Jingus

I live in Texas. For the past two decades, our senators, our governors, and our Presidential electoral votes have ALL consistently gone to one party. Over the same time period my district has overwhelmingly voted a single-party ticket for Congressional representatives, state senators, mayors, and judges. The numbers are too high for any possibility of change in the foreseeable future. There's absolutely no fucking point to voting here.

I think one problem with Kawada in really long matches is that, at a certain point, he runs out of different stuff to do and can become rather repetitive. He never had as big a bag of movez as Misawa and especially Kobashi did; hell, Akiyama and Taue might've had more varied offenses as well. When Kawada goes past the half-hour mark and into the finishing stretch, sometimes it starts to feel like an Onita match. "I'm just gonna KEEP hitting powerbombs, eventually ONE of them should get the pin!" The only part of 6/9/95 that I don't passionately adore is that last few sluggish minutes, where it felt rather arbitrary that This Powerbomb is what finally pins Misawa rather than Those Other Powerbombs.

I'd personally put it Kobashi > Misawa > Kawada > Taue, but with several qualifications. Such as, "oddly, although I like Misawa/Kobashi better individually, Taue/Kawada are clearly the better tag team" and "hmmm... do I feel like Kawada is better than Misawa today?" and "it depends kinda heavily on who their opponent is" and especially "but still, they're ALL better than like 99.999% of other wrestlers who've ever walked the aisle (or, on Dome shows, the ramp)".

I dunno how much of that you can really blame on Steph, considering that Vince always had total control over the product. When the boss insists on having things a certain way, there's not much an employee can do to change that.

Yay everyone, some dude (wait, who the hell are you?) is here to insult me for no goddamn reason whatsoever! For your information: I've talked with Si in the chat about "serious" academic analysis of all kinds of wacky pop culture, my post here was an extension of those conversations. And my post didn't mention a single thing about my time "in DA BZNSS", I was referencing the fact that I'd just spent the last few years as an English major and have written countless citations just like the ones Si did here. It's an in-joke that you're on the outside of, so take your assumptions and shove off. JvK, as for "ibid": it's just always looked weird to me, this random word that's never used in any context outside of footnotes. It's pretty typical of academia to use a random contraction of a Latin word in the same place that any regular person would just write "same" or "ditto" or whatever. And it's not even a contraction that makes sense; the entire word is "ibidem", what's the point of only lopping off the last two letters? That hardly makes things much shorter...

Were you actually citing sources in a wrestling recap? You were! Academic MLA-style, right down to the needlessly-jargoned-up "ibid", and hiding more humorous snark in the footnotes than is in the body of the essay, and everything! Wow.

Youtube's got at least two of 'em: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPj7BpNwVrc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ngkqi-acR-k And a whole bunch of tag matches with various partners, if you feel like searching for those.

Are you arguing that this reaction is a good thing or a bad thing, in terms of debating the guy's legacy?

Which, you'd assume, would be more of a tribute to Hernandez's "overness" than anything else, right?

Does Jericho count as "returning" in the same way as guys who skip entire years or only wrestle once or twice annually? He's a part-timer, but he returns pretty often and consistently. Also, Jericho has a much larger multimedia presence than a lot of the other guys in the WWE. He's got his band, his podcast, various non-wrestling television and movie appearances. He keeps himself in the public eye to a much larger degree than someone like the aforementioned Boogeyman, who pretty much vanishes off the face of the earth whenever they're not under contract.

Hey, I'm the one trying to keep things on track by actually talking about a candidate; and I find this particular section of the IWC's disdain towards Edge to be rather mystifying, and it's an opinion not shared by the vast majority of wrestling fans I know from other places and other communities. Yeah, some of Edge's stuff was pretty light, but he looked like Yuki Ishikawa when compared to some others; especially the historical guys like Giant Baba, Killer Kowalski, the aforementioned Big Daddy, and various others whose offense was so phony-looking that it's hard to believe that fans actually bought their matches as being shoots back in the kayfabe days. And saying he wasn't a draw: yeah, technically true, but then how many legit "draws" really existed during his tenure on top the WWE? By then, Vince had long ago made the company's entire name brand into the draw, specifically devaluing the individual wrestlers so that no one guy would have enough power to give Vince any ultimatums. EDIT: and no, I don't think "he wasn't as bad as people here are saying he was" means he should necessarily go into the HoF. He does seem like a borderline candidate at best. But there are plenty of guys already in the Hall whose work I enjoyed less, and even more guys than that whose work was certainly watched by much fewer people.

The larger point (aside from how hilariously perfect that sentence fit Austin's finisher too, with no other change in the wording) is that there's been plenty of over moves that look like crap. The People's Elbow often looked like Rock wasn't even making contact. Big Daddy's belly bump required people to run directly into him like a moron and then bounce themselves backwards. Umaga's throat thrust was just him swinging one finger in the general direction of a guy's neck. Cena's STF often has a laughable amount of daylight. And what do all those moves have in common with the Edge-o-matic (which is admittedly a terrible name)? The common denominator is that the crowd bought all of them and popped every time. Ad hominem attacks: for when you know you're losing an argument but are just too proud to admit it.

Stone Cold also had that one move where he grabbed a guy's head and then sat down. It was literally just a guy taking a back bump after Austin's hands were on his ears. Seriously, there's nitpicking and then there's NITPICKING.

There were pretty consistent reports about Hogan bragging about his great (coincidental) ratings backstage and in interviews. Has anyone said the same about Cena?

When's the last time Hun-Tor, The King Of Kings got showed up by anyone at all? (Or at least, anyone besides Sting?) Serious question.

It's worth remembering that Bischoff was the only guy who ever made WCW profitable. Bill Watts, Dusty Rhodes, Kevin Sullivan, Ole Anderson, Kevin Nash, those various clueless non-wrestling Turner execs, and especially Vince Russo all utterly failed where Bischoff succeeded. And it's unfair to blame the last two years of the company's most horrific business all on him, considering he'd been removed from power in mid-1999 and wasn't calling any shots after that. I don't even like the guy, I think he's a Trump-esque piece of shit. But it's insane to deny the massive amount of money he made during the good times, and the even more massive overall impact he's had on the nature of the business as a whole.

His company was national, theirs weren't. And Bischoff invented the modern style of televised production which is still the standard formula for the industry to this day.

Hey, look on the bright side: if this is true, then maybe Piper just faked his death in order to teach us a lesson.

Just going by this: Big Daddy flunks at least half of the qualifications. His business practices ultimately had the long-term effect of permanently killing all professional wrestling as a viable industry in England forever. And in-ring, he's possibly the single worst wrestler that I've ever see perform on the entire nomination list. Lots of veterans will knock Jerry Jarrett (and rightly so) for his poverty-line payoffs; but there's still plenty of praise out there for him as a moneymaker, as a booker, and as a human being. In comparison, I literally can't recall a single good word ever spoken by any British worker about Big Daddy ever.

Who owns the rights to JWA footage?

Wasn't there a match with the Invisible Man as a skit in one of Cheech & Chong's movies?

Backlund had already wrestled longer shoot-style matches with Takada in 1988 and Masa Funaki in 1989. This wasn't his first go-round with the style.

He tagged with Lanny a lot when they were working the territories together. Which was... interesting. Aside from both men's proclivity for an ahead-of-their-time level of gymnastics in their movements, there's few brothers in wrestling who worked less-similar styles.

Yoko was great at little things and little moments, but I struggle to think of many of his performances where afterward I think "yep, that match was worth a bunch of snowflakes!". He's one of the better squashers out there for short vivisections of hapless jabronis, sure. But man, his competitive matches could be dull, especially once he started gaining more weight around '94. Sometimes it seemed like he'd spend half the match working The Shoulder Massage Of DOOM; and to this day, I've still never seen any man walking the planet who could make the standard Samoan "nerve pinch" look good. (The entire point of how Spock did it on Star Trek was that Nimoy barely even touched the other guy; the gimmick was that Vulcans were so precise with its application that it would lay anyone out instantly.) It always looked but the most blatantly lazy, non-hurty resthold this side of of Killer Kowalski's laying-down stomach claw; and sometimes Yoko would just sit there doing it for seemingly nine hours straight.

Er, maybe not, at the moment Randy is squashing Greg eleven-to-zip. EDIT: now, sixteen to nothing.