Jingus

To be fair, that's more a problem with the modern televised American wrestling's finisher-centric style in general than anything wrong with Cena specifically. Practically every guy in the WWE has some "patented maneuvers" which never win the damn match. Why does anyone ever hit any move which isn't their finisher and then try for an inevitably-unsuccessful pinfall? Of course the real reason is "because we've gotta do SOMETHING to kill time and get our shit in before going home". But it's long been a glaring psychological weak spot in WWE Style that the wrestlers are going for ludicrously unlikely pin attempts after hitting non-finisher offense. The best workers can get around that kind of thing (ever notice how rarely Stone Cold actually tried to pin his opponent during his matches, until the final stretch?) but it hurts most guys when the audience is palpably underwhelmed when someone's trying to get a pinfall after hitting a clothesline or bodyslam or some damn thing like that. Ironically, I think this is partly to blame for the WWE's much more workrate-friendly booking in recent years. Back when half the matches routinely had non-clean-pinfall finishes, the crowd tended to be more on their toes because you never knew when the sudden DQ or countout or feet-on-the-ropes, handful-of-tights rollup might end the match without warning. A little like All Japan did back in the 90s, the current WWE has focused so heavily on mostly-clean finishes and Exciting Final Acts in their matches that the audience can often mentally check out of a match (beyond the token Pavlovian popping for particularly big moves or beloved signature spots) until they start trying to hit their finishers. Of course, unlike All Japan, the WWE doesn't have the saving grace of everyone on the roster having half-a-dozen different legit finishers, which leads to its rather video-game-ish psychology of "hit your One Big Move and win". According to their billed heights and weights, John is one inch shorter and one pound lighter than Steve. Personally, I think they look just about identically-sized: But I'd say the real problem is that Cena's just way too much of a bulky bodybuilder and doesn't have nearly enough catlike grace to pull the move off successfully. I've seem him hit it nice just once, on Rusev at Wrestlemania, but otherwise it often has that "Johnny Ace trying to hit the Ace Crusher and looking like he just bumped into his opponent and they both fell down in a heap" sort of appearance to it. Oh gimme a hell yeah. To this day, I've never met a single person who's been able to explain the "Y2Cheap" joke to me. What the hell is that even supposed to mean? It reeks of being one of those backstage ribs that they obnoxiously insisted on putting it in front of the camera, making all the boys laugh their ass off while the fans just stare in confused silence. The match itself was a fine give-and-take brawl (Trips gave Cena way more of the match than he gave Batista the previous year, when it would've made more sense for HHH to be taking more of an ass-whipping) but I don't agree with the finish. That was a straight-up Klique "Job" all the way, officially putting the other guy over while subconsciously making him look like shit. Cena had barely even started using the STF as a finisher, and Trips does such an abrupt tap-out that you can actually see the fans at ringside reacting in what-the-hell-bro disbelief when HHH submits so quickly. It lets Triple H brag forever "hey, I couldn't have put the guy over ANY harder than I did!" while sabotaging the drama of the finish. Compare it to how Trips fought and clawed and struggled to get out of Benoit's crossface two years prior, ramping up the tension, before finally succumbing to the inevitable and admitting defeat. By giving Cena such a perfunctory "submission victory" without building up to a climactic finale, Triple H made damn sure that everyone's most vividly positive memory from that match was him teasing a DX reunion with the crotch-chop.

To be fair, that's more a problem with the modern televised American wrestling's finisher-centric style in general than anything wrong with Cena specifically. Practically every guy in the WWE has some "patented maneuvers" which never win the damn match. Why does anyone ever hit any move which isn't their finisher and then try for an inevitably-unsuccessful pinfall? Of course the real reason is "because we've gotta do SOMETHING to kill time and get our shit in before going home". But it's long been a glaring psychological weak spot in WWE Style that the wrestlers are going for ludicrously unlikely pin attempts after hitting non-finisher offense. The best workers can get around that kind of thing (ever notice how rarely Stone Cold actually tried to pin his opponent during his matches, until the final stretch?) but it hurts most guys when the audience is palpably underwhelmed when someone's trying to get a pinfall after hitting a clothesline or bodyslam or some damn thing like that. Ironically, I think this is partly to blame for the WWE's much more workrate-friendly booking in recent years. Back when half the matches routinely had non-clean-pinfall finishes, the crowd tended to be more on their toes because you never knew when the sudden DQ or countout or feet-on-the-ropes, handful-of-tights rollup might end the match without warning. A little like All Japan did back in the 90s, the current WWE has focused so heavily on mostly-clean finishes and Exciting Final Acts in their matches that the audience can often mentally check out of a match (beyond the token Pavlovian popping for particularly big moves or beloved signature spots) until they start trying to hit their finishers. Of course, unlike All Japan, the WWE doesn't have the saving grace of everyone on the roster having half-a-dozen different legit finishers, which leads to its rather video-game-ish psychology of "hit your One Big Move and win". According to their billed heights and weights, John is one inch shorter and one pound lighter than Steve. Personally, I think they look just about identically-sized: But I'd say the real problem is that Cena's just way too much of a bulky bodybuilder and doesn't have nearly enough catlike grace to pull the move off successfully. I've seem him hit it nice just once, on Rusev at Wrestlemania, but otherwise it often has that "Johnny Ace trying to hit the Ace Crusher and looking like he just bumped into his opponent and they both fell down in a heap" sort of appearance to it. Oh gimme a hell yeah. To this day, I've never met a single person who's been able to explain the "Y2Cheap" joke to me. What the hell is that even supposed to mean? It reeks of being one of those backstage ribs that they obnoxiously insisted on putting it in front of the camera, making all the boys laugh their ass off while the fans just stare in confused silence. The match itself was a fine give-and-take brawl (Trips gave Cena way more of the match than he gave Batista the previous year, when it would've made more sense for HHH to be taking more of an ass-whipping) but I don't agree with the finish. That was a straight-up Klique "Job" all the way, officially putting the other guy over while subconsciously making him look like shit. Cena had barely even started using the STF as a finisher, and Trips does such an abrupt tap-out that you can actually see the fans at ringside reacting in what-the-hell-bro disbelief when HHH submits so quickly. It lets Triple H brag forever "hey, I couldn't have put the guy over ANY harder than I did!" while sabotaging the drama of the finish. Compare it to how Trips fought and clawed and struggled to get out of Benoit's crossface two years prior, ramping up the tension, before finally succumbing to the inevitable and admitting defeat. By giving Cena such a perfunctory "submission victory" without building up to a climactic finale, Triple H made damn sure that everyone's most vividly positive memory from that match was him teasing a DX reunion with the crotch-chop.

I always thought the Varsity Club just never made any damn sense. A bunch of reputable college athletes, with "serious shooter" gimmicks, being led by... crazy babbling devil-worshipper Kevin Sullivan?! I've read/heard interviews with Sullivan where he claimed that the disconnect between himself and his wrestlers was the whole point of the gimmick, but I still don't think it works.

I think the most likely way it would ever happen is if Hunter booked himself in one, to prove he can do the "aging hardcore legend" gimmick.

What top matches of his from 2015 are available on Youtube? Which ones would y'all recommend?

TNA has long had a way of making the matches feel crappier than they were. Cheap-looking production, lousy camerawork, overly frenetic cutting, terribly forced and insincere commentary, and the inevitable lame overbooking and lousy finishes all conspire to strangle the workrate right in the middle of the ring (regardless of whether it had four or six sides).

For what it's worth, I thought Rude's match with Steamboat at Rumble '88 was very possibly the single worst match I've ever seen the Dragon participate in. Literally half of it was one long rest hold.

If any one of the above three things is true, Berbick deserved every single thing he got.

A drunken womanizing materialistic Republican (whose son is a cop) is that appealing to Islamic militants (who planned to kill cops)? Wow. The awesomeness of Ric Flair really does cross ALL boundaries.

Also vs Rhino at Backlash 2001. I still like the Dreamer matches in ECW, but those all run together in my mind and it's hard to pick out the best ones (although my instinctive guess would be the tag with Funk and Foley, just cuz those guys make everything better). I'm told he did some fine work on Heat around 2002 or so, but never saw it myself. And I'm sure he did some good stuff when he first showed up in TNA all motivated, but I haven't seen those shows in so long that I dunno how they hold up.

"Matwork" is admittedly stretching the definition of what happened. Goldberg was attacked backstage earlier that night, and went into the match with a knee injury (and a giant black metallic kneebrace, just cuz he didn't already look enough like Stone Cold). They spent the first few minutes basically "they circle, Hall tries something, Goldberg shrugs him off and hits a move, they go back to circling again". Finally, Hall starts kicking Goldberg's leg, and hits a few Flair-style "softening up the knee" moves. That's about it, after that they go straight to the ladder, but Goldberg continues (poorly) selling the knee for the rest of the match.

They're certainly expected on Japanese and especially Lucha shows, and nobody holds it as a symptom of those shows sucking.

Financially speaking, I still don't think there's ever been a worse booking decision than the 1-2 combo punch of beating Goldberg and then the Fingerpoke. Combined with the horrible NWO-dominated followup, it just broke the fanbase's faith in WCW ever breaking out of their self-destructive rut. Ratings slowly but consistently trended downward from that point onward. If you check the buyrates, every single WCW ppv in 1999 did a significantly worse number than the corresponding show in 1998. The only exception was Superbrawl; 1999's show, where Flair was prepared to get righteous revenge on Hogan (which he failed to do, sending the buyrates afterwards spiraling ever-downward) did the same number as the 1998 show, which was loaded up with stale rematches including Hogan/Sting 2 which nobody really wanted to see. Hell yeah I'll defend it, your quote perfectly described the whole thing. It was the perfect way out of a match that the fanbase was shitting upon the very idea of. Nobody wanted Reigns to become champ, but Brock had held the belt for more than long enough and it was past time to get the world title onto not-a-part-timer. (Immediately after this, Brock promptly took over three months off; clearly he didn't want to stick around.) Considering all of the above, having Rollins make history by doing the first-ever MitB cash-in at Wrestlemania was a pretty brilliant solution to their various problems. It's not Mania's fault that they decided afterwards to book Seth so poorly that it looks like they've got a bet to see if they can make him be the most unprotected champion in history. Only in the short term. Less than four years later, the company was out of business. And both Hogan and Hall were sent home long before the doors finally closed. But the general audience was a pretty big fan of Wyatt, so it doesn't make sense to see him gone sooner rather than later. And considering how the entire crowd totally shit on the rest of the Rumble from the point that Bryan was eliminated, maybe they shoulda kept that guy in there until the end.

I love the spot where Funk goes for a drop-down, but Hogan just steps on his back; and then runs the ropes over and over and keeps stepping on Terry each time he crosses over. I wish more guys would do that, it's such a fun piece of business and it's a good comedy spot which mocks the heel but doesn't make them look like a complete idiot.

True dat, yo. Speaking from experience, it's much harder to call a match with two partners rather than one. For each guy you add to the team, it exponentially increases the amount of time you're going to be talking over each other and generally stepping on each other's toes. It's like the difference between a singles match and a triple-threat match, it's so much more difficult to get into a good rhythm and share time equally enough so that nobody feels like a third wheel. It's especially bad now since the WWE doesn't give a reason for the third guy to be there. When you've already got Lawler as "the wrestler who gives an insider's perspective to what's happening in the ring", why do you need to throw in Bradshaw for more of the same? At least the Schiavone/Tenay/Dusty team back in WCW had different specific roles for each guy: Tony was the straight man who acted as a moderator, Iron Mike was the talking encyclopedia who provided obscure move names and bits of trivia, and Dusty was the drunken maniac who would babble in tongues. Each one had an entirely different job. When the WWE puts multiple wrestlers as seemingly-identical color commentators, what's the point?

Did Kudo have anyone besides Toyoda who was even worth mentioning as an opponent? Shark Tsuchiya was basically an incompetent mad scientist's attempt at cloning Dump Matsumoto, but to quote Roger Ebert, "it's like one of those experiments where the room smells like gas and all the lab rats are dead". Aside from her interpromotional matches, who else was there? Bad Nurse Nakamura? Oh, I just made myself legitimately laugh out loud... in my bedroom... alone in the middle of the night... god, I'm depressed. But seriously, El-P's point about her terrible coworkers is a great one, because I can't remember anyone else who did such an amazing job of taking an entire division full of stiffs and still making the matches into something I genuinely looked forward to with anticipation. It's like as if Misawa still managed to be The Man and look as good as he always did except with a roster consisting entirely of Richard Slinger, Yoshinari Ogawa, and Giant Kimala with none of his top-shelf opposition ever existing.

I love Steamboat more than most people here do, but this point is absolutely true. Steamboat was much better when he stuck to amateur greco-roman stuff mixed with his trademarked work-the-arm offense, he was a pretty poor martial artist. Of course, "karate fighter" is maybe the worst in-ring gimmick anyone can have, and practically nobody can sell it believably and have good matches at the same time. Trying to do this bullshit was a major part of killing Billy Graham's career. Has ANYONE ever made a successful career out of it? All I can remember are guys like Glacier and Steve Blackman, who were walking examples of why nobody should try to wrestle like that. Even heavily gimmicked "martial arts strikers" like Low-Ki, Rob Van Dam, or even Shinya Hashimoto used the karate stuff as just one part of their much larger overall bag of movez. The only really successful guys I can think of with martial arts styles were basically MMA hybrid fighters, dudes like Taz or Brock or pick-your-favorite-worked-shooter-here. They used plenty of strikes, but focused more heavily on submissions and suplexes and whatnot.

I think Duggan's WWF run is a tad bit underrated. Heck, he and Andre were doing a really fun forgotten run together around '89 or so, which was better than the Giant's average work at that time. Heck, he was even entertaining when he came back years later and tagged with Super Crazy. But it's awfully hard to overlook the fact that Hacksaw was consistently one of the absolute worst wrestlers in the entire company during his tenure in WCW. He was fucking terrible in every way possible; embarrassingly light offense, bad transitions, clumsy spots that were frequently blown, bad cardio which had him sucking wind like a marathon runner. Worst of all, he'd often go out of his way to be a selfish prick in the ring and make his younger opponents look like shit, barely selling anything and constantly cutting them off so that nobody could keep any heat's momentum going on him. He was actively detrimental to the roster, so of course they kept him employed for over six years straight.

I do think the escape-to-win matches have one small but important advantage over pinfall cage matches: no referee. It's a subtle but powerful visual statement, when the wrestlers are beating the crap out of each other and using normally-illegal tactics but there's no ref in sight and nobody's trying to break it up. It's sort of a Thunderdome "two men enter, one man leaves" atmosphere of anarchy and chaos, one which suggests that any damn thing could happen. Of course what sadly DOES happen is usually spending half the match on spots where one guy's trying to crawl out the door while the other guy is grabbing onto his boot; but still, that image of two isolated warriors with nary a representative of law or order anywhere near them is one hell of a subconscious thrill. And of course ladder matches have the same asset. There's also something to be said for the "climbing to triumph" metaphor, fighting to ascend and become the newly crowned king of a steel mountain. Of course someone would. But I thought it stunk. The feeling-out-process goes on forever; they circle, circle circle, lock up, do one move, aaaand... both of them back off and return to circling; repeat for five minutes straight. It's the exact same bullshit which made the Goldberg/Lesnar match such a tentative bore which never got out of first gear. Goldberg does his usual mutant-healing-factor selling where he never stays down longer than half a second; which is fine in his usual squashes, but is terrible for a match where he's supposed to be selling a knee injury and getting hit with a ladder but then immediately trying to stand back up again. Finally at the end, when they get to the taser (it's basically a taser-on-a-pole match, except with a ladder instead of a pole) they tease it tease it tease it tease it teeeeease it for minutes (and not GOOD teasing, but "time stands still while two guys just sit there staring at each other" teasing)... and then Goldberg uses it a grand total of one time, in a taser shot lasting literally less than a second. Then, in a "the business flashes its junk at you" level of exposure, the camera cuts to the entryway a brief moment BEFORE Bam Bam Bigelow comes out for the run in. Afterwards, the heels beat down Goldberg and Hall shocks him over and over again with the taser. Bravo, that was Goldberg's big fuckin' "revenge" for being screwed out of the title, what a goddamned hero.

I'd bet the thinking went something like this: Memphis always loved for people to have patented weapons that they used as part of their gimmick. So, the Sandman is a surfer, he brought this surfboard with him to prop up next to him while he does promos; obviously, he's gotta hit someone with it. But I'd wager Lawler said "look kid, don't hit me with the damn board... just, like, hold it up straight and ram me into it". Maybe he saw the then-green-ass-grass rookie either destroy someone with an uncontrollably stiff shot, or embarrass himself with a business-exposingly light shot that the recipient shouldn't have to sell. By having Lawler basically ram his own head into the board, the King is in total control of the move and can make it look good while keeping it safe. It was common practice for Memphis to have a known wrestler doing double-duty as a masked henchman whenever the show needed an extra worker but didn't have an extra warm body; and frequently, said warm body under the cheap shitty mask was indeed Tony Falk. It's exactly the sort of thing he'd be willing to do; in this case that narrows it down a lot, cuz not too many veteran wrestlers would be willing to put aside their pride and let a referee beat the shit out of them. (Hell, once when Tony needed a quick win, he almost stuck me in the ring as a generic masked evil ninja to be squashed; thankfully, someone realized "oh yeah, this clumsy half-trained announcer has no business actually wrestling".) Glancing at the footage, the guy certainly has Tony's shape and movements. Glancing at the card results, this match was the semi-main and Tony was booked (inevitably) losing in the first match, giving him plenty of time to get into the costume. So, yeah, safe bet that it's The Falker.

Yep. Scott Hall vs. Goldberg, Souled Out '99. It sucked.

Maybe, a lot of the local territorial stars tended to be leery of working with national stars who dropped in for the occasional guest spot. They were afraid of having their heat scooped by a guy who wasn't gonna be there next week to return the favor, which did happen sometimes.

After immigrating to America, Dundee's stardom was largely limited to just the Memphis territory. He never did much top-level work elsewhere. More wrestling fans saw him as Sir William than anything else he ever did outside of CWA/USWA (and, arguably more than saw him in Memphis as well, considering how widely WCW was broadcasted). It is a bummer how people go rushing to try and find some scapegoat or outside influence to explain things. Much of the time, people simply say what their real opinions truly are.

Don't sleep in the same physical space with other wrestlers. Don't shut your eyes until you're behind a locked door and you're really sure nobody else has a key.

I agree that you can do more different things with a cage than you can do with a ladder, for several reasons. One is a literal matter of space: once you've dragged a big ol' ladder into the ring, it's difficult in a spatial sense to do any spots which don't involve it. If you tried to do something as simple as an Irish whip or a vertical suplex, the ladder is almost inevitably in the way. In comparison, all a cage removes from a wrestler's bag of movez is simply getting out of the ring in a casual manner. And if you're in a Hell In A Cell match, you're not missing even that much; aside from crowd brawling, you can do pretty much every single thing you can do in a normal match, plus using the cage. But I still think ladder matches in general have been rather severely underrated in this thread. Yeah, slow climbing sucks and too many of those Money In The Bank matches tend to look alike; but that's a problem with intellectual laziness on the part of the individual workers in the individual matches, not so much a problem with the gimmick itself. The live audience inevitably LOVES these matches, it's hard to remember many examples of a crowd shitting on a ladder spotfest. And it doesn't even necessarily have to be a "spotfest", remember how Miz/Lawler did a much more old-school Bret/Shawn type of contest and it got over like gangbusters.