Jingus

For "underwhelming": it wasn't immediate, but Tazz's WWE introduction comes to mind. They did a rehash of Jericho's Millennium Clock deal with Tazz's orange "13" symbol, except it was way too soon after Jericho debuted and wasn't executed nearly as well. The outcome of his first match seemed to indicate that he'd be pushed as a top guy, beating Kurt Angle's undefeated streak and all; but even in the match itself, something looks kinda odd if you watch it with today's eyes. Tazz has to do a hell of a lot of selling in his big debut, and I think Angle suplexed him just as many times as he Tazplexed Kurt. Having the suplex-heavy midcarders Angle and Benoit who already did Taz's stuff (but did it better) didn't bode well for him fitting in on what was already an overstuffed roster. And then they tried to make him a hardcore brawler in the Bob Holly mode, and it was all downhill from there. Taz's entire gimmick in ECW was based around the fact that he was the only guy who didn't swing chairs or dive off the top rope, but the WWE quickly turned him into just another guy who swung aluminum weapons and jobbed to Crash all the time.

Intergender wrestling is just fine, and we should have more of it. Women should contend for every title. Is it seriously less credible for Awesome Kong to be "world heavyweight champion" than Rey Mysterio Jr or some of the other tiny lil' fellas that have held those belts? Around here, that's not against the grain at all. That's just how Japanese wrestling is documented and written about. They list things by simple date, much more often than by a collection of made-up show names. It's much more accurate and clean a system than saying "that Thunder that happened a couple weeks before Uncensored that one year".

And there's plenty of examples of older male wrestlers who did the "childlike" gimmick at older ages; Eugene and Festus were only in their early 30s when they did those gimmicks, but their hairlines made them look middle-aged at the very least. The audience still bought it just fine, those guys were over. Hell, you could argue that Hacksaw Jim Duggan has been playing that kind of character for the past three decades. But Goodear's right about the current main-show WWE not knowing how to do "fun" characters well. Just look at how consistently they've mishandled Cena's kid-friendly character for so many years now. It's sad that the Attitude era seemed to condition everyone into expecting that most wrestling characters are violent sociopaths who despise all other human beings and have such short tempers that you literally can't leave two of them alone in a room without a fistfight breaking out. The whole sense of fun is sadly missing from today's gimmicks; you don't have anything like, say, Giant Baba's ear-to-ear grin when he's getting his shit in.

A glance at his Cagematch match list suggests that he ain't exactly fond of laying down. He doesn't have a recorded pinfall loss in the past ten years. And the few Vader matches I've seen in the last few years have all featured Leon squashing the shit out of whoever his opponent was.

The problem is that 99% of indy promoters really aren't good enough to book it. First of all you've got to have the money; most independent promotions don't even have the cash to bring in Ospreay, let alone Vader. Wherever you book it, you've got to pay for at least one really expensive plane ticket, maybe two of them. Then you've got to work out both guys' schedules and find a time which is open for Vader, for Ospreay, and for the building that you're promoting. And unless you've got the smarkiest audience on the planet, it's probable that the crowd won't care about the whole thing unless one of the guys is already a regular veteran of the promotion. And even assuming all that is do-able, THEN you have to talk both guys into putting their bruised egos away and doing proper business. And since logic would dictate that "proper business" means "Ospreay goes over" considering that Vader almost certainly won't be returning to wherever this happens, good fuckin' luck getting THAT to happen.

That's my thought too. It's become too big a story for someone not to cash in on it. Assuming of course that some clever promoter can talk Vader and Ospreay into doing proper business, of course.

Yeah. I appreciate that he's basically trying to do a Mutoh/Muta gimmick, but he does need to try to change up what he does in the ring when he's playing his alter-ego.

Number of matches on the card is also something worth counting; including time for entrances, one thirty-minute match sometimes feels a hell of a lot longer than two fifteen-minute matches. When I was working smaller indy shows, five matches was considered the bare-bones minimum for any paid show; anything less than that (outside of special events like fair shows) was considered a ripoff. On the longer end, eight or nine was generally the upper limit; except for special occasions, like if you were taping a month's worth of TV in one night or something like that, those marathons could stretch on for four hours or more of mostly shorter matches. Also: intermissions really matter, and it's one of those things which a lot of shows don't manage very well. There's nothing to make your ass ache like having to sit through half a fucking hour of a single intermission so that the promotion and the workers can shill every piece of merchandise on the planet in order to drag the last penny out of every single customer. And then they'll do it twice in one show!

Another vote for LCO vs Kaoru/Watanabe, one of the most insanely vicious things I've ever seen. And I'm sure others will mention it, but both the early Shawn/Taker and Mankind/Taker Hell In A Cell matches warrant mentioning. Also the Dibiase/Hacksaw match from Mid-South where the cage was only one of half a dozen different gimmicks they used in one match, but it was still pretty awesome. I'll mention an obscure little favorite of mine, which was the main event of ECW Heatwave 1996, a six-man tag match in (and out and around and on top of) a steel cage, with Tommy Dreamer teaming with Sandman and Terry Gordy to take on Raven, Brian Lee, and Stevie Richards. This was one of those cool "mix ALL the storylines together in one match" epics which only ECW ever did in this fashion, making things feel so much more epic than they really should have. Sandman still wanted revenge on Raven for brainwashing his young son Tyler, Tommy Dreamer still wanted revenge on Brian Lee for being chokeslammed off every tall platform in Philadelphia, and Terry Gordy wanted to murder Stevie Richards just on general principles. But then the different wrestlers all had their own interwining reasons for why each guy on each team hated all the others. And then also getting involved were Tyler and Lori Fullington, Blue Meanie, Nova, Beulah, Kimona, and Missy Hyatt; but somehow it all made sense as you're watching it. The entire first half of the match is practically a musical, as Sandman, Gordy, and Dreamer all have their entrance theme keep going for a bizarrely long time while the action is happening. It's a crazy spectacle: people are caned and chairshotted and fall through tables, children are threatened, women are strangled, it's all just good dirty fun of the type which ECW specialized in delivering.

I wonder if a lot of indy promoters are still stuck in the mindset of the DVD era. The reason why companies like IWA Mid-South would fly in thirty outsiders and then proceed to have six-hour-long shows (in front of a hundred people in the audience) was that the vast majority of their income was from video sales, and the biggest longest shows tended to be the best-sellers. A lot of the other superindies must have operated the same way. But does that make sense in the streaming age, when video sales are down and everything is so much easier to pirate?

Eh, I get the reasoning. "So wrestling is fake, huh? Tell it to THIS guy." It lets them do some more Jim Ross-style bragging about the legit athletic accomplishments of their employees. And like everyone said, it opens the door for crossover stuff with Rowsey or whomever. The more surprising thing is that Brock's apparently healthy enough to do this again. I always heard that the diverticulitis had basically ended his career as a shootfighter, and he was medically incapable of ever giving 100% again. And even if he stepped back into the dojo for training the very next day after Wrestlemania, three months is an awfully short turnaround time to get ready for a big-money PPV fight. It's been almost five years since his last one. ...I wonder what Punk thinks about this?

If it's the same one that was making the rounds fifteen years ago, yeah I have. It's much more of the same stuff, and well worth the six bucks. Steamboat goes into a lot of detail like he did in Bix's piece, including an extended discussion of the difference between "registering" (that is, selling a move's pain as soon as it happens) and "selling" (selling the pain long-term through the rest of the match).

Damn fine interview. I especially love the details on stuff like the number of chops you wanna throw during a comeback, that's the sort of deep-cuts psychology that most veterans seem unwilling or unable to talk about in public.

Watching the match right now: I don't see the problem. The gif'ed portion makes complete logical sense in context. Yeah, a few parts are overly cutesy and contrived; but like everyone else said, welcome to the past twenty years of cruiserweight wrestling. They're certainly showing a hell of a lot more fire and charisma than lots of movez-based spotfests ever do. There's a genuine sense of competition between the two of them. Incidents of no-selling are kept to a minimum. And they clearly had that crowd 100% in the palm of their hands at every moment. Of course there's flaws, Rick's hand strikes have always been his worst weakness and Ospreay needs to work on hiding his calls (but even that at least shows they didn't script the whole thing in the back), but this is a perfectly good match which clearly drew some money and isn't making any huge mistakes.

"Exposed"? That would imply that nobody else has ever complained about any of that at any point in the past two decades.

Anything which is a one-and-done occurrence on free TV, taking place entirely in one segment, which doesn't go past a single commercial break, always feels like people are trying too hard when they immortalize it in Wrestlecrap legend. My favorite example being the infamous Trish Stratus/Jackie Gayda match; way too many people remember that as being one of the worst minus-five-stars matches in wrestling history, when in reality it's less than three minutes long and everyone is just remembering two particularly horrible botches. Heck, most people never even remember it was actually a mixed tag with JBL and Chris Nowinski. Regarding gimmicks: I tend to think they do indeed qualify for Crapitude when they were those stupid "part-time wrestler" characters. "He's a plumber/repo man/hockey player/male model/race car driver/garbageman who moonlights as a professional grappler!" is just fucking dumb. It's counterintuitive, the focus of the persona is based on things which can never really be explored and expressed inside of a wrestling ring. And it sends the subconscious message that any ordinary slob can get in the ring and be competitive with the real athletes. And if you've already got a lucrative career which is such a primary focus of your life that you would constantly reference it in your wrestling side-job, then why the hell are you even a wrestler to begin with? It's like those guys who have a coward gimmick or a narcissist gimmick where they spend the whole match desperately trying not to get hit even once, there's no logical reason why such a person would deliberately choose to participate in an activity where they're inevitably gonna get smacked around.

I didn't see the fight, but I drove up twenty minutes afterwards and heard it directly from everyone who did, wrestlers and fans and non-fan-bystanders alike. The short version is: they bumped into each other at a restaurant next door to the building, words were exchanged, they stepped outside, Teddy offered a handshake, Punk bitchslapped him, Teddy drilled him with a couple of punches and knocked him down, and then other wrestlers ran in and broke it up as Punk was trying and failing for a leg takedown while Teddy was trying to kick Punk's head right off his shoulders. Teddy is no joke in a shootfight, he's a lightning-quick muthafucka who knows every single trick that grandpa Stu could teach you to hurt someone with. As for Punk... well... that's probably why he's spending years training before his first fight, as opposed to someone like Lesnar who practically woke up one day and said "hmmm... I feel like almost-beating Frank Mir tomorrow".

Jim Duggan and Super Crazy as a tag-team in 2005 WWE. Or, Road Warrior Animal and Heidenreich as a tag-team in 2005 WWE. Or, Tatanka and Matt Hardy in 2005 WWE... damn, that was a weird period for the company.

Unbelievably, Cagematch lists 44 matches for him in 1992. Sure, most of them were six-man tags where he would mostly just lean on the ropes the whole time, but even walking to and from the ring must have been pure hell.

Not really that bizarre. I remember hanging out one time with a family I hadn't met before; at one point in the conversation, someone mentioned a white friend of theirs had been assaulted by her black husband. One of the women just nodded and said "That's what you get from consorting with (N-WORD)s" in total dead-serious sincerity. She was a wrestler's wife. These people really do still exist. This was in the year 2002 or thereabouts. Just look at all the people today who still whine about how great the Confederate flag is. Wrestling's primary audience in America has always been lower-class white people, and you're inevitably going to find a certain amount of racism among that demographic. Around 2003, I was once managing an evil heel vampire-ish Batboy-looking creep of a guy, against a good-looking clean-cut athletic black babyface who had a generic "heroic sportsman" gimmick. In support of the disgusting blood-drooling Hot-Topic-wearing heel, one of the old redneck ladies in the crowd screamed "WHY DON'T YA GO BACK TO AFRICA, YA FUCKIN' (N-WORD)!" at the babyface. And nobody else shouted her down! There was a brief moment of nervous laughter from some of the other fans, and that was it. These are just a couple of examples, but I could KEEP going, about "the time a guy in the crowd seriously threatened to have the Ku Klux Klan murder the black heels" kind of stuff which aren't hypothetical nor terribly rare. The sad fact is that wrestling in this country is aimed at one of the most racist demographics we've got.

I think it's a terrible gimmick, for one reason: I can't imagine Vince allowing it. Clark will almost certainly be sent home and either fired or repackaged, once Vince finally pays any attention to what they're doing at an NXT house show. They would never allow any blatant criticism of Trump to air on television. And if they try to retool him as a pro-Trump babyface, that's like making him Kerwin White Jr and his career would probably be dead on arrival. .

If you think you hate Abyss like this, you shoulda seen him during his rookie days as Prince Justice, when he was unmasked and fifty pounds heavier and wearing a hideous aqua-colored singlet. The style he eventually wrestled as Joseph Parks was basically a parody of what he looked like when he was starting out.

And there have been white gimmicks, but not so much "white wrestlers". All the various hillbilly characters that the WWF were always using at some point or another, for example, you couldn't have stuck any other race into those and have it make sense. (Unless it was like Jimmy Wayne Yang, where the entire message of the gimmick was that this silly Asian man was clearly mistaken in his belief that he was a redneck and we should all laugh at his racial identity confusion.) The Brits do seem the closest, in American companies Regal always got booked as a foppish upper-class twit despite having the UK equivalent of a miles-thick Bronx accent.

Aaaand it's gone. Already. Fucking hell, Youtube!

Cagematch lists two Hogan/Jake matches in Providence, in December '86 and a rematch next month; and then another one in Winnipeg at the end of February '87. That one seems especially strange timing, it was apparently his last match as a heel during that run. And he'd already been having some matches against other heels like Kamala (who wasn Hogan's main house show opponent at the time), Randy Savage, Butch Reed, and a whole mini-feud with King Kong Bundy. So either the office was capable of some truly spectacular multi-tasking as it played different storylines out at different speed in different markets, or they were just so damn busy and crazed with cocaine exhaustion that they frequently lost track of what was going on.