goc

Konnan is a good pick. It doesn't matter if they were over. Rufus R. Jones was over in places. Ox Baker had to have been over somewhere. I can't think of any good Konnan matches, at least not any that he directly contributed to.

Just watched this. It was really stupid but it did make me laugh. Mostly at the fact that WWE even went through the trouble of copying this angle a few years later with Raven shredding Perry Saturn's Moppy. Now I'm watching the nWo beatdown on Rey, then Konnan. And by the end of it the fans are chanting "We want Sting." They aren't chanting Goldberg. And there has been absolutely no mention of Sting for the last 2 weeks as far as I can tell. I find this amusing because while Hogan was doing his promo earlier I kept thinking they needed to go all the way 97 with it and show Sting lurking in the rafters. After watching The Giant's departure, I can't help but think that was really one of WCW's worst decisions. They just threw all that money at Bret Hart the year before, when they didn't know what to do with him, he didn't really fit in the main event at the time while making main event money, almost solely to take him away from the WWF. Well The Giant is a guy right up Vince's alley, 15 years younger than Bret, and would have fit perfectly in the main event from the beginning of the nWo storyline if they knew what they were doing. They could have probably kept Giant and Jericho for what they paid for Bret and not only kept WWF from making those two even bigger stars but kept two young guys they could build into their own top stars. I really wish that Vince would have ripped off this angle with Eric Bischoff being bumped down to ring boy. I'd love to see someone yelling at Vince while he's putting up ring ropes.

I wanted to start a thread about guys who had lengthy careers (at least 10 years) and had consistent runs at or near the top of the card who consensus says was outright bad. I want to leave out someone like Bruiser Brody from the discussion, and focus on guys who even at the time were thought of to be bad by people in the business. My first example for a guy like this is Ox Baker. He had a great look with the eye brows and the facial hair, was somewhere around 6'5 and 350 lbs but from everything I've ever seen or heard about him he was absolutely terrible in the ring. Reading his bio here: http://thelegendaryoxbaker.com/bio.html and it sounds like he was also involved in what could have been some really terrible tag teams as well. He won tag titles with guys like Scandor Akbar, Big John Studd and Superstar Billy Graham. But he was also a guy that was always near the top of the card and had probably close to a 20 year career. So unless someone wants to come along and defend Ox Baker, what other guys fit this mold? I'm thinking along the lines of Rufus R. Jones, Tiger Jeet Singh, those types.

Thought this was an interesting review of the Mazer book, if only because of this person's apparent struggles in separating fact from fiction in dealing with Tom Zenk:

I've seen Sharpe labeled as "mis-used" by WWF from time to time and I just want to say after seeing him have a run in Memphis, he was used right at his talent level. The guy wasn't very good. Watching him and Jimmy Valiant have a long match from the Mid-South Coliseum was a real chore.

Bam Bam might be the only wrestler that had a long career whose best matches were in their rookie year. According to wikipedia he debuted in CWA (Memphis) in the summer of 86, the latest of the 3 Memphis matches that I pimped was in March of 87. I can't think of any other "name" wrestler where I think you could argue the same thing.

Dylan have you seen the Memphis set? I might put the two tags with Lawler up on youtube if you haven't seen them so you can see a kind "what could have been" on Bam Bam.

That's the same thing I said. And until anyone comes along, as far as I'm concerned the best match of his career was the Texas Death Match with Jerry Lawler. Either of the tags with Lawler against Idol/Rich are acceptable substitutions. If anyone disagrees, for the sake of comparison here is Texas Death Match w/Jerry Lawler: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnaGaZSbTno Part 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1P5fRcgVfA Part 2 I couldn't find the two tags on youtube.

I will say that while I said Bigelow didn't have very many good matches, I have seen almost none of his ECW work. If I were to guess I would say he probably WAS putting out better matches in ECW than anywhere else because his style was much more suited to ECW, because I said earlier I thought his strength was hardcore brawls.

I don't want to come off as anti-Bigelow, or act like I think he was "bad" but I don't think he was particularly good or one of the "best big men ever" either. He's a guy who had a great look, was a great athlete and could do some really impressive things but never actually seemed to put it all together. The best matches I've ever seen him in were from what's probably his first year in the business when he's having a Texas Death Match with Lawler or teaming with Lawler in what were essentially hardcore tags against Austin Idol & Tommy Rich. That's what I mean with my "staying in Memphis" line. In Memphis he was going to stay near the top working with guys who were more apt to work around his strengths, and probably more importantly, he'd have a lot more out of control brawling matches. That was his strength and it wasn't something he could really do once he got to the WWF. *I'm hoping a mod can break off the Bigelow discussion and put it into a Microscope thread.*

Never going to happen. I'm sure part of the deal they did was WWE having final say on who inducts him. After all the stuff they gave up, I still can't see them giving that up.

I thought he was usually getting a lot of that information from people in the cable (and I guess satellite too maybe) industry.

If only Bam Bam had been satisfied making $600 a week and stayed in Memphis then we could be talking about him like an all time great. Unfortunately he had to go and wrestle with people other than Jerry Lawler and be exposed as a guy who has all the physical tools but never seems to actually have a good match with them.

Goldberg couldn't feud with the nWo at this time, he was injured after putting his fist through the window of the limo remember?

The funniest part to me is when Bruno said on the Observer podcast that he never heard anyone tell anything bad about HHH, he only heard good things about him. Corporate as hell already. I've always heard that Triple H doesn't drink or use drugs, not even painkillers (all anabolic steroids were obtained with a prescription, of course). That could be the "good things" he'd heard about Triple H. Yea Nash talked about on his shoot how Triple H doesn't, and never did, do ANYTHING. He's telling a story about passing around joints and making everyone smoke them on their last night and HHH was the only guy that got a pass.

I think it would be less notorious if it led to a satisfying payoff of Goldberg running through the nWo to get revenge and the title back.

I realize that. What I am saying is that if the WWE Network includes PPVs it would almost have to cost $50 a month or else they are kind of giving PPVs away. And I think that the potential customer base willing to pay $50 a month for the WWE Network is probably largely made up of people who are already buying their PPVs. And thus, I don't see how they can create any new revenue with this.

I don't see how they can make money on this if they offer every PPV but WrestleMania as part of a package. Unless it's just like WWE 24/7 used to work where they show the PPVs on like a 2-3 month delay. They would either have to do that, or price it at like $50 a month and then they would only get the people who were already buying every PPV anyway.

Horace may not be very good but I'm interested to see, if I keep watching, if he keeps trying as hard as he did in his Nitro match with Benoit where he shocked the hell out of me with a pretty good looking suicide dive.

I just watched the first Nitro of 1999 and finally saw the whole thing in context. I did think it was actually really well executed. There was really no indication at all that the swerve was coming and then they really milked it during the Goldberg beatdown afterwards, even handcuffing Goldberg and spray painting him. But I still understand the initial hatred because it kind of does feel like a big reset button.

I bought a hard drive almost specifically for WCW and have barely even watched any. I feel like jumping in and watching along but then that might sour me on going back and watching 1997 when it was still really good.

I might try to join in for this one. I wanna make sure there's at least one person to hate on Mad Dog Vachon and pimp Dino Bravo in that tag.

Totally not against buying wrestling footage, but something like one episode of Nitro is really easy to find, and much faster to watch using the power of the internet.

Ahh the infamous Al Snow eats Pepper angle. Call it bad booking, and it was, but man Al and especially Bossman try their best with what they've got to work with. Maybe that's the bigger problem with today's booking is not so much that it sucks, but that guys are content to just go out and do the "god look at this shit they want me to say" delivery instead of trying to make the best of it.