Jingus

I don't recall saying a single goddamn thing to you, buddy. And I've had this exact same argument multiple times on this board, I'm tired of re-elaborating on it. If you wanna know why, go work on shitty wannabe-Memphis indy shows in the South and see how high your tolerance remains for walk-and-talk bullshit in matches after seeing it done ad infinitum for years on end.

Bryan's book directly contradicts this, he said Shawn came to training all the time.

THE THINGS TOTALLY MURDERED THE TERRITORY BY CUTTING OFF THEIR HEADS WITH A CHAINSAW. Except what I actually said was "probably helped". Pay attention, guys.

Over time, they've actually been pretty skittish about that one. They've been just as likely to cast white guys into minstrel-ish funk gimmicks: Akeem, PG-13 as the Nation's rappers, Too Cool, rapping Cena (plus Albert and Buchanan as his hip-hoppity sidekicks), so forth and so on. And, Brodus is black?

I'm fine with wrestling in general. It's the awful, illogical, intelligence-insulting spots that I hate. And that description covers a whole lot of the southern, Memphis-style aggressively-phony bullshit that probably helped kill off the territories.

It doesn't get the crowd involved. It teases the crowd with the possibility of involvement, and then basically tells them "go fuck yourself, you don't matter" when the crowd-asking doesn't lead to any punishment of the rule-breaking. Also, it sets up an expectation that the referee is supposed to listen to the crowd, if he ever asks them. How do you do any kind of fuck-finish after that? The referee asked them just five minutes ago if the heel was cheating; now he's expected to ignore all the fans who are screaming that the heel hit the babyface with a foreign object and then put his feet on the ropes for the pin? "Hey you blind asshole, you listened to us before, why aren't you listening NOW?" Once again, the heat in those situations goes on the referee rather than on the wrestler, and unless you're setting up a Danny Davis, Evil Official angle then that's always a bad thing. Oh, I would loved to have worked for a company where a referee could get away with doing that on the fly. Unless it was a spot that one of the wrestlers explicitly called, a referee doing that could almost automatically expect a pissed-off wrestler throwing a tantrum about interfering with their stuff-to-do. Most modern workers seriously do expect the referee to just do whatever they say and otherwise stay completely out of the way, never interjecting themselves unless instructed otherwise.

I always felt like a total goddamn fool when I was refereeing a match and I had to ask the crowd if the heel did something. You don't see real-sports referees asking the audience's opinion on anything. And back to my point: why should you ask if you're not gonna do anything based upon any answer you get? It doesn't matter how sternly you scowl at the heel, how firmly you shake your finger at them, how grumpily you demand them to knock it off. If you're not going to do anything, then it makes the fans feel nothing but frustration that their input was requested and then summarily ignored. The heat then goes on the referee for being an impotent wallflower, rather than on the heel who's doing the cheating. EDIT: and it really doesn't help that, in wrestling, the punishment for cheating is an all-or-nothing deal. Either the referee ends the match immediately (which nobody wants to see), or things just continue onward like nothing happened. It'd be nice if there was some middle-ground punishment. Not like a point system, that would be too complicated to keep up with, but something besides "do nothing" or "stop EVERYTHING" would make the referees look like they had more power.

It's useless to ask if you're not gonna do anything about it. Unless the ref immediately ends the match and disqualifies the cheater (which would piss off the crowd), why bother asking?

His memory's better than my mother's. And she's not only a few years younger, but didn't spend forty years getting hit in the head and drinking herself to sleep every night.

Trash cans are far from harmless. I knew a guy who took a Rock Bottom onto one, and it FUCKED his back up, huge gashes and welts all over his back. (And he was wearing a shirt when he took the bump.)

I don't think real heat leads to good business anymore. If a wrestler truly pisses off a fan nowadays, the fan doesn't watch the next show hoping to see the wrestler get beaten up; they just stop watching entirely.

Damn right they do. Most painful thing I've ever been hit with, for sure. And there was a period in the early 2000s when EVERYONE was using the damn things. I generally hate anything that is more of a murder weapon than a foreign object. Sledgehammers, baseball bats, swords, knives, anything with a sharp edge on it. Even the dumbest of marks can tell that the workers aren't using the weapon in the manner you'd really use it in a fight, just gingerly poking and prodding at each other in a really phony-looking manner.

That's putting it mildly. We watched this match in the GWE chatroom tonight, and pretty much everyone hated it. Dory wouldn't sell ANYTHING, sandbagged on half the moves, and looked like he even might've been taking liberties with some of those uppercuts. Just a slow, dull, selfish performance which made both men look like shit and totally killed the crowd.

It did lead to something, it just took them an entire year of stalling to pull the trigger on it. The office didn't expect the relatively huge sales it drew on DVD and PPV, which (once they got over being butt-hurt that a show mostly featuring non-WWE-wrestlers could outdraw their own Superstars) led directly to their launching ECW as a third brand.

Nash is the one I think of. He knows all the right things to say, even if they're 100% diametrically opposed to everything he actually did.

Remember when they made Sabu cut promos? That was just painful to watch, and they should have realized it on week 1 but they continued to make him talk anyway. He's never been LESS compelling, but you know WWE and their hard-on to remodel everyone into their own image.

Everyone loved the debut angle and match with Rock, and rightly so. But other than that, I can't remember anything in his tenure that was worth watching. They had no idea what to do with Goldberg once they had him; he ended up working way too many long matches, and spending way too much time selling, which of course wasn't his strong suit. They tried to force him to work WWE style, and the results weren't pretty. Especially since he spent months on end feuding with Triple H, who did the exact same thing with Goldberg in 2003 that he'd do with Lesnar in 2013, forcing the unstoppable monster to slow down and work an even-steven match series. They presented it like Trips was an equal, when of course the fans didn't buy for one second that he was on the same level with Goldberg (or Brock) and it just hurt the monster's unique aura when they ended up on the receiving end of so many pedigrees and sledgehammer beatdowns.

That's not Hogan being willing to play ball; that's Hogan, for the first time in two decades, being caught without leverage. WCW was dead, TNA didn't exist yet, and a couple of other attempts at anti-Vince competition had failed miserably. Hogan rarely goes for more than a couple of years without making sure to show up on wrestling TV to remind the fans that he's still here, but at that time he had nowhere to go. For the only time in his post-AWA career, he was stuck in a situation where he didn't have any negotiating power. The WWF had an entire roster overfilled with hot young stars, they didn't need Hogan.

Wait, what? That's kinda weird. Their only regular foreign coverage is a twenty-years-ago nostalgia column? Huh. Wonder what the thought process is about that.

Oh bullshit, don't twist my words and try to martyr up like that. My very last interaction with Lariat, just a few days ago, was hitting the similar (and admittedly lazy, but I don't care because I find it amusing) "holy shit, Vince posts on PWO!" response on him after he repeated another one of Vince's talking points. Hence the obviously-not-to-be-taken-literally wisecrack that you're both sock puppets of the same Higher Power. Show of hands: did EVERYONE know Japanese wrestlers never watched American tapes? Hah, ah yes: whenever insulting someone in a polite-but-condescending fashion, always make sure to call them some variation of "kid". I'm a middle-aged man, and inaccurate insults aren't effective.

When you have to resort to this level of ridiculousness it's time to just stop. Hell no, he's repeating and rewording a classic Vince talking point. "They chant E-C-W because I taught them to chant that!"

Huh. Okay. I've never heard that before, but I guess you'd be the one here who'd know. I just assumed that any country with a booming wrestling business would come equipped with an equally booming subculture along the line of our own tape traders and sheet readers. So, I guess they fit the original topic of the thread REALLY well, being in a bubble that kept them even more isolated than happens to wrestlers in America.

No, there's nothing funny about it at all, because I never fucking said that and you're either trolling me or just not paying attention. Is it entirely possible for Human Being #1 to be unaware of the existence of Human Being #2, regardless of their individual identities? OF FUCKING COURSE. Don't even try to pretend that's what I was saying. I just take issue with this weird idea that Japanese wrestlers would never ever EVER watch American wrestling. I dunno, you tell me. But I refuse to share the weird implication being made in this thread that no such people could have possibly existed. Also: guys, stop using the Jake Roberts comparison. Once again, try to pay attention, just a little, please? I never said Sandman's popularity was equal to Jake's. I said Sandman was just a similar type where their outside-the-hardcores fame was greater than it probably should've been, considering they're better known outside their own bubbles than a lot of other guys who were higher on the card or got pushed harder. (And how do all these completely-not-a-fan people even know who Jake is, considering that he rarely-if-ever did acting gigs or other outside-the-ring appearances? Where did they ever see him in the first place?)

The thing is: every single thing you're listing, from the lack of legally-available tapes to the lack of foreign wrestling on television to the language barrier to being in a bubble: all that stuff applies just as well to American wrestlers watching Japanese stuff. Yet clearly they managed to do exactly that, a lot. "Watching Japanese tapes" was the most popular thing for young wrestlers in the late 90s to do together. Why would it work so differently in the other direction? Holy shit, after Lariat got canned, Vince got a NEW account to post at PWO!

It's not that black-or-white. There's a big sliding scale of how obsessive people are about their wrestling. But, for comparisons sake: three thousand people showed up at the Municipal Auditorium in December of 1999 for an ECW tv taping. Literally one month later, a WCW house show didn't even draw one thousand people to the very same building. THAT'S the atmosphere I'm used to, where even the quarter-hardcores or the mostly-casuals were very familiar with the ECW product.