Jingus

They might pretend like the split reactions are all part of the plan, but I doubt it. I think the office is just resigned to the fact that they can't make everyone cheer their top merch-seller.

Well, yeah, of course. They're the ones he was hitting. Super-stiff workers have generally been more popular among people who watch them, as opposed to people who actually have to get in the ring with them. Wasn't that philosophy the basic reason why Bill Watts made top-rope moves illegal in WCW? Also, one would think the easy answer to your question would be "the 200lb guy does lots MORE movez and they look prettier than the big guy's stuff".

One problem with Piper's later career is that he really made no effort to change his style at all. In 1999, he was still trying to wrestle the exact same matches he had in 1985. It looked silly for this middle-aged guy to be acting like he was still the hot young firebrand of the industry; and unlike Shawn Michaels in the re-formed DX, it didn't come off like a hipster inside joke. Piper seemed to really still believe that he was just as big a star in WCW as he had been in the early Hulkamania days, when everyone else knew otherwise. And the various injuries and whatever else he'd done to his body had really taken their toll on him, too. It wasn't just a lack of effort, because at the Wrestlemania where he teamed with Snuka & Steamboat against Jericho, we saw Roddy giving absolutely everything and trying every trick he had left. He even tried to throw a dropkick, for god'z sake. It all looked horrible, of course, but the effort was clearly right there. His body simply refused to perform the tasks that Piper was begging it to do.

Big Show is insanely consistent. He's so good that familiarity bred contempt. (What other giants are better? Okay, he ain't Andre and he ain't Baba, but that's like blaming Kurt Russell for not being John Wayne.) After he got over his early greenness in WCW, he rarely had a match that wasn't at least watchable. He was killed by under-protection, the exact opposite of how the Undertaker was gilded by over-protection. We got too used to seeing Paul Wight doing impossibly good big-man shit on a regular basis, and now everyone just goes LOL BIG SLOW at a guy who consistently succeeded whenever they gave him a fair chance (and no, his TERRIBLY-booked first title run in WWF does not count as a "fair chance"). Go back and watch those ECW matches. Holy fucking shit, Big Show took years off the epilogue of his career with how much he beat himself up in there. Tables, blood, thumbtacks, chairshots directly to the skull; it's what was necessary in the current circumstances, so he did it. Hell, Heyman even managed to smuggle a great storyline under the incredibly shallow plot of 2006-era ECW, that Big Show was afraid of Sabu; and Show sold it just enough to let the hardcore fans pick up on those subtleties, while simultaneously pleasing the office and the casual fans who just wanted to see the giant squash the little guy.

This is entirely different from what everyone else is saying, but: Hogan/Warrior. If the main event of Wrestlemania 6 ain't EPIC~!, I dunno what is. In some ways it's the biggest match ever, cuz nobody knew who was gonna win. Hogan/Andre had a much more foregone conclusion.

Bob seemed like he should've been better in Japan since they were much willing to dig a no-frills, mat-based style like his than the fans in America. But far too many of his New Japan matches I've seen turned into rest-hold marathons, plodding exhibitions of mooovez that frequently felt like they were being performed at three-quarters speed. Maybe it was jetlag or something, I dunno, but Backlund typically delivered better workrate in American than in Japan (aside from exceptions like the 1988 Takada match, of course).

There's being in denial, and there's being at Hogan level insanity. Really, there's no way they can rewrite history to *this* extent. How's he wrong? The Raw rating that week jumped an entire half a point from the week before, from 3.48 to an even 4.0, the highest number they'd scored in six months. They fell again the next week and wavered for a while, but immediately following Wrestlemania the ratings leaped higher and higher than they'd ever been before. It's pretty widely agreed that the whole Stone Cold/Mike Tyson angle was what drew new fans to watch the WWF in large hordes.

I had the good fortune of hanging out at Wildside around 02-04, when I was driving various wrestlers down there to work. Heck, I even got to "work" there once, as a substitute ring announcer when half the crew was off doing the Ted Petty tournament for Ian (technically twice, but it's a stretch to count the time I was "lighting crew technician" aka the guy who flips the ramp lights on and off during the entrances). That promotion really was something special; hell, it was nigh-legendary on the Nashville indy scene, spoken of as a magical utopia where people actually worked hard and didn't lean on tired old Memphis shtick. You could tell there was an unusual feel of camaraderie here, something sadly lacking in so many clique-based backstabby indy shows. Even though the building itself was a splintery disaster (an old converted schoolhouse of all things, complete with plywood-walled bathrooms and VERY shaky carpentry in many places) the action and atmosphere inside that building was unlike any I've seen anywhere else in the South. From the inexplicably noisy "ropes" to the equally inexplicable picture in the locker room bathroom of Ricky Morton saying "That's a fucking mark finish, you fucking mark!" it was truly one of a kind. Nope. Larry's awesome, probably the best unpaid amateur reporter I've ever known.

This ain't exactly "recommended", but it's interesting to look at people in all different stages of their career. Here's a young, super-green Meiko wrestling on fuckin' Monday Nitro of all places. (Remember when WCW had a Women's Cruiserweight belt? Me neither.) It's funny to watch her trying to work what she thinks is "American" style, with a bunch of clumsy pandering to the crowd. The match starts two minutes in, unless you just really feel like watching a Harlem Heat promo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgckv7q1Cn4&t=2m4s

What were the situations and contexts of those injuries, how exactly did they happen? These things aren't always as cut-and-dried as everyone tends to think. Like, plenty of people will still say it was Kennedy's fault for tearing Cena's pectoral, despite the fact that a simple viewing of the tape proves otherwise. Also, it's funny how some guys get painted with that label of "dangerous to work with" and others don't. I haven't seen a single person getting angry with Rollins, despite him literally caving in the face of the company's top draw, on live TV, during the run-up to a big PPV match.

Yeah. "Fake" tends to be the word choice used by people who people who would further elaborate by saying "that shit's all fake, none of those guys are really hurt". And also the word choice used by non-fans who condescendingly assume that the fans still think it's all real.

Thanks Grimmas, subscribed. (Too bad Loss's original links are almost all taken down; curse you, SkyTV!) Since this is damn near Chiggy/Dump: The Thread, I thought I might as well post the following. Here's a match between them from two years prior to the first hair match. Chigusa looks twelve years old; and Matsumoto hadn't adopted her street-punk gimmick yet, she's just a generic chubby heel chick. It's interesting to see them so different from how we usually envision them, especially Nagayo who really doesn't look like she was ready for prime time with some of her cringe-inducing offense. Not-yet-Dump was already pretty awesome, though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDv0qcT1qoE And here, much more recently, Chigusa and Dump renewed their rivalry in an exploding barbed wire match. Because, fuck it, why not? With Chiggy tag-teaming with Onita, because of course Onita's gonna be involved in every explosion match ever. It's pretty much the same "stall stall stall KABOOM" that you always get from this gimmick; but still, it's a "is this a dream?" kind of surreal amusement to see these two women doing this a full thirty years after their initial feud. It's also got a laughable finish, I'd love for anyone to be able to explain what the hell the logic is supposed to be with how the pinfall works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tU1tCmjAYcc Loss, if you ever get around to restarting those other writeups you meant to do in here, I'd love to read them. This has been one of the better-written threads on a board which doesn't exactly lack for good analysis.

I've never taken a single bump that didn't hurt at least a little bit. I don't like the f-word, and have a standard pre-packaged lecture for any non-fans who use it. Especially since mainstream culture still has this idiotic opinion that wrestling still pretends to be real combat, and that the fans buy into it. This hasn't been true for any company in America for decades now. Yet people will still condescendingly sneer "don't you know it's FAKE?" as if the idea had never occurred to us before. Sheeyit, even the South Park wrestling episode fell into that trap, depicting the fans as a sea of ignorant rednecks who completely buy the entire show as being absolutely legitimate. I'd imagine that yeah, they probably do.

A destroyed nose. There are different levels of breaks, and this one was about as bad as it can be and still have the nose attached. He couldn't breathe through it, had surgery on it the very next day. Four weeks is a really small recovery window for nasal surgery, sometimes it takes as long as twelve weeks. So yeah, he might be forced to sit this one out. Especially since this isn't some muscle tear that the company can try to sweep under the rug, it's his face that got tremendously fucked up and they can't possibly hide it from the casual fans or the mainstream media. They might be willing to slap on a protective mask and have him just take the risk, but everyone involved would know that the risk is not insubstantial in a case like this.

The easiest way to do this, in my experience, is just to have everyone together on Skype and have everyone load the same Youtube link. Someone counts down "3, 2, 1, play" and everyone's easily synced up. (Of course, the weak spot is that whatever you're watching has to be on Youtube.)

Firstly, it's never a surprise when they put the belt back on Cena under any circumstances; by now, he's their go-to Plan B. Secondly, both the overall ratings and Cena's merch sales have been down recently, and it does make a certain kind of sense to re-push the proven commodity in Cena to try and fix that. However, reports leaking out now say that Cena's nose might have him on the shelf past Summerslam, so who knows what the hell they're going to do.

What about Tatanka's return in 2006? He was wrestling guys like MNM and Regal/Taylor on a regular basis, you'd think that would be a good atmosphere to produce decent stuff.

Whoops. Fuckin' Wikipedia. (Wrestlingdata and Cagematch didn't have anything close to a full list either.) But still, the overall point stands, that's an incredibly low number for a guy who some might have in their top ten.

Not directly, but I was listening to The Lapsed Fan's podcast about Mania 8, so of course Piper was heavily discussed.

Would anyone have had Brock high on their list before his post-UFC comeback? What a difference a mere thirteen matches, over the course of four years, have made in our perception of him.

Oh, whoopsie. He's easy enough to learn about, though. Short version: Russian sambo master, greatest mat worker since Lou Thesz, but only competed sporadically and only in Japanese worked-shoot promotions in the 90s.

Nah, Brock's got WAY more matches than Volk, he spent two years on the road working a standard WWE schedule. He was wrestling every week on Smackdown, and also house shows, for months and months on end. (Although, Lesnar is still a good example for this thread.)

Wouldn't Volk Han be a lock for this? His chronological tenure might've covered six years, but in that entire time he only had about thirty matches. When a dude's entire career has barely consisted of twice as many matches as I have wrestled in front of people, that's pretty inexperienced. Is there any other case of a top-regarded wrestler whose COMPLETE career could literally fit onto a single Goodhelmet-sized DVD set?

Don't forget that the WWE is, and always has been, a babyface-based company. Bruno Sammartino played the heroic champion in front of the same crowds every month, while Lou Thesz was the travelling heel champ. Hulk Hogan was pinning all his opponents clean, while Ric Flair was holding onto his title with fuck-finishes. Stone Cold was confounding Mr. McMahon most weeks on Raw, while the NWO stood triumphant over the corpses of WCW's pathetic babyfaces most weeks on Nitro. This has always been a company which has had the general mindset of "our most popular star should hold the belt" (even when they didn't agree with the fans about which wrestler was most popular). They've never been subscribers to the old-school theory that The Money Is In The Chase; and considering that Vince is still in business while all his chase-based rivals are long gone, it's kinda hard to argue that point.

That's rumored to be fake spoilers. Which, even bothering to release fake spoilers for a lineup to a PPV that nobody will watch anyway, LOLTNALOL.