wrestling, which is why the WWF stopped running shows there after Tunney got replaced. Having said that, all that information is just "rumor and innuendo." I know his relationship with the WWF ended on a bad note. His wikipedia page is actually really detailed and is pretty accurate, I think.

That seems to be a huge waste of Angle, doing this with no build. Joe is reportedly cleared to return now, and there are a bunch of other guys on Smackdown they could have borrowed to replace Reigns rather than Angle. I figured we'd be seeing him at some point, but not like this. As far as Wyatt, as much as I loved the other matches he and Balor had on PPV already, and as much as I was looking forward to the debut of his cross-dressing Sister Abagail, the important thing is that he stays healthy. I guess we can make do with Balor vs. Styles in the meantime. This show has gone from "no way I'm watching this crap" to "mildly interesting" on the TTK scale.

To echo what others are saying, I was personally hoping it was AJ. Apparently they started the ball rolling in that direction on Smackdown this week, but I missed the show. As far as where Jinder as champ is ultimately going, who could say? By every estimable metric I can think of, he's been an absolute bust as champion. The fans still chant "WHAT?" during his promos, which indicates they are not invested in his character, and his matches have been mediocre at best and total shit at worst. Years ago, I would have assumed that Vince would look at how he is doing as champ, do the math and get that belt (sorry I mean Championship) off him ASAP. However, this is the newer "I know what you want even if you clearly indicate you don't want it, and I'm going to cram it down your throat whether you like it or not until you learn to like it, or stop watching and stop showing up at the arena and if you do it's not my fault" version of Vince McMahon. So in this case, I assume Jinder will be champion for years to come with no end in sight. I was thinking about this the other day. There are so many "unappreciated" or underutilized wrestlers that some fans dream of getting a big push and making it big. Guys who are supposedly "held back." This is one of the rare cases where McMahon elevated somebody who went on to demonstrate with no doubt that he had been exactly where he belonged on the card before he got pushed. 3MB is pretty much perfect for Jinder Mahal, as far as I'm concerned.

I read that it was meningitis which is no damn joke, that's for sure. Even if you survive it, it can knock you on your ass for up to a year.

If rumor and innuendo are to be believed, Flair has to take a lot of the heat for that. Apparently he was the one who was campaigning heavily behind the scenes to turn heel, as he supposedly preferred working heel and thought he had one good run left as a heel against face Hogan. I don't think he quite understood that people just didn't want to boo him, and they weren't going to do it, regardless of what he did. It actually brings up an interesting point about Flair as a person. He himself has admitted in many interviews that he has suffered from a lack of self awareness and confidence at times, believe it or not. He claimed that when he returned to the WWF in 2001 he didn't want to wrestle and he didn't think anybody would want to see him wrestle. I've seen it talked about in more than one interview that it was the Undertaker who pitched working with Flair at Wrestlemania 18 and Flair couldn't understand why Taker would want to work with him. Triple H said in one interview that he had to sit Ric Flair down when he was pitching the idea of Evolution and "remind him that he was Ric Flair." The fact that Flair wanted to turn heel against Hogan bears that theory out, in a way. It seems that he didn't quite get how people perceive him, which is crazy when you think about it, considering how people are constantly naming him as the GOAT. You'd think he'd actually believe that people think that, even if he himself didn't necessarily agree with them.

Was the LA match any good? Like I said, I don't care what anybody says, that Bash at the Beach 94 match holds up. It's a good match and I don't think I'm the only person who thinks that. Even some other PWO members thought so.

They actually announced that Hogan vs. Flair was going to be the Main Event of WM8. Like on TV, and everything. I remember it very clearly. Then they changed it. Why would they announce it and promote it if it was never really the plan? That sounds like more than a fanboy fantasy to me.

The story I've always heard was that the WWF tried running Flair vs. Hogan on a couple of house shows to try out the match, and that it didn't draw (I want to say this was in San Francisco but I could be wrong) and that the two of them didn't have any in-ring chemistry. Depending on where they tried the house show matches, I can see them not drawing. If they ran Hogan vs. Flair in a northern market where the NWA had little exposure, casual fans might not care about Flair or even really know who he was. I can see that. In Toronto, we only knew about him through the Apter mags mostly. We didn't get barely any NWA TV here at that time. If they tried to run in a more traditional southern market, I can see fans not coming because they don't like the WWF, Hogan, or they thought Flair had sold out by going to the WWF. What I don't buy is the argument that the match wouldn't have worked, due to "bad chemistry" because anybody who saw Bash at the Beach 94 could plainly see that if booked correctly, the match worked fine. More than fine. Go back and watch that, I say it still holds up as damn good match. I know Flair claimed on his WWE DVD that he didn't know why the main event to Wrestlemania 8 was changed, and Hogan said the same thing on the Monday Night War episode that covered Hogan coming to WCW and their Bash and the Beach match. They could be lying, of course. Maybe one or both of them know why they never had a program in the WWF and they aren't saying. You could speculate that neither guy wanted to lose, but if that was the case they could have easily done a screwjob finish - just like they ended up doing in the Hogan/Sid match that actually ended up being the main event of WM8. Plus, Flair showed repeatedly over the years that he didn't have an ego about losing to Hogan. You could argue that Vince didn't think Flair was a big enough name or a draw, but if that was the case, like sek said - why did he put Flair over like a million bucks in the Royal Rumble? And why would he have put Flair in the other half of the double main event at WM8? The fact that they never had that match in the WWF never made sense to me. Does anybody know what Meltzer's theory is? Did Prichard ever cover this on one of his podcasts?

In my opinion this whole thing with the Shield vs. Miz and Company has become beyond stupid. The Shield vs. Braun & The Bar would have been awesome. I don't know why they had to make it a handicap match. I hate handicap matches with a passion. I can't think of one handicap match I ever enjoyed, aside from them being used with enhancement guys to get monsters over. The addition of Kane has done nothing to help this story. At this point, I don't even think I'm going to watch the stupid PPV, that's how little I care about this now.

Maybe, but even in some of ECW's most famous feuds, there were clear good guys and bad guys. Raven was the bad guy, Tommy was the good guy. Raven was the bad guy, Sandman was the good guy. Shane Douglas was the bad guy, Pitbull #1 was the good guy. The lines may have been blurry, but they were there.

And doubly funny, since they are now ditching the Global Force name again.

One of the things I dislike the most about the current product, and one of the things I miss the most about the kind of wrestling that existed when I was a kid, is the lack of clear "good guys" and "bad guys." I know I am out of touch with the current product and I am not suggesting that they are "wrong" in the way they are approaching things (although TV ratings and attendance suggest that could very well be the case) but I just don't like it. I find it very difficult to get emotionally invested in today's wrestling, and to me the quality of the match is only half the battle when it comes to compelling pro wrestling. You have to be emotionally invested to get the full impact of a good pro wrestling match, and I can't remember the last time I felt really emotionally invested in a pro wrestling match. I freely admit that I am probably stuck in the past, nostalgic for a simpler time. Having said that, let's look at other forms of entertainment. The top grossing movies from the past five years are all Superhero and Star Wars movies. If there is a genre of entertainment where there are clear heroes and villains, it has to be stories like Marvel movies and Star Wars. Vince himself has famously said he doesn't promote pro wrestling, he "makes movies." So make a good movie, then. I think wrestling fans would react positively to stories where there are heroes who do good things, and villains who do bad things, if these stories were written intelligently. I think the fact that wrestling has changed so much doesn't necessarily point to an evolution of character dynamics. I think it is far more indicative of a lack of creativity and poor writing on the part of the WWE writing staff. If WWE was capable of presenting well written storylines, I really do think the fans would buy back into the traditional face/heel roles. But it would have to be done right, and I don't think they know how to do that, I really don't. Or maybe they just aren't inclined.

Excellent point, and I think that is another reason why I philosophically didn't agree with this match. What Foley did was special and unique, and it's being diluted and devalued for no constructive reason. It's not like Shane McMahon needs to do stuff like that to add to his illustrious wrestling career. I really don't get the point of his doing bumps like that, other than raising the "stupid bump" bar for no reason. Overall, I thought this was actually a pretty good show, but I have some issues with that Main Event.