goc

Having seen some of the same stuff from Ivan in 83 Georgia, there is enough there to make you think he might have a case if there is more footage. He's clearly past his physical prime in 83 but he works so smart and has such good matches on TV that you really wish you had more arena footage of him and from earlier in his prime. In the current era it doesn't mean as much to say a guy has good matches on TV, but when you are watching early 80s footage it makes a guy stand out a lot more. Especially in a place like Georgia where even the squash matches could have a tendency to drag and get dull.

So I have been watching some Southwest Championship Wrestling lately and WOW does Tug Taylor absolutely suck. Seems like a viable candidate here.

Of course Reigns can't have that match with anyone else, there is no one else who would be that believable to completely maul him. But that doesn't mean it was all Brock's match, not even close. To say Brock could have had that match with "a dozen other people" really undersells just how good Reigns was at selling and how hard he brought it when he was on offense. I mean, imagine Dolph Ziggler in that same match and not only is Dolph doing silly cartoon bumping in between just laying there and pretending to be dead but he would be contributing absolutely nothing on offense that would look like it could even make Brock Lesnar feel pain much less hurt him.

In an amusing story, when they brought the future Zach Ryder & Curt Hawkins as the fake relative team of The Major Brothers, apparently Vince didn't know for a long time that they weren't actually brothers. Apparently when Vince finally found out he said they needed to come up with a new gimmick for them because you couldn't fool people like that anymore.

soup why in the hell are you throwing Cena into the old dudes retiring match??

I am really torn about the IC title thing now. I like the attempt but I just feel like the title was too devalued for too long that it's just not going to work. A lot of the guys feuding over it now are former World/WWE Champions like Ziggler, Bryan, Sheamus. The current IC title scene is just the former World Title scene but the WHC felt like a lot less of a step down from the WWE title than the IC title does right now.

I'd rather watch two big guys have a "slow, lumbering match" in front of 70,000+ people screaming their heads off than 2 dudes doing a bunch of flippy dos in front of 50 people chanting how awesome it is. Even more than that, I'd have liked to see Andre pile all those 50 people up and sit on them.

Didn't know about either of those but I am positive I don't want to see any Killer Tim Brooks in 1986 after seeing him in 1983 Georiga Dutch Mantel worked as Dutch Bass, the kayfabe brother of Ron Bass in the Gulf Coast territory during the mid 70s. Possibly Central States also, I know they teamed there but not sure if it was as brothers.

I am really torn about the IC title thing now. It really has just turned into the World Heavyweight title since the Unification and on that note, I feel like this stuff would feel more important if the belt they were fighting over WAS the WHC. It just feels like you're devaluing the wrestlers more than bringing value back to the IC title when you have so many former World/WWE champs battling over it.

I would be down for seeing Brock in a MITB match if not just for seeing him smash multiple people at one time.

This is exactly what happened last year after Wrestlemania, with the rise of Cesaro, Rusev, The Shield guys and Wyatt all at the same time, the company had to give up on Cesaro and put guys like Ambrose and Wyatt on the back burner. And then to complicate matters it seems like everyone has their different supporters so who is getting pushed seems to depend on who was able to get in Vince's ear the most that week and the company rarely ever seems to truly commit to a guy. Even when you thought they were committed to Roman Reigns & Rusev, it doesn't feel like those guys are trending upwards at all now after Mania.

I'd like to see him against Cesaro somehow. Even though that wouldn't really be a good opponent considering how far down Cesaro is from where they want Reigns to be.

WWE put themselves into a real bind by waiting so long to create new stars that now they have so many that are somewhat on the verge but there isn't enough to feed all of them so some (or hell maybe all of them) are going to wind up getting starved out.

From what I read he asked for his release. I would imagine he saw the writing on the wall and realized he was never going to get called up and decided to move on.

It feels like so many people who comment on the current ratings are doing so solely in comparison to what the ratings were in 1998 and 1999 which is totally unrealistic and completely ignores how much the TV landscape has changed over that time period.

Not every single post everyone makes on this board is going to lead to further discussion, that's not realistic. There is very much a value to posts that don't deserve responses. No one responded to my post about Dutch Mantel working as Ron Bass' kayfabe brother in Gulf Coast but I have to assume at least one person found it interesting to read.

Goldust on jobber duty on Raw seems to confirm that his feud with Stardust is already over. I was hoping maybe they were going to go back to it after WrestleMania. What a huge waste. They could have done a lot of fun psychological stuff with Cody going down the same road Dustin went down in the late 90s and Dustin failing to save him from a descent to madness.

"Well Loss and I didn't like them" doesn't feel like a very good reason to kill the Comments megathread when a ton of people clearly DID like it and were using it. I still don't see how that won't have a big effect on all the random tidbits you'd get from old observers & people's random watching. I will right now post 5 random posts from that thread that are truly "comments that don't warrant a thread" that will now just be things that no longer have a place to be posted here: "Watching the January 17th 1983 episode of Mid-South. If you have Andre, Ernie Ladd, the Samoans, Dusty and the Junkyard Dog in town at the same time you know that some restaurants made a years worth that evening." "I often wonder if Wahoo was either mildly annoyed or if he didn't care that most of the wrestlers referred to him as Wahoo McDaniels instead of Wahoo McDaniel." "I know the CMLL world heavyweight title doesn't mean that much, but it's still kind of amazing that in all of wrestling the first father/son combo to win the same world title is Super Porky and Maximo. " "So I'm watching the terrible Southern Boys/Master Blasters match from Havoc '90 solely for the finish and Cornette and Heyman sniping on commentary, and early on the crowd breaks out in a brief but loud "LOD! LOD!" chant for the Blasters. People are visibly laughing and pointing at them. Yeeeeouch." "Watching some Gulf Coast from the 70s today and I just saw a match with Dutch Mantel working as Dutch Bass the kayfabe brother of Ron Bass. I had no idea Dutch and Ron worked as a kayfabe brother team." I suppose one could argue that the board wouldn't really lose anything by losing those posts but I wouldn't agree with that at all.

Lawler coming out later and them both STILL standing behind the tipped over table for the rest of the show was beyond stupid. Are we to believe that only Brock Lesnar would have the strength to turn it back over?

It was easier to be hopeful about things getting better when it seemed like they were just too incompetent to do anything right, especially since there are always little flashes to tell you SOMEONE there at least knows what they are doing. Loss' theory seems disappointingly plausible even if it is a mind numbingly stupid way to keep your company from making more money. Now someone just needs to explain The Producers aspect of it.

I never really felt that way and it was one of the topics I followed most closely. Most things brought up there only really illicit 1 or 2 responses anyway. Sometimes you might have something to post that really won't generate discussion but that is an interesting note or observation. I went through all my posts in the Comments megathread since February and they were: A link to a Buxx Belmar match where the finishing stretch is built around a used condom, a quote from Gary Hart's book about referee Rick Hazzard being cut up by the Yakuza while on a trip to Japan, a post about Abdullah the Butcher working babyface in Montreal and a post expressing surprise at seeing Austin Idol in Montreal footage due to his fear of flying. I wouldn't even contemplate making a thread for those posts if there wasn't a catch-all for stuff like that. The only post I could find that might have been topic worthy was another quote from Gary Hart's book that included a financial breakdown of the costs of running a territory that I thought was very insightful. I don't think anyone even responded to the post though.

LOL at calling that debacle "a really good match"

It would have worked but Cena would have actually needed to apply some pressure for once.

I think this is going to have the opposite effect of what you want and lead to less discussion instead of more. Making a new topic is far more daunting a prospect than simply dropping a random thought in a megathread. Anything worthy of more discussion in a megathread can just be moved out into it's own topic. I'm not gonna start a whole thread about the interesting tidbit I read in a 1993 Observer. It fit perfectly in the Comments megathread though.