Jingus

Is it just me, or does Misawa sometime seem to struggle in matches with gaijin? I remember a TM2/Curt Hennig match from around this time which was pretty dreadful too. And years later, there was the infamously terrible Samoa Joe abortion, Heck, Misawa didn't even manage to click with guys like Stan Hansen, Steve Williams or Vader as well as Kobashi and Kawada did.

I don't get this argument. Since when do real-word physics matter with wrestling finishers? Hell, if we're talking finishers, Hogan's was never devastating, it was a simple leg drop (and was often applied sloppily, with Hulk barely even touching his opponent). The Rock Bottom does nothing but force you to take a normal back bump, same as a hundred other power moves. The Stone Cold Stunner does practically nothing at all; you suddenly bend forward, and that's enough to knock you out? Some moves wouldn't even work at offense in real life; you try the Samoan Spike in a barfight, and you're gonna accomplish nothing but breaking your own damn thumb. It doesn't matter what move a guy picks as his finish; what matters is that it's HIS finish, and in kayfabe theory he's able to hit that move better than anybody else on the roster. Countless guys use a figure-four leglock as basically a rest hold; what makes it when Flair does it? It's still the exact same move. The difference is it's Ric fucking Flair doing it, and in wrestling's phony storyline he's mastered using that hold at a level that nobody else has. What's the difference between Shawn Michaels' superkick and every other wrestler who ever kicks another guy in the head? There IS no difference, except that the storyline PRETENDS it's somehow different because it's this one guy's signature move. Saying "Perfect shouldn't be able to get a 3-count with that move because Hogan is too big" is silly. In real life, Curt Hennig probably would have kicked Terry Bollea's ass in a fight; Hennig was a college athlete while the future Hulkster spent his youth playing guitar and laying on the beach. Anyone could have kicked out of all the same moves that Hogan kicked out of; the only difference is, he's the only guy the promoter told to do that.

Still better than America. There are MASSIVE sections of this country in which public transportation literally doesn't exist. The nearest bus stop to my house is five miles away, and the nearest train stop is twenty miles away, because apparently rural America's motto is "fuck trains".

No, usually it's just "oh shit, I walked through the curtain naked" and either you're desperately trying to cover up or keep the fans from seeing you. Bret Hart's repeatedly mentioned another common one, where you're completely undressed and unready in the locker room, but suddenly your music's playing and it's time to go and the promoter is screaming at you to get your ass out there, and you can't even find your damn boots...

Is Megumi Kudo quite possibly the single greatest barbed-wire worker of all time? She didn't have that many of those, but every time she nailed it with both airtight psychology and brutally epic spectacle. Terry Funk is the only person I can think of offhand who has a better run of wired matches; but some of those were SO violent and nasty that they become actively unpleasant to watch, which is a problem that I don't think Kudo ever had. I've heard lots of people complain that particular spot is illogical. I think I can justify it thusly: being Irish whipped is usually a pretty neutral position in a wrestling match. Half the time, the whip-ee ends up coming back with their own move or reversal anyway. Being whipped isn't something to be feared in normal circumstances (unless it's being done by Stan Hansen, and he just now adjusted his elbow pad, in which case it's I Hope I'm Wearing Very Dark Pants time). But, in a barbed wire match? You're not just gonna bounce off the wire and come back with a casual counter-move. Well, that happens occasionally as a Fighting Spirit~! hope spot, but not often. Usually you just hit the wire and STAY there, shrieking "OWWIE OW OW MOTHERFUCKER OW!!!" Hell, you might even be shoot-stuck there, caught on a barb (or worse, some barbs) and not wanting to move until you gingerly remove the sharp pointy steel from your gear/hair/flesh/whatever. So it makes total sense to me that, in kayfabe terms, the wrestlers are paying much more attention to their ring positioning in a barbed wire match than in ordinary bouts. Small mistakes in one's gameplan can suddenly have much larger, much more painful consequences than in regular everyday wrestling. So they're taking a way more defensive approach than normal, constantly on the lookout for any attempt by their opponent to send them into the wire. In such a paranoid and nervous mindset, they're capable of making micro-adjustments in midstream; even though you'd never even try to just sandbag and collapse on an Irish whip in the middle of most matches, this is one situation where such an unusual action is warranted.

I haven't stepped foot inside a locker room in over six years, but I still have stress-panic dreams of trying to make it to bookings and having transportation troubles.

Seriously. Josh Brolin is right there, guys. Hell, you could even use daddy James to either play Dory Senior or as current-day Terry as elderly retiree.

Yeah, that too. Especially how they lump all of "hardcore" wrestling together into one group, like it's all equally bad for your long-term health. People don't seem to understand that a long WWF-style main event with a hundred back-bumps is actually worse for your body and your brain than the vast majority of stabbing-the-forehead deathmatches.

Being a self-promoter and a hype man is part of being a pro wrestler. Even if you're having a five-star all-time-masterpiece exhibition of technical wizardry, none of that matters if you're playing to a building so empty that, as Ricky Morton likes to say, "you could've thrown a hand grenade into the crowd and not killed anybody". You have to be able to sell the idea of your matches to the point where people will show up to see them, or else you're not gonna have many matches in the first place.

Oh yeeeaaah. This was the very first wrestling match I ever watched. It was playing on the big-screen TV in the college dorm lobby when I happened to be hanging out there during the super bowl, and it immediately drew me in. "Huh, these guys are called Mankind and The Rock? What oddly abstract characters for a couple of rasslers. This looks WAY cooler than that old Hulk Hogan fake bullshit that I always ignored. OUCH, that fall down the stairs had to hurt like hell!" Since it basically single-handedly ignited my fandom (it wasn't until a few months later that I began watching regularly, but still) I'd say this broadcast definitely did its job as far as drawing in new viewers. But LOL, that final camera shot! BAD Kevin Dunn, what the hell were you thinking with that bullshit?! Even as a guy who'd never watched wrestling before in his life, I could immediately tell that it broke the "rules" of how this narrative storytelling artform was supposed to work.

Sloppiness in American women's wrestling has nothing whatsoever to do with differences between male and female biologies. Even the most casual viewing of a few high-end Joshi matches shows that women are absolutely capable of doing pretty much everything just as well as any man can, in physical terms. The problem is the manner in which female wrestlers are treated in America, and the weird expectations that the wrestling business has for its women. Simply put, like most American media, the vast majority of female celebrities in wrestling are required to be cute in conventional terms. There are some exceptions like Kong, but overall any female wrestler who gets lots of work is more likely to look like a Bella twin. If a woman is "too muscular", that's treated as a profound negative; they're expected to usually be pretty skinny and petite. Yet they're expected to perform the same maneuvers, in the same ring, which are typically designed for really tall really muscular men. Of course they're going to look like fools, when they're trying to run the ropes in a ring where the top rope is high enough to hit them in the back of the neck. And as someone else mentioned, the "they're just chicks, they don't matter" attitude within the industry is still REALLY strong in many quarters. All too often, the bosses don't even want them to try hard or improve their game. I've seen promo-shooting marathons for local TV where the booker works exhaustively with the men, making them do take after take to get their talking as good as humanly possible; but when it was time for the women to talk, the same booker would go "that's fine, next!" after the first (horrible) take. The WWE sends the same basic message when the Divas rarely get worthwhile ring time, with half the roster working two-minute matches and the other half not even wrestling on TV at all. Fit Finlay and Sara Del Rey can train all the girls as hard as they want, but you're not gonna get better when you're a greenhorn who is stuck working a part-time schedule against the same mini-roster of equally-green opponents. The company clearly spends more time and effort prepping them for bikini photo shoots and their shitty reality show than they ever spend on trying to make much of their female workrate look as good as your average curtain-jerking match on any Shimmer show. And, "it's not believable for a 100-pound girl to beat up a full-sized man"? Uh, why not try and book more girls who weigh more than a hundred damn pounds? Chyna might've been a shitty worker, but nobody in the crowd ever had any problem "suspending their disbelief" when she was going toe-to-toe with men the same size as her. (And besides, it's fake, and none of the marks ever seemed to have difficulty believing guys from Shawn Michaels to Spike Dudley to Jushin Liger when they went over much larger opponents.)

Did Hogan and Giant ever have a good match together? They main evented at least four different PPVs with singles matches, and iirc every single one of those sucked pretty hard. Especially that godawful Superbrawl 96 cage match, where Hogan just KEPT ramming Giant into the cage over and over and over and over and OVER until it started feeling like an endless Mike Myers joke. Really puts all those Hogan/Andre matches (which were far superior to Hogan/Wight even all the way into Andre's sad 1988-era performances) into their proper perspective; and also makes me think that Andre must've been the one calling those matches, whenever Patterson wasn't scripting them anyway.

Yeah, she got squashed by Mickie James in a disappointingly brief match on that WWEvsECW special they did on Wednesday night before One Night Stand 2. I don't remember her ever showing up on TV again. And why the hell did they hire Scorpio and then never put him on television? He still looked crisp as ever in his indy matches from around that time.

Oh yeah, that was always hilarious. "Hey Shawn, look, isn't that Mr. Fuji over there?" Or Shawn groaning and covering his eyes when Trips pulled him into the women's locker room, etcetera. The funniest moment of that match did belong to HHH... it was the look on his face when the crowd was unleashing nigh-deafening "CM PUNK!" chants. (The second-funniest was Shawn instantly pinning Mike Knox and then asking his teammates "...who was that guy? Was he in the match?") I'm with the guys who was actually entertained by Michaels as the sad old guy at the teen party, who knows he's totally out of place but still can't leave. (During the times when he wasn't sabotaged by being forced to make a bunch of dick jokes with Trips, anyway.) Shawn sold his material as being the tired old man who barely even wanted to be here, but didn't know what else to do. Like, that one time when Boogeyman pulled him under the ring (which Shawn sold with the classic "Undertaker is slooowly dragging me into the casket!" act), and the punchline was him coming back into the ring with a mouthful of worms. Most top guys wouldn't even agree to do that in the first place; but practically nobody would've undersold it like Shawn did. The natural instinct would be to be frantically wiping at his mouth, fake vomiting, and generally overacting like Chris Farley on the night when the coke was very pure indeed. Instead, Shawn projected fatigue, stoic helplessness at the gross fate he'd been subjected to. He just climbed back into the ring, worms dangling from his lips, and blankly stared at Triple H like "why me?!". Little unique moments of effort and character-based humor can help sell anything, even something as fucking nasty and pointless as a shitty worm-eating gimmick. There were plenty of other times when Michaels was bringing his desperation and insecurity to the forefront of the character. The semi-legendary "See, I just kicked Stan!" backstage vignette is one popular meme, in a moment where the whole point of the character is that he knows full well that he's no longer the young hellraiser of the company, and is willing to do any damn dumb thing to relive his old glory for even the briefest moments. At other times, he'd give up and sink into the resignation of being the fuddy-duddy who's too marginalized to even be considered an elder statesman, when he mock-ruined one of DX's "openly shill merchandise for Christmas" skits/commercials by going into a tantrum over his ungrateful kids being spoiled brats during the holidays. HOWever, all that other stuff classified as Everything Triple-H EVER Did In DX-2.0 can fuck right off. Terrible shit, especially with a whole bunch of "LOLfaggot!" gay jokes which were never funny even in '98 but were something you really shouldn't even be trying in '06.

And you think they followed the script 100% with no improvising? I doubt even Patterson would've realized just how over Hogan would be with that crowd. I can't see the office specifically laying out the match with the deliberate intention of making Rocky look like the heel, when he was the biggest babyface the company had.

I don't buy that at all. (Well, the No Way Out match part maybe, that one wasn't very good.) But Rock obviously figured out in a real hurry that he wasn't the babyface at Mania, he changed his entire shtick to go full heel and let Hogan act as the face.

...Triple H, maybe? Austin usually had shockingly good matches with him, better than Shawn usually did. Nobody else but Foley and Benoit seemed able to so consistently pull such good work out of Trips. This is something that does kinda make me chuckle, the bizarre gap of perception between the consensus and some hardcore smarks. It's not just the WWE's imagination. You know what people generally think that Shawn was great? Wrestlers. People as different as Ric Flair, Mick Foley, Ultimate Warrior, Jim Cornette, Hulk Hogan, Steve Austin, Sid Vicious, Chris Jericho and Jim Ross all manage to put aside their completely differing philosophies on wrestling and agree that Shawn is possibly the best in-ring worker they've ever seen in their lives. (Same thing with Undertaker, but that's a different thread.) And they'll probably all immediately follow that up with "and he was a total asshole backstage", but if anything that makes their compliments towards his work even more impressive, because how much are you willing to compliment a guy you really don't like? I remember a Hurricane Helms shoot interview where he was bitching for like five minutes straight about how terrible a person Michaels was... while still occasionally peppering in comments like "and that really hurt, cuz I idolized his ring work". You don't say that kind of stuff just to be a WWE corporate shill, not when so many of these people don't work there anymore and have tons of big disagreements with other parts of Vince's general business philosophy. These are the guys who've been there and done that, and it's pretty damn rare to hear anyone who's been in the ring with him saying anything not-glowingly-positive about HBK's abilities as an in-ring artist. Even fuckin' Bret doesn't knock the work itself.

The crowd was already on Hogan's side from the instant that his music hit. He didn't have to do anything to get them to cheer him, they were already doing it. Rock quickly recognized what was going on and heeled out (which was interesting, cuz he'd been a babyface for the past three years straight).

That's fascinating. Does anyone know if ANY of those matches made tape? A quick bit of Googling doesn't turn up any Japanese matches for Piper available for online viewing in the usual places. The closest I found were a match or two of him working The Canadian gimmick in Los Angeles; although one match against Tatsumi Fujinami shows Piper working a bit more grappling-based style than he did in years afterwards. (He also gets pinned, but does that annoying "kick out at 3.1" deal; what was WITH Piper refusing to EVER lay down, until he got to WCW and suddenly decided his pride wasn't worth more than Ted Turner's money?)

Who didn't ever stiff jobbers in squash matches? I'd never heard of Shawn being more out of control than various other guys. Remember, the freakin' Nasty Boys were around during the same time period.

Little Guido and Norman Smiley, perhaps? It's a helluva transition from UWFi shoot-style to hardcore comedy gimmicks.

Also, while that's a lot of bullshit on Shawn's part, remember you're only talking about four years of his entire career. During his tenure as one half of the Rockers and in his post-comeback miracle run, Shawn was much more professional. In fact, I'd say it's 75% of his career that he wasn't a shithead; we just remember that 25% because it stuck out so glaringly at the time.

Rumor has it that DID happen. The Harris twins allegedly caught Shawn away from his bigger buddies, with only Waltman being there. Ron or Don, whichever, one of 'em beat the crap out of Shawn while the other one held X-pac down, with a prison-like warning: "You didn't see shit!"

Hell, his entire 2002 return is full of gems. Don't be put off by the stinky Undertaker match or the boring HHH match, go find the Smackdowns where he was working Jericho or teaming with Edge or getting squashed by Brock and you'll find a lot of fun stuff. Hell, I think it even included the only time we've ever seen Hogan tap out, against Kurt Angle (and Hogan took at least half a dozen suplexes like a champ in that match). It's a shame that Hogan's ego got the better of him and he seriously thought that he should still be the top guy at that time, otherwise they could've kept on doing some really good stuff. In WCW, however... well... yeah, there's not very much. He had a few good matches with Flair here and there, more because of Ric than Hulk of course. (Their Superbrawl match is especially slept-on, the nonsensical booking blinded everyone to the fact that they were getting a shockingly good bout out of these two guys at this period in their careers.) I remember the Goldberg title change being everything it needed to be. One or two of the Kidman matches were alright. Did he have any forgotten gems on Nitro with DDP that I'm blanking on? I'm pretty sure everything he ever did with Sting was mostly garbage, I think Hogan was legit threatened by the Stinger's popularity and didn't want to make him look good (is it a coincidence that their best matches happened when Sting had turned heel in '99?). The first match with Piper at Starrcade was actually a perfectly decent brawl, which gets overlooked because of the lame non-title booking and all their increasingly-terrible rematches. And then there was that one bizarro-world week where Arn Anderson actually pinned the Hulkster in '95. Did I miss anything? I remember every single one of the matches with Savage, the Giant, and Luger as being just awful; as were most of the other Vader encounters besides the first one. EDIT: also, people were way too hard on the match with Shawn Michaels in 2005. That's EXACTLY how it should have happened, with Shawn taking the exact same pinball bumps that he always did as a heel against a much larger and stronger opponent. He bounced around the same way for Nash in 95 and Taker in 97 as he did for Hulk in '05.

Yeah, one. The Superbrawl match was shockingly fun. My theory on that one is that Hogan was legit pissed off at Vader for, well, being Vader. You can literally HEAR the smack of Hulk's fist hitting Vader's face, multiple times in the match. How often did that happen? But whatever the motivation was, Hogan looked fired up for once (which didn't happen often in WCW) and the two of them clicked pretty well.