Jingus
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This. Also, it includes a tendency of being allergic to clean finishes; not just in the main event, but up and down the card.
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Actually we're both wrong, I accidentally clicked on 10/31/98 and was describing that one. You're right, the woman is funny, especially how her entire face just dies when the pinfall is counted.
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Apparently, no we cannot. When I was still working shows in Tennessee, I couldn't BEGIN to guess how many times some out-of-shape indy worker told me that Memphis-style bullshit was "what the people want to see", at shows where there were typically less than a hundred people in the crowd.
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Wait, what? The TD91 isn't at the finish, the match still goes another five minutes after that. And you can't see anyone in the crowd when he hits that, the camera zooms in and all you can see is the ring in the camera frame for both the impact and the pin attempt. The ref freezing in place for a moment after the kickout, as if to say "I cannot believe that just fucking happened", was pretty boss though. And the actual finish is brilliantly sold, with Kobashi slowly crumpling into unconsciousness rather than just taking a gunshot-bump like pretty much everyone else would have done. Stuff like that, little touches nobody else would even try, are one reason why I still like him better than any of his peers.
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According to most ex-WWE wrestlers, you have to improvise about half the time on Raw because your time is constantly getting cut. "You've got eight minutes including entrances. No, wait, five minutes. No, wait, your entrance is during the commercial break and now your match can't go more than ninety seconds." Apparently that happens all the damn time. I would imagine that's one major reason why the Divas matches tend to feel so rushed and disjointed when they're short, because they had been planning something much longer and then suddenly had to edit it down to practically nothing. And if they're not ready to call it in the ring: that's on the company, not the wrestlers. They should be training their rookies how to call it on the fly, every competent wrestling school does that. I'm sure Sara Del Ray knows how to do that shit, let alone a thousand-year international veteran like Finlay. If they're not passing it on to the trainees, it's because the office is actively telling them not to do that, for whatever dumbfuck reason. And if the problem is simply that the girls are too green and don't have enough experience to improvise a match on their own (which is why most first-year rookies are either matched against veterans who can carry them, or fellow trainees whom they've practiced with for months and have a collection of shared spots) then the company shouldn't be putting them on TV yet.
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Weird, I just watched that too. Damn fine match. It was weird to see Taue looking so motivated that he was just as fiery as Kobashi; was this a regular thing for him around this time in NOAH, or was it just a really good night for him? I'm so used to seeing him as "the stoic guy standing behind Kawada" that it felt bizarre to see him going after Tenryu with serious intensity and aggression. Speaking of which, Tenryu stooging his ass off and playing the heavyweight strong-style equivalent of a chickenshit heel was certainly a sight to see. "Okay, Kobashi can beat me in a chop battle... but only after we each chop each other literally twenty-eight times in a row and then I'mma be a heel and dropkick his bad knee."
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Heel turn. Make him a laughing, mocking, insincere, sarcastic piece of shit. Let him pummel the living hell out of a bunch of smaller opponents on a regular basis, make him look like a tough guy. Wait until the crowd finally starts cheering for him organically. Basically, do what they did with The Rock in 1997 once all the "Die, Rocky, die!" chants became overwhelming.
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Steamboat's story about the '89 matches is true. The point that gets downplayed is that it stemmed from he and Flair having wrestled countless times before that, and already having so many shared spots that they could basically do an hour broadway in their sleep.
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Sure, people will get in the ring before the show and walk-and-talk through their matches. That's common. What's NOT common is having an entire training center with several different rings, in which you could literally do your entire match at 100% intensity (and do it several times over) if you felt like it. That's not an option on Raw, when you've got a dozen different people in the ring at the same time, all trying to work around each other while planning their different matches in the limited time that they have to do that. And, what Slasher said about modern house show matches typically being completely different from TV matches. The time given to the wrestlers is different too; Divas get handed an ocean of time on a house show, compared to the trickle of minutes and/or seconds they get to shine on television.
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Samoa Joe is about the same age and was in a similar place career-wise, and decided to take the plunge anyway. Never say never. The main problem is, what the hell would the WWE (outside of NXT) even do with AJ Styles if they had him?
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Have you ever landed right on your fucking head while taking a bump in a wrestling ring? I have. It sucked, every time. I was lucky and never got seriously hurt. But one of my best friends ain't so lucky, a former wrestler who now has serious brain damage (like, "has such bad seizures that he's not legally allowed to drive a car anymore" kind of shit) and a permanent crack in his skull. He's far from the only example I could name, just the one most relevant for talking about bad bumps onto the head. So, yeah, pardon me if I sound like a motherfucking kettle screaming at some goddamn pots when I say that I don't find any enjoyment out of hideous botches where wrestlers get very hurt, or at least could've easily gotten very hurt because something went wrong.
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Are you saying that serious injuries, or horrifying botches which could've literally killed someone, are awesome? If so, then goddamn, that's an incredibly sadistic thing to enjoy.
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How much does match order matter?
Jingus replied to Cross Face Chicken Wing's topic in Pro Wrestling
What the hell does that even mean? My point here is really simple: "The company usually doesn't book a meaningless piss-break match right before the final main event. Here's examples and statistics to back that up." How are you misinterpreting that? What rules am I changing, what things am I neglecting? -
How much does match order matter?
Jingus replied to Cross Face Chicken Wing's topic in Pro Wrestling
I didn't say MOST important. I just mean, two matches which were fairly heavily pushed in the hype up to the show, and generally treated like a big deal. -Manias 22 and 23 did indeed put the barely-promoted diva's match in the semi-main before Cena's title match going last. -Mania 24 had Mayweather/Show, a celebrity match, as the semi-main before the world title main event. -Mania 25 put the two heavyweight title matches on last. -26 had the world title in the semi and then Streak-vs-HBK's-Career on last. -27 had the Snooki celebrity match (which, sadly, had been pretty heavily promoted in mainstream media) in the semi and the world title on last. -28 had the world title match, then the Rock/Cena superfight. -29 had the Trips/Brock allegedly-a-superfight before Rock/Cena Part Deux. -30 was the sole exception, with "AJ beats the entire Divas roster (in order to set up for Paige's debut & win the next night)" put in the death slot between Undertaker losing and Bryan winning. -And finally 31 had Undertaker returning for his first match since his lost last year for the semi-main, before the title match going on last. So, three out of ten. Not exactly a locked-in tradition of how they always do things. And yeah, for purposes of the MATCH ORDER thread I totally discount the HoF walk-on cuz it's not a match. -
If this was the intentional result, maybe. This was clearly a botch. She didn't try to land like that. So no, no awesomeness at all.
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We can judge THIS one, she clearly landed right on her head with nothing softening the impact. It's total luck on a bump like that if you're not hurt at all, or if you break your neck. These things are flatly unpredictable and the variables can come down to fractions of an inch.
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How much does match order matter?
Jingus replied to Cross Face Chicken Wing's topic in Pro Wrestling
It's not something they always do. In fact, statistically speaking, it's not something they usually do. Only three of the past ten Wrestlemanias put a break match before the last main event (always the Divas match, of course). And it hasn't happened at all on any PPV this year, unless you count the tag title match at Money in the Bank. The WWE tends to run at least two important matches back-to-back at the end of their big shows, more often than not. -
Why are they on the list? They were a team for, what, maybe three or four months? Way too short a period to be considered for best-ever, even if the matches were great (which they certainly weren't, not in WCW '99).
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The AJPW guys generally weren't doing it like THAT. The vast majority of the time, they sort of rolled with the momentum rather than just spiking directly downward; and usually they absorbed some the impact with their forearms or their shoulders, rather than landing entirely on their head like poor Sasha did here. That's basically the same bump at the same angle that paralyzed Hayabusa.
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There's always been a bizarre lack of tape on Stan. I dunno if I've seen enough of his matches to even need both hands to count them all. Does anyone know why his entire WWWF title reign apparently went completely untelevised? Well, "entire" is maybe not the best word for something that lasted about a week; but still, he sticks out as being the only guy whose title changes weren't filmed for posterity.
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How much does match order matter?
Jingus replied to Cross Face Chicken Wing's topic in Pro Wrestling
And there is a little bit of truth to the boss's side in those examples. If you burn out the audience with super-workrate-type wrestlers doing EVERYTHING you can possibly do in a ring before the show is even half over, it's hard to keep the people engaged. Of course, in a lot of those older territories the main event was all too often something like "Abdullah beats up one of the Funks for five minutes before they go to a double countout", which is all too easy to show up with something that they can't follow. -
How much does match order matter?
Jingus replied to Cross Face Chicken Wing's topic in Pro Wrestling
And Jericho vs HHH... and Orton vs HHH... hey, waitaminute! And it's true that it heavily depends on the type of crowd that the show tends to draw. Some smaller venues have an atmosphere which is almost more like an outdoor concert, where people spend half the time wandering around and talking amongst themselves and doing whatever while practically ignoring whatever happens in the ring. You're gonna book a show in that building completely different than you would one in, say, the Hammerstein Ballroom where you've got to constantly be throwing so much shit at the audience that they don't get bored and start chanting you out of the building. -
How much does match order matter?
Jingus replied to Cross Face Chicken Wing's topic in Pro Wrestling
This is one of those things that are seemingly never talked about in public by people who've actually done this sort of thing. I wish there was a hell of a lot more talk in shoot interviews about exactly how one goes about booking a show, in the nitty-gritty details of why it's This Guy versus That Guy on This Spot On The Card, rather than That Guy versus That Other Guy on This Other Spot On The Card. (Maybe they do that those Kayfabe Commentary interviews where they focus on the history of one year with a guy who was there; I dunno, haven't seen 'em, but it seems like something that former bookers are generally reluctant to discuss in a nuts-and-bolts fashion.) Match order is something we all love to armchair-quarterback; but even as a guy who's worked on hundreds of shows, the decision process mystifies me. Okay, in general you want your biggest money-drawing match to go on last; and you want something relatively light and accessible to go on first. Don't do similar matches back-to-back, try to vary match type/length/gimmicks/stipulations/finishes; at some point, try to make sure you put in a piss-break match or two that most people won't care much about missing if they need to go to the bathroom or buy some concessions. All that is basic Booking 101 stuff. But past that? Your guess is as good as mine, man. -
It was more than just that: a lot of the match's structure is about how Kobashi reacts to Joe marking out for being in the ring with him. Joe in that match was totally cast as a cosplaying fanboy of King's Road style (albeit one who was still a legitimately dangerous top wrestler himself). It really is a kinda unusual story, of a young superstar who's finally meeting his aging idol in the ring, and the odd consequences thereof. Yes, part of it felt like Kobashi was performing the live equivalent of his own highlight reel, but that was actually part of the story they were deliberately telling. The match starts as a pretty clean exhibition with both guys doing their standard trademark spots; it's competent, but nothing special. It's two talented guys who are kinda going through the motions. But eventually Joe starts trying some cutesy fan-film bullshit, acting like a total mark and copying a bunch of old All Japan moves and spots. Kobashi is all like "what the fuck, you little punk, you haven't earned the right to do our moves!" and turns things up a notch. He angrily no-sells all of Joe's I-saw-this-on-tape offense, and chops Joe into next week. Joe learns the lesson, and takes back over with his usual faux-MMA knees and kicks. They repeat this sequence a couple of times; whenever Joe tries to do some marking-out bullshit like getting into a chop battle with KOBASHI it never goes well for him, but he does just fine when he stops being a wiseguy and goes back to his own patented moveset. Kobashi keeps himself in second gear until after he survives a series of big moves, culminating in kicking out of a Musclebuster; after that he's like "oh shit, this little punk might kick my ass if I don't take this much more seriously" and that's when he pulls out the half-nelson deathplexes and the Hundred-Chop Barrage in the corner. And finally we get the traditional old AJPW finish of "the lesser opponent gets dropped on his head several times, manages to bravely kick out of all that, but then The Ace hits his striking finisher for the pin".
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Finally got around to watching this show, and it was just as great as everyone said. But I noticed one thing that I don't think anyone else pointed out about this show: no swerves. No screwy finishes, no outside interference, no manufactured "controversy", and no heels going over. The babyfaces won every single time, clean in the middle of the ring. Number of people I've seen complaining "gee, they gave us TOO MUCH on this show and I don't want to watch NXT again": zero. Sometimes you don't need all that gimmicky shit to deny the fans the satisfaction they crave, in order to theoretically make them come back next time. Sometimes people just wanna see what they want to see, and this show's universally glowing reviews by everyone who's seen it prove that cheap fuck-finishes and shocking plot twists just aren't something you need on every damn show.