Jingus

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.

The job. He only worked a few house shows in late 2000. Not officially, but Disco is/was close friends with Russo.

We still have some pretty fucked-up unwritten racial rules in our society. "If you appear to have three white grandparents and one black one, you count as being black." Which of course goes back to the old laws about slavery, which were written to broadly include as many people as possible under the definition of "this person can be owned like property". But for the record, Ricochet looked a lot more traditionally black when he was younger. Somehow he's... grown out of it? Which I wasn't aware was even physically possible, but I've known him since he was sixteen and I've watched it happen.

I do believe this is in the wrong folder. But, on topic: in terms of execution, Nash's jackknife powerbomb is the very first thing that comes to mind. It looks like shit, Nash seems like he's losing his balance and about to fall over on literally half the times he ever does this move. Add in the fact that it's legit dangerous and he's injured people with it, and it's one of those "no, seriously, WHY is this your finish?!" conundrums which I have never understood. In terms of bad-on-paper theory: Umaga's "Samoan Spike". How the hell do you hurt a guy with your thumb and nothing else? It's hard enough to believe the Asiatic spike as a hold, but asking us to buy this same move as a strike is ludicrous. You'd break your own finger before you actually hurt anyone else with it.

I do think there's definitely some bias against Southern promotions. I'll put it this way: quick, name a major indy company which is routinely featured on major news websites and has its video sold in the larger "tape-trading" outlets (or their modern equivalent), and which also primarily runs its shows in former Confederate territory. Could you think of any? And if you did, were they running somewhere besides Florida? It probably has to do with population density and technological usage. Shows in the South tend to be promoted in smaller towns most of the time, by promotions which typically aren't focusing on internet sales to prop up their income streams. It's pretty common to have some random indy show with a Jerry Lawler-type in the main event to draw a thousand people to a high school gymnasium in a little town in the middle of nowhere, but you rarely hear about that outside of maybe a two-sentence blurb buried way down on the back page of the Observer.

I'd argue that the whole Stone Cold character wasn't very Randian at all, considering that his mortal arch-enemy was a capitalist entrepreneur who was portrayed as being a brilliant self-made businessman while also happening to be a selfish sociopathic piece of egomaniacal shit. That's pretty much the direct opposite of the way that rich people are portrayed in Atlas Shrugged and the like.

Also known as the one and only Kizarny!

The aggressively-phony names in the Braun Strowman category are SO terrible that I'd almost prefer a solo first name over that bullshit. (Almost.) Their entire gimmick was literally being a couple of effeminate cocksuckers, so this is another case where the solo name is clearly meant to demean and diminish them. Once again: the "standard" of heterosexual American usually-white men are considered the default, what we should come to expect, and it's everyone else who is given a gimmicky personality which is entirely based on the fact that they're not a heterosexual American usually-white man. (Also, Billy Gunn and Chuck Palumbo were both referred to by their full names both before and after the Chuckabilly phase.)

And then in his first match wearing the Blitzkrieg gear, Jack promptly slipped off the top and fell on his head and damn near killed himself. I think he took it as an omen, he only used the gimmick on two or three other occasions when he was doing comedy matches with a masked partner. IIRC, the guy's job as a computer tech actually paid better than his WCW salary, so he just decided that wrestling wasn't worth it.

Does anyone even know what the specific numbers are for merchandise sales nowadays? The only public metric I can think of is to analyze quarter-hour ratings for people's segments on TV, which much be a ghastly soul-killingly tedious process to try and count all that bullshit in a quantifiable manner and weed out the insane number of outside variables which influence the numbers.

And most of the really-super-over megastars from the Monday Night Wars/Ruthless Aggression era are either still aligned with WWE or otherwise unavailable. Austin, Goldberg, Foley, Bret, Shawn, Flair, DDP, Sid, Booker, Luger, Hall, Bradshaw, Ron Simmons, Edge, Christian, Trish, Lita, Sable, and now Sting are all retired and likely to stay retired. Undertaker, Triple H, Cena, Big Show, Jericho, Kane, Orton, and Brock are all WWE 4 Life. Rock and Batista are probably retired, and if they return it'll almost certainly be for the WWE. Savage, Warrior, Piper, Eddy, Benoit, and Chyna are all dead. Hogan is damaged goods. Nash and Jarrett are useless. No new stars from the early days of TNA besides Styles and Joe have come to mean anything special. Pretty much the only free agents that 1.still wrestle, and 2.ever made any difference are Rey Mysterio, Kurt Angle, Scott Steiner, RVD, Vader, and the Hardys. And as mentioned, TNA proved that even those types of guys are still worthless if they're put in a promotion which doesn't know how to use them correctly. Am I missing anyone important? (Unless you want to start counting old ECW stars, but really, let's not even bother.) If someone managed to book ALL of those guys into the same promotion along with a healthy young roster of indy stars and foreign talent, it might theoretically be possible to craft it into something interesting; but once again, TNA has been trying and failing to do exactly that for pretty much their entire existence.

Kinda continuing to prove the point, since Sheamus is seen as being exotic foreigner as opposed to just a Normal Guy with a Normal Name by the cultural attitudes of the WWE universe. The Irish guy has a single first name, the French guys have single first names, the Puerto Ricans have single first names, but the ordinary Americans are seemingly never named just James or Jacob or Peter or Joshua or Joseph or Michael, which are the direct English equivalents to all those guys' names. As for Eugene, the water is a bit muddied there by the fact that the character was named after a real-life handicapped kid named Eugene, an old superfan who was constantly in attendance at the shows.

Which probably goes back into the racism subject, because I can't remember a time they ever did that with common English first names, only those gosh-darn exotic foreign names.

He promptly injured himself in one of his first matches back. The guy's body was a wreck, he wasn't even capable of the same level of physicality that he was doing just a few years earlier.

I never even noticed that, but yeah, you're right. The one-name guys are never "Bill" or "Dave", which is the equivalent to what the one-name Divas are.

The problem with that area of analysis is that it only focuses on a minority fraction of the population. Basically, the "we have too much stuff and it controls is all" argument is something that only applies to rich people. Poor people (who do comprise the overwhelming numerical majority, even in America) don't have fancy custom furnishings in the first place to be defined by. They just have whatever was on sale at Walmart.

Seeing how many women get treated online, especially on wrestling forums, I don't blame any of them for adopting a male or gender-neutral persona. Misogyny is still incredibly alive and well, and even thriving in too many of these places. And as for Jimmy: I didn't know your gender, and honestly it doesn't change much now that I do know it. About the only difference is "oh, some of those things you said about Trish make even more sense now".

This made even less sense than you know. Backstory: Edward Chastain is the real name of motherfuckin' Iceberg, a Southern indy worker out of NWA Wildside. 'Berg was a hardcore monster, basically like an Akebono who would happily bleed all over the place and fall through tables. His gimmick was basically that he was a serial killer, and his special weapon was a fucking sickle. He was a guy who was legit 500 pounds but would still do the occasional bump off the top turnbuckle. And so of course TNA took one look at this guy, and said "we should book this man with an anti-hardcore gimmick and say that he's here to crusade against garbage wrestling. Also, for some reason it's mandatory to call him by his goofy-sounding shoot name." It hurt his character so badly in his home promotions that they had to scramble him into a babyface turn, with his eeeeeeeevil manager Jeff G. Bailey turning on his former client in disgust over how badly TNA had sabotaged the one-time unstoppable monster.

When's the last time Scott Hall had a genuinely good match? And I mean something which featured a really strong performance from him, not just "well, that three-way with Jarrett and Sid wasn't too bad". Also, they were screwed from the start by the booking. I don't think the WWF crowd really gave a shit about the Outsiders in 2002, they were mostly just excited for Hogan's return while Nash and Hall rode on his coattails. Putting Austin into this feud was seen as a step down for Stone Cold, who should never be wrestling a sub-ten-minutes match deep in the undercard of Wrestlemania against a worker whose finish Austin can't even physically take. It doesn't help that Hall was trying to wrestle a Rock-type sprint, and simply didn't have the ability to do that and pull it off.

It's not identical, but it's along the same lines. Wrestling being perfectly happy to cast vaguely-ethnic-looking Westerners as exotic foreign heels is a pretty despicable trend which is awfully hard to defend on any moral level, but it's still something that continued all the way into the 21st century. Y hello thar, Muhammad "Italian guy from New York" Hassan!

Rick Rude was still kinda green at the time, but his match with Ricky Steamboat at Royal Rumble '88 was mystifyingly terrible. It was mostly one long chinlock, and the few bits of "action" all seemed counterintuitive in their design and dull in their execution. Maybe the worst match I've ever seen Steamboat have. The inexplicably awful Bret vs Sting match from Halloween Havoc '98 comes to mind as well. They botched half the spots, nothing made any sense, and they did one of the dumbest ref bumps I've ever seen where Bret laid out the official in the middle of the ring and then proceeded to superplex Sting right on top of the poor fucker.

Hey, I know that guy. As in I was there when Josh was training, called his first match and about a million others after that, hung out with him countless times. Glad to see him randomly pop up in a place like this.

i've never understood the whole "it's unbelievable for men to compete against women, even if they're the same size or the woman's bigger!" talking point. Especially since the guys who believe that will often turn right around and have no problem cheering Rey Mysterio against Mark Henry or whatever else would be a ridiculously unbelievable fight in real life. And feminism has been the babyface multiple times in wrestling. Even in the middle of the Attitude era, one of the most misogynistic times in all of wrestling history, Chyna still managed to be one of the most popular babyfaces on the roster. Some people still bitched and moaned about how she ruined the IC title by wearing it, but clearly the paying fans loved it when she beat up men. And ODB had some similar success as an intergender asskicker in TNA. The precedent is there that the audience is perfectly willing to accept intergender matches on a regular basis.

It is literally a fairgrounds, they have flea markets and gun shows in the same place. Out back are animal stalls for when people bring livestock for sale. Elsewhere in the same complex is a Nascar race track.

Do Taz and Sabu even have enough full matches against each other that made tape to fill up a whole DVD set? I'd imagine they'd have to pad it out with matches where they tagged together.