Jingus

Would "every indy wannabe who wrestles in ordinary shirt and pants" count? You'd be depressed at just how many of those there are clogging up the smaller indies in this country. And I don't mean stuff like the Hardys wear, I mean "gear" that literally looks like they bought it at Walmart.

My rule of thumb is that talking and other intangibles count as long as they're still kinda part of a bell-to-bell match experience. Like, Lawler's promos that he'll often cut in mid-match, that counts. Hogan's inevitable pose-down, that counts. Whatever the hell Sakura Hirota is saying during her matches that cracks up the entire crowd, that counts. But anything that's separate from the match isn't going to be part of my process. If it's something that you'd generally do in a Piper's Pit or backstage or while cutting an I'm-not-wrestling-right-now promo, then that's not influencing my vote. Although, come to think of it, a Best "Outside-The-Ring Entertainers" Poll would be interesting to have sometime.

To be clear, that's not a real breakdown, I just made it up. But the show often feels like it's going exactly how I described it there. They've got plenty of good wrestling talk, but the show tends to be filled up with even more random tangents where they're just trying to crack themselves up with their impressions and jokes.

The problem is, to do such a breakdown on Lapsed Fan would look something like: 2:32:45: they start to talk about Tito Santana vs the Executioner 2:33:20: they stop talking about the actual match, for one guy to go off on a tangent about the Executioner's prematch promo 2:37:15: they finally start talking about the match again 2:37:50: they stop talking about the match, start doing impressions of Vince McMahon threatening to rape Tito's wife and murder his children 2:43:30: they finally start talking about the match again 2:44:05: they stop talking about the match, start speculating on the geography of Parts Unknown 2:47:55: they finally start talking about the match again 2:48:10: they stop talking about the match, start doing impressions of a neurotic Hogan being paranoid about people wanting to roll him up from behind 2:51:00: they finally start talking about the match again 2:51:35: they stop talking about the match, start doing impressions of Patterson trying to talk Vince out of literally decapitating a wrestler on live PPV 2:55:25: they finally start talking about the match again 2:55:40: they stop talking about the match, start talking about Hasbro action figures 2:59:40: they finally start talking about the match again 3:00:00: the match is over, they spend the next five minutes bragging about being the greatest podcast on the internet

What? No, the only two hosts of the show are pretty well-established in their identities. One has written for Sherdog and elsewhere, and we know both their names. They're not the type of guys to go trolling random boards for hits.

According to Cagematch, Flair and Hogan competed against each other in 113 matches. Hogan won 90 of them. (And this is including stuff like "a battle royale which happened to include Flair, Hogan, and eighteen other guys".)

Why not? My ballot's gonna have several women, a few of them even (gasp!) not Japanese.

In hindsight, the Starrcade match didn't even suck. (Especially compared to the rematches.) Perfectly watchable brawl, two or three stars.

As a fan who's listened to most of the Lapsed casts in their entirety: oh yeah, they do totally devolve into masturbatory tripe at times. They spend an unholy amount of time on their self-indulgent tangents and running inside jokes. Especially when they go into the egomaniacal "we give you what you need" rants for minutes on end. That kind of bullshit is the worst aspect of the show, and it sadly it makes up about half the running time. This is the bit I don't understand. For all the Wrestlemania and Starrcade shows, they bring in Meltzer to do ten or twenty minutes of setup, talking about all the backstory and behind-the-scenes events which led to these shows happening the way they did. That's not even close to being WWE revisionist history.

Comparing them year by year: it's true Taker didn't really get good until 1996. That was the twelfth year of his career. In comparison, 1985 was the twelfth year in Hansen's career; that's when he stopped tagging with Brody and also won the AWA belt. I can totally see an argument that this period was when Hasen really grew into what we think of today when we hear his name. Also, Hansen got to wrestle most of the best talent in the world and develop a very well-rounded education. Undertaker spent his formative years doing endless jobber squashes and gimmick-based feuds against cartoonish monsters who were even bigger than himself. Of course we expect more out of a guy who is wrestling Terry Funk or Jumbo Tsuruta every night, as opposed to someone who spends most of his time with the likes of El Gigante or Steve Lombardi.

She was working with so many more handicaps than all of those women that it's tough to compare them. Trish never wrestled a single match outside of the WWE. Her entire career only lasted six years (not counting the two cameo comebacks). She didn't go through developmental or any kind of training academy, she was trained on the road while she was already working shows. In comparison, all the other women Loss mentioned had proper training, worked many more years, and travelled to a much wider variety of different promotions. Most telling of all is simply how few opponents she had. I just went through Trish's entire Cagematch.net resume (it took forever) and counted up every single woman she ever stepped foot in the ring with. (And no, I'm not counting her three-week comebacks in recent years where she'd have two matches with a whole new roster of girls.) You know how many women, from 2000 to 2006, that she ever wrestled? Twenty. That's it. Her entire career consisted of literally wrestling the same twenty people, over and over again. (And according to Cagematch, the VAST majority of those matches went under five minutes.) And even "twenty" is really an inflated number, considering that the list includes such ringers as Jackie Gayda, Terri Runnels, Stacey Keibler, Christy Hemme, Stephanie McMahon, Torrie Wilson, Ashley Massaro, and "that one time Trish and Jillian Hall happened to be in a battle royale together". You can count on one hand the number of women she feuded with who actually had more in-ring experience than Trish did. And everyone knows that you're not supposed to be able to learn much by endlessly wrestling the same rookies over and over again (which is a serious problem affecting talent quality in today's industry). But still, Trish DID get better; despite never being properly trained in the first place, despite having a relatively small amount of ring time with an objectively tiny number of opponents, despite being employed by people who never gave much of a shit about women's wrestling to begin with. The fact that Trish improved to the level she did is an unprecedented miracle.

It's kinda bizarre to me for anyone to claim Benoit had no charisma, when he was standing next to guys like Dean Malenko and Perry Saturn for so much of his career. Chris showed way more fire and emotion than those dudes ever did. One big reason why Benoit and others like him became so beloved in the late 90s was that they were the complete antithesis to what was popular at the time. In the NWO/Attitude era, "workrate" was practically a dirty word. Tall guys who cut long-winded catchphrase-filled promos were most often pushed as the most dominating stars of the time; nevermind the fact that they could do little but punch, stomp, and choke when it came time to actually get in the ring. Benoit was the polar opposite, a guy you didn't want to see talk (partly because he wasn't good at it). When he was involved, you only wanted to see him kicking ass in the ring. In the late 90s, which featured SO much more talking than wrestling, Benoit became the symbolic face for the fact that there was another way for wrestling to be which didn't necessarily center around endless dirty jokes and guys bragging about how great they were at nauseating length.

It's a little depressing to think of how much better Trish could've been if she hadn't been so stifled by the WWE Diva Style. She was wrestling the same dozen opponents over and over again for her entire career, in matches which usually went less than five minutes, in a division which was largely ignored and denigrated by the overall company as a barely-tolerated sideshow. The fact that she reached the level of quality she did (I'm not sure her bout with Mickie James wasn't MOTN for Mania 22) is an astounding tribute to how much talent she had and how hard she was willing to work.

I could see it maybe working if it were a lot more jabronis and a lot fewer top guys on the heel side. Like, if it was DX beating the Spirit Squad and the McMahons in one epic match (and even then it would probably feel like a stretch). But having Flair AND Luger AND Arn AND the entire Dungeon AND some other guys who are supposed to be a legit threat; it's just ludicrous, there's no way Hulk and Randy should've won that match. I could see a decent match being done with this setup, considering that DDP and Jarrett pulled something fairly watchable out of the triple-cage setup in 2000. (Even poor overhated David Arquette did a frog splash off the top rope and took a couple other big bumps.) But you need some pretty creative workers to think up some interesting spots, and they've got to be athletic guys to be able to pull them off. When dealing with a creatively drained, physically immobile Hogan '96 that kind of thing is simply impossible. Like, imagine if you did this match with Rey, Kidman, and Chavo against the entire Latino World Order, with Eddie waiting in the top cage like a kung-fu villain. Also, the match did itself no favors by having the guys start in the top cage and climb down. Even a hack like Russo knew that it makes the most thematic, primal sense for the fighters to start at the bottom and work their way up. It's the whole "king of the mountain" motif; there's a reason why Conan killed Thulsa Doom at the top of the pyramid, and why so many villains in so many movies tend to die by falling from a great height. How much did they spend on this nonsense, also? They had to build the cage (I doubt they saved the one from 1988), had to bring in another ring, had to spend at least double the usual ring-crew manhours for the whole thing to be set up for the show.

I don't expect it to last long. And he was practically hand-delivered the title by Triple H in the first place, so he's got the Authority's explicit backing.

No, the way Russo tends to book it is just awful. His turn-ers will absolutely ignore every single near-fall in the match, all those moments where (in kayfabe) the person they're turning on could've already won. They'll watch an entire half-hour-long match, ignore finishers and weapons shots and all kinds of opportunities for the match to be over, because apparently they've got psychic powers of precognition and just know that the other guy is going to be kicking out. And then, only at the very end when the match could've already ended a dozen times, THEN they'll turn on whomever. It's intelligence-insulting and business-exposing, when the guy who's turning is practically telling us "it's okay, I listened to them call the match and I know they're not going home until the third Rock Bottom!" when they're not running in for the turn for either of the first two finishers.

I'm not sure that would necessarily be better; it's got a bit of a Mania 16 smell to it, which I'd argue is a bad thing. But more importantly, we all know that's just not how the WWE does things. They typically don't like long-term stables, they don't tend to reunite teams after they've broken up and turned on each other; and, most damningly for the Shield, they almost never allow a top heel stable to possess the world championship unless HHH or a McMahon is the head of said stable. In a perfect world they could just book the Shield as if they were the prime-era Horsemen or the circa-1996 NWO, but sadly they just won't do that. Within the narrow parameters of their booking style, among their self-limited choices of what they could do in that particular situation, I still think having Seth cash in the briefcase was the right call.

JCP would have eventually burned out all those Southern towns if they ran them regularly enough. In the modern era, the sad truth is that no territory managed to keep its home-base towns healthy over the long term. Memphis used to draw 11,000 at the Coliseum every Monday night, but they eventually went bankrupt too. The "Crockett would still be in business today" myth presumes that those towns would stay permanently hot for the JCP product over the course of multiple decades. In the 21st century, that simply ain't gonna happen. There's too many alternative sources for entertainment today in places like Greensboro which didn't exist back in the mid-80s.

It was racist and lame, but "worst in-ring angle in 30 years of wrestling" bad? Guys have been using dumb stereotypical gimmicks as weapons forever; hell, right up to the modern era, with Finlay's oh-so-Irish shillelagh. The problem with that one was that Russo was completely ignorant about puroresu and WCW's relationship with NJPW, which was not remotely happy about their guy jobbing in that fashion. They also never really explained why Kanyon turned on DDP around the same time, or why Kimberly turned on DDP around the same time. Literally three PPVs in a row all ended with someone turning on Page to cost him the match. (And in typical Russo fashion, they always waited until the very end of the match to do so, somehow magically predicting that none of the previous near-falls would be the finish.) And really, most of the turns Russo ever booked tended to be under-explained. It usually boiled down to some guy saying "Former Best Friend was totally holding me back! I didn't need him, I was doing all the work but he was taking all the credit!" and this exact same thing got said again and again and again in mind-numbingly repetitive fashion.

In the situation they found themselves in, neither Brock nor Roman could really afford to do a clean job at Mania. Nobody wanted to see Reigns pushed as the top guy over Brock, and the crowd would've shit all over that match if he'd pinned Lesnar. But they also didn't want to just give up on Reigns either, so they couldn't have Lesnar beat him clean; it would've made him look like even more of a chump and a loser than the fans already thought he was. And since doing some bullshit DQ or other non-finish is obviously not a viable option at Mania, we got the compromise solution of Rollins cashing in. That benefitted four different guys at once. It gave Brock a plausible way to finally lose the title without damaging his unique aura, it gave Roman a reason to lose without looking like a loser, it gave Rollins the title and made him the new top heel (which sadly didn't last, but nobody knew that at the time) and it also gave Randy Orton a ready-made storyline reason to be in a top title feud since he beat Seth earlier that night. Heck, it even benefitted Dean Ambrose, tossing him into the title picture mostly because the other two ex-Shield guys were already there. None of that would've happened if Brock had just pinned Roman.

Oh yeah, but I think it's better if the suggestions are something that the company might actually do in real life. As long as Vince is still in charge, I don't see them ever devoting an entire show to women's matches. Under the current setup, I also doubt that they'd change the Raw format so that one hour is devoted to anything other than their ordinary programming. If they did that, the ratings for that one hour would probably drop; and that defeats USA's entire purpose of giving Raw three hours in the first place, which is mostly "we don't have anything else to put in that slot which gets better ratings than Raw does now". (I've seen people at other boards suggesting they should turn the last hour into a talk show format with recaps and promos and analysis, and I think that's just as unlikely as the Divas getting an entire hour of primetime ringside TV all to themselves.) It's a no-win situation for the current regime; if they treat the Divas more seriously and it flops, then it hurts the company financially. If they treat the Divas more seriously and it actually succeeds in a significant way, then it disproves Vince & Co.'s entire philosophy of How Wresting Sports Entertainment Works and we all know that the WWE office is perfectly willing to sabotage parts of their own promotion just in order to prove themselves right.

In this company's mind, they already DO devote an entirely separate show to women wrestlers. It's called Total Divas. That's as far as they're willing to go in this era, and to suggest anything further is pure fantasy booking.

I wondered what the deal was there. A few years ago, I woulda put in some cheap joke about "well, clearly we see the quantifiable content of your contribution", but as I get older I find myself tiring of the ritualistic putdowns that we too often devolve into. Hey... shit happens, maybe you were just drunk and posted wrong, I've done that. Last week I somehow managed to post a reply into the wrong thread at another board, one I've been posting at for like a decade and I know every quirk and kink that their software has to offer. It was just plain ol' human error. (And the same thing happens in wrestling matches, too, which is good thing to remember.)

I think what they meant was that Hansen had the best overall matches with both guys, more consistently than any other wrestlers did with both Baba and Inoki. Plenty of other guys had great matches with one or the other, but few wrestlers managed to achieve it with both. And I doubt anyone else would throw his name in, but truthfully: Bruiser Brody had plenty of matches with both men which I thought were damn fine. When he was in the ring with the bosses, Brody would scale back a bit on his whole "eat your opponent alive and never sell jack shit" philosophy and actually have some really fun give-and-take brawling. (They still never had a clean finish, of course; eh, 80s Japan matches with brawly gaijins, whaddya gonna do?) Neither Baba nor Inoki were gonna sit there and let Brody dictate the terms of the match, so for once you'd see Bruiser being forced to work with someone who would only allow him to go so far, and no further. Of course Inoki would spend more time down selling Brody's beatdown (to make the eventual fiery comeback all the more climactic, natch) while Baba tended to be on his feet, grinning from ear to ear and doing even-steven strike exchanges; but that's just how those two guys worked differently from each other.

Anyone know why this title change got booked in the first place? It's a huge feel-good moment for the crowd that night, but it went absolutely nowhere. They could've given Lex a nontitle win on Nitro and then have Hogan win the championship match on PPV and achieved the exact same results. The minifeud did Luger no favors; he consistently fell further and further down the card for the rest of the year, finally ending up in a feud with fuckin' Bagwell. Hogan acted like it never happened; in fact, he didn't even wrestle another match for over two months after this. And it certainly served to water down Sting's eventual win over the NWO. So why even bother? Was this just yet another symptom of WCW's "it seemed like a good idea at the time" tendency to book everything on a cocktail napkin in the hotel bar, right before showtime?