The Thread Killer

People always go on about the Submission Match between Steve Austin and Bret Hart at Wrestlemania 13 - and rightly so. Jim Cornette has called that the greatest WWF match of all time, and he might be right. However, some people tend to forget about the Austin/Hart match at Survivor Series 1996. In my opinion, that match is almost as good, but people tend to sleep on it for some reason, probably because it wasn't quite as dramatic as the WM13 match. I know some people claim the WM13 match gave birth to the Attitude Era, and I don't know about that, but the entire Bret Hart/Steve Austin feud is classic. It is a multi-man match, but no Stone Cold collection would be complete without the Main Event from In Your House: Canadian Stampede. Similarly, In Your House: Final Four is a Fatal Four Way, but it is another must see Austin match. Also, Austin's match with Shawn Michaels at King of the Ring 97 is excellent, and is everything their WM14 match should have been. You'll notice most of these matches are before Austin had his neck broken in the match with Owen Hart at Summerslam 97. That match seemed to severely limit what he could do, after he recovered. After he came back he had that excellent match at Over The Edge 98 with Mick Foley, and that brawling style pretty much became the in ring style he used from that point onward. If you want to talk really under the radar stuff, I have a couple of suggestions for you. You remember that Austin came into the WWF as "The Ringmaster" and he was managed by Ted DiBiase. Eventually, he transformed into Stone Cold, but there was a brief period there while he was Stone Cold but he was still managed by Ted DiBiase. During that brief period, he had a feud with Savio Vega which I thought produced some really solid matches. Austin himself has said that his feud with Vega was what he felt finally kickstarted his WWF career after he had been floundering. The feud started on WWF Superstars in March 96, when Austin teamed up with Vega against the Bodydonnas for the Tag Titles, and the pairing did not go well for Vega. That led to a match between Austin and Vega on the 03/11/96 episode of Raw, then they fought again at Wrestlemania 12. In April 1996 on Raw, Austin cost Vega the Intercontinental Title by bashing him in the head with the Million Dollar Belt. They fought again on the 04/02/96 episode of Superstars, when Vega donned a mask as "The Caribbean Kid" to screw with Austin. The feud culminated in a Strap Match at In Your House: Beware of Dog. There was some kind of stipulation where the loser had to be the other guy's chauffeur or something. All I remember is that after the feud DiBiase left the WWF and went to WCW, Stone Cold went on by himself, went on to win King of the Ring 1996, and the rest as they say is history.

I pay attention to ratings when it's the first season of a network television show that I like. There's nothing worse than getting into a new TV show and then all of the sudden they pull it because of low ratings. For example, I've never totally gotten over Fox cancelling Firefly 16 years ago...those low-down-no-good-dirty-rotten-filthy-stinking-sons-of-bitches.

Yeah, you're not wrong about that...it's never wise to put too much stock in ratings during the holidays.

Yeah, but Janela is now squawking to anybody who will listen to him that he wants to be taken seriously as a Pro Wrestler, and not just as a hardcore guy. Which is a big ask, considering how much he sucks.

If nothing else, these ratings prove to me that the viewing public don't value the same things I do. I thought AEW made some positive changes this past week (namely the inset promos for the Diamond Dozen Finals, more character vignettes not just long matches, etc.) and they had the superior show over NXT...so of course NXT wins in the ratings. Most of the weeks when AEW won in the ratings, (with the exception of the first two weeks) I generally thought NXT put on a better show. So basically, everybody is stupid except me...and they're all wrong. There, I said it.

Yeah, if Vince "doesn't believe" in getting sick and doesn't allow people to yawn or sneeze, God only knows what he must think of mental health problems.

A lot of AEW fans have been complaining about JR, but I don't see AEW pulling him out of the booth any time soon. From what I understand, Cody Rhodes is a friend and admirer of Jim Ross so barring some major incident, I don't see AEW putting JR out to pasture. One of the funnier things I have read recently was when some AEW fan was bitching about JR on Twitter, and asked Cody Rhodes why AEW had even hired him. Cody responded "because he's Jim Fucking Ross."

A guy wearing a monocle, managed by a woman wearing a bunny mask? I dunno...seems like cosplay to me.

Ugh. I just googled "Jim Cornette Banana" and now I really wish I hadn't. I want to take a steel wool pad to my brain to get that story out of there. Although having read that...it still doesn't explain what the hell Janela was talking about.

Tonight's show really showed how much they need Tony and what a valuable role he plays on that broadcast team. As bad a "Grumpy Old Man" JR can be at times, that's not the only problem. Excalibur talks too damn much. He's not up there in Mauro territory, and at least he isn't shouting all the damn time...but he still doesn't seem to understand how to let the action speak for itself during key moments. It's like he thinks he's calling the match for radio, or something. Having Tony in there really gives that group more personality and makes them much easier to listen to...I think it helps break up the discussion a bit. Besides, Tony's enthusiasm really adds something to the overall dynamic.

I have a question... Not to turn this into the PWO version of the infamous DVDVR Sleaze Thread, and not to be too salacious...but what the hell is up with the banana jokes about Jim Cornette? I remember after his famous anti-Kliq rant on Raw back in 1997, DX responded by eating bananas during an entire segment, which was allegedly some sort of dig at Cornette. And then this week, Joey Janela (who totally doesn't care what Jim Cornette thinks about him) drops this line in an interview with WrestlingInc: "Fuck you Jim Cornette… Hopefully one day, Jim, I can join the other wrestlers in the hot tub while you sit down with…I’m not gonna even go there. Banana Boy! Banana Bitch Boy! You’ve got me riled up. The OVW jacuzzi days, I know about that Jim. The OVW jacuzzi days with the banana boy.” What the hell is that all about? At this point, Janela may as well paint a giant red button on his forehead with a sign saying: "Jim Cornette, press HERE to get a reaction." As much as I dislike Kenny Omega, I have always admired how he generally takes the high road when it comes to Jim Cornette, unlike guys like The Young Bucks, Joey Ryan and Janela. It's pretty much a fact that the best way you can get under Cornette's skin is to make it clear you don't care what he thinks about you, shrug it off and ignore him and his fans. Too bad Janela can't seem to figure that out. Cornette insults him and baits him, Janela responds and the cycle goes on and on... But what the hell is up with the banana stuff? Do I even want to know? I remember reading at The Smarkboard that it has something to do with the details of his divorce from his first wife, but now Janela is going on about OVW so I don't know about that.

Was the "oriental" line during the Women's tag match? I changed the channel during that one...it was pretty much the only part of the show I skipped. What did he say? EDIT: Never mind, I see what he said from earlier in this thread. Poor choice of words, but he probably won't get a ton of heat over that, I wouldn't guess. Mind you the way things are nowadays, who knows. Everybody is one gaffe away from exile.

This. Janela just gave an interview to WrestlingInc., where he said: “I went to many schools and I have a bigger seminar and camp list than any wrestler on the independents, maybe any wrestler ever. I’ve done more with the who’s who of wrestling and I’m perfectly trained and capable of protecting somebody and my track record speaks for itself." Okay. So why can you still not throw a convincing looking punch, and what's with the ridiculous goofy facial expressions when you're supposed to be selling how angry and intense you are? Because those weaknesses are really taking away from his epic blood feud with Shawn Spears, which would otherwise be classic.

The minute that line came out of his mouth, I cringed. I hope JR doesn't end up getting the Cornette treatment over that line.

It will be interesting to see if Jericho/Moxley will be better in AEW than it was in WWE. It is going to take some doing to get the memory of their blood feud over Jericho's torn jacket and Mitch the Potted Plant out of my mind.

JR still has his moments here and there where he sounds like the JR of old. I can't even imagine what it must be like for a guy who came up under Bill Watts in Mid South to watch some of the stuff AEW does, but Ross tries to keep up. In some ways I'm sure AEW would benefit from a younger, newer announce team, but in a sense it's nice to hear JR and Tony calling Pro Wrestling again on television.

Very interesting episode of Jim Cornette's Drive-Thru this week. Normally he just takes fan questions (which seem to be getting progressively dumber the more popular Cornette's podcasts become...he used to get really interesting questions about Pro Wrestling history...a couple of weeks ago somebody asked if John Cena should be in the WWE Hall of Fame) but during this week's episode he used the same format he does for the Jim Cornette Experience. There will not be a new episode of The Experience this week, due to the Thanksgiving Holiday in the States. Cornette responded to more of the fallout from his quitting the NWA in this episode, specifically in three different areas. Firstly, he once again reiterated and emphasized to all the people who keep claiming that he is "finished" in Pro Wrestling due to this joke, that he was already finished because he hasn't worked full time in Pro Wrestling since 2012, and he doesn't want to. This really hurts the whole "Cornette will never work again" narrative that some people are pushing but as proof he goes into great detail about how he has been drastically cutting back on his appearances over the past few years. Even in 2019, he only actually attended a grand total of nine Pro Wrestling shows and he attended even less in 2018 (not counting conventions and fanfests.) Secondly, Cornette issued a rebuttal to Dave Meltzer. I guess Cornette's quitting the NWA was major story in the most recent issue of the Observer. Even though they are friends, Meltzer apparently never called Cornette to get his side of the story or any comment from him. Meltzer also pushed the "Cornette is finished in Pro Wrestling" narrative, and went so far as to suggest that this situation with the NWA pretty much killed any chance Cornette had of working in AEW(?!) This comment almost gave Cornette a stroke. He once again told the story about how he was one of the first people Tony Khan met with when he first decided to form AEW, and how that meeting and subsequent conversations went. The end result was that Cornette could have worked with AEW but made the choice not to do so, long ago. Cornette did admit that if The Revival had ever gotten free of WWE and went to AEW, he would have agreed to manage them for a couple of months, but that was the only scenario where he had ever seen himself working with AEW. Cornette has a further rebuttal to Meltzer's points about Cornette's opinion of modern wrestling. Finally, I guess there have been people trying to claim that Cornette has a long history of getting fired and burning bridges in Pro Wrestling, so he literally goes through every major job he ever had in the industry and recaps if he was fired, quit and if he said "Fuck you" on the way out. It's quite interesting, especially his recapping the end of his time with ROH and his time running OVW. If anybody is interested in hearing any of this, his official YouTube channel has each individual topic broken up into separate videos, so if you want to hear his rebuttal to Meltzer that's one video, or his leaving ROH that's another, etc. It makes it much easier to listen to, especially if you don't want to listen to the whole show.

That's the problem, right there. Like you, I have also read online that at this point, they only have 2-3 matches left from their first set of tapings which haven't aired yet. And they have two weeks of TV left before the PPV. People can blame the Cornette situation for the negative reaction to this week's episode, but Cornette quitting didn't magically make all the matches they had in the can mysteriously vanish. Yeah, they had to probably record over his commentary for that empty arena match, and I assume they are going to voice-over the Cabana/Starks match and the RnR World Tag Team Titles match. He reportedly joined the Rock n Rolls in the ring after the match, which I assume they're going to have to try and cut out or minimize. But even if Cornette was still around, by all reports they just don't have enough content to get them to the PPV. Like you said, @chapstarfall I can see them doing a recap show the week before the PPV, but they sure as shit didn't have to do one this week. It's bad enough that the card for the PPV is garbage, it looks like the TV up until the PPV is also going to be garbage and they're going to lose all of their momentum leading into the biggest show they've had so far, due to bad planning and terrible booking. The only way I can see out of this for them is if the reports online are wrong and they have more stuff in the can than we've heard. Or if they go the route they did with the Eli Drake promo this week and use stuff from Championship Wrestling from Hollywood. Otherwise I guess we have nothing to look forward to but weak promos, bad vignettes and no matches for two weeks. I will check out the show next week, but unless something drastic changes, there is no way in hell I am paying for that PPV, and until they announced the card I had really been looking forward to it.

I am personally struggling with this whole situation. The part of me that is a former Mental Health worker would never take any enjoyment out of somebody having a breakdown of any kind. Quite the opposite. However...if I am being honest...the part of me that is a Pro Wrestling fan, and wants to enjoy NXT and actually watch the show with the volume up? I have to admit I'm not entirely upset by this news. That may make me a terrible person, but at least I'm somewhat conflicted about it?

Yeah, and apparently Corey Graves apologized for the comments he made about Mauro Ranallo on that podcast he does. So I'm guessing he got his ass chewed out. I hope they pull Tom Phillips out of mothballs for tonight's episode.

It's like they taped nine weeks of TV and then figured out on the last day that they needed to book a PPV, and in doing so decided to totally ignore all the angles they had shot over the past nine episodes. And just for fun, they decided to totally ignore concepts like logic or storytelling as well. They could have had a drunk, brain-damaged monkey randomly pull the names on the NWA roster out of a bag and slap them on the table, and it would have booked a better PPV than this.

I don't think this week's episode being garbage was just because of the Cornette fallout. This episode was always going to be just filler. In the interview Billy Corgan did with Mike Johnson a few weeks back, even he sounded unsure how many episodes of Power they were going to get out of their first set of tapings. He said it "might be as many as nine." This week was episode eight, so I'm guessing he was right. They obviously didn't think ahead (which seems to be a recurring theme with them) and I don't think they had enough TV taped to make it all the way to the PPV. I think next week we get the final episode of what was taped, and then I assume the following week we get a PPV preview show. Then they do the next set of tapings right after the PPV for two days. There isn't really any nice way to say it...this week's episode was basically garbage and a complete waste of time. I'm pretty disgusted with Corgan and Lagana right now, because tonight pretty much proved that all that "storytelling" they have done up to this point was utterly pointless. They clearly had no long term creative plan going into this PPV. All that supposed story they built up with Tim Storm and Nick Aldis and Kamille and Latimer and Drake went NOWHERE and they end up giving the Main Event to a guy who lost his last major match on TV, and his title in the process. It makes absolutely no sense. It's like having a murder mystery movie with a bunch of suspects, and then in the final scene you find out the killer was somebody who wasn't even in the story up to that point. They basically spent the last two months jerking us around with angles about Kamille and Storm and Drake and then even Bram...that ended up going absolutely nowhere. Hell, when was the last time Tim Storm was even on the show? Like I said, what a pointless waste of time. The Eli Drake promo was great, and I think Eli Drake is great in general. I get people saying that he sounds like Austin or The Rock or whatever, but he's good at it so more power to him (excuse the pun.) Plus, the guy can go in the ring. Why they're wasting him in this stupid feud with Anderson is beyond me. And I'm not even one of the people who hates Mr. Anderson, but lets be real. The guy was just "okay" at best when he was in his prime, that was quite a long time ago and he's basically been semi-retired for a couple of years now. In the NWA so far he's had to wrestle in a t-shirt advertising his wrestling school in order to try and hide his gut. I will personally be shocked if Eli Drake can drag a watchable match out of Mr. Anderson. They should be focusing on big promos and short matches for Anderson, not putting him in a major angle like this. This is just a waste of Eli Drake. The mini-documentary on Thunder Rosa was okay, I guess. But I don't really care about the NWA's women division because it sucks, and this didn't make me care about it any more. This was basically just filler. It was decent filler, but it was filler. So let me get this straight...they've been building up Colt Cabana vs. Ricky Starks for the past three weeks now, and instead of having them fight at the PPV...they're giving the match away on TV next week and then announcing a different opponent for Cabana's title next week as well? Brilliant booking. Brilliant, I say. I was fine with The Question Mark being a comedy character that got over with the Atlanta studio audience as a joke. I was even fine with them making Aron Stevens his mouthpiece and partner, as a joke. But this week they took the joke way too far. They obviously taped this ridiculous "empty arena" match after they discovered that they didn't have enough wrestling content to get them to the PPV. A couple of weeks ago the Dawsons were tough enough to beat Kingston and Homicide, but now one of them loses to The Question Mark in under two minutes? Brilliant. One thing this match did prove is that Joe Galli is no Joey Styles. He badly needs a color commentator and they'd better hope they find and hire a decent one by the PPV...which I am assuming they won't. This match was a joke but it wasn't ha-ha funny and the post match segment was beyond ridiculous. That segment and The Question Mark angle in general has graduated quickly from mildly amusing to embarrassing. The fact that they're wasting Trevor Murdoch in a match against this guy at the PPV is a travesty. Murdoch should be one of their top guys and the fact that they have him wrestling a fat comedy relief guy on the PPV is ridiculous and outright stupid. If they can't see what they have with Murdoch now, they're a bunch of morons. I really didn't care about the Melina promo. I never really paid all that much attention to her in the WWE and I don't care now. One thing I do find interesting is that they have what could have been a serviceable Women's Title Match in Thunder Rosa vs. Allysin Kay for the PPV. But of course...they aren't giving us that. We're getting a fucking tag team match featuring Marti Fucking Belle. Another example of brilliant booking. And we haven't even got to the episode where the senior citizens win the World Tag Team Championships yet! I loved the concept of NWA Power, and I loved the first 5-6 episodes...but it is quickly becoming clear that whoever is making the major creative decisions for the NWA is a complete fucking moron and has no business booking an independent show at fucking flea market, never mind a PPV. We are in the process of watching this promotion totally shit the bed. What a waste of potential. Cornette is lucky he got out when he did.

I agree, it's kind of a shame it won't be Tim Storm getting the shot at the World Title, because I think there is still some mileage left in that rivalry. I never saw their match at the CZW show back in 2017, so out of their "trilogy" I've only seen the match they had on Championship Wrestling from Hollywood and of course their third match on the debut episode of Power. I think they could have easily had a couple more matches before using the stipulation that Storm doesn't get any more shots at the title. Of all the other available options, I'd most likely enjoy Drake vs. Aldis the most. Although I hope Trevor Murdoch gets another chance to fight Aldis again in the future as well.

So apparently on tonight's episode of Power they are announcing who Aldis will be defending the NWA World Heavyweight Championship against at the PPV. My money would have been on Eli Drake, but after his attack on Ken Anderson, I assume that feud is the direction they're going? The other possibility is James Storm although as I said previously, in kayfabe terms I don't understand how losing the secondary championship makes you the #1 contender for the World Championship...but we'll see. I can't really see anybody else in the picture who they would grant a World Title shot to, especially in a spot as important as the Main Event of their first major PPV. Maybe the Question Mark?

I should clarify, I suppose. I have no issue with cannabis as a treatment for mental illnesses that do not originate as a result of a chemical imbalance of the brain. For example, I do believe medicinal marijuana can be helpful with conditions like PTSD or Social Anxiety Disorder. Even with some cases of depression which aren't caused by a Serotonin uptake imbalance. But as soon as you add THC to a chemical imbalance, in my opinion you're rolling the dice on triggering a psychotic episode, and I feel there is adequate clinical proof of that. Like I said, I've seen it with my own two eyes and it's not a pretty sight.