Jingus

And they actually charged money for it? You see, at the time, most of the Asylum's crowd was let in free. The fans around ringside paid to get in (or at least some of 'em, there were lots of comped seats for special guests, you can frequently spot Dixie in the crowd back then) but all the fans in the bleachers and in the balcony got in free, because TNA drew so badly that they wouldn't have filled up even this small building otherwise. This show was an exception, with Sting being there, and they actually made everybody (except the wrestlers' inevitable special guest Plus Ones) pay the ten dollars to see the show. Also, afterward the show went off the air, Saturn walked down the ramp dressed as Naked Mideon, wearing only a thong and a fanny pack. Your guess is as good as mine.

Yeah it is. I've actually known multiple people who actively call themselves that, and are proud of being hipsters.

Not as much in the later Cena years when practically every main event had a bunch of inevitable finisher-kickouts, but it was already happening. Don't forget that by this time the Shawn/Trips feud was already nigh unwatchable in ridiculously overlong, overbooked, overhyped, oversold matches. Matt Stryker was a Les Thatcher trainee from HWA in Cincinnati, he wrestled on the forgettable undercard in ROH in their early years. Sadly, his career never went anywhere and he eventually retired, probably because Matt Striker was rocketed to fame when him getting fired from his shoot job as a teacher for using sick days to work WWE tapings suddenly became a huge story. Too bad, because Stryker was by far the better wrestler of the two. Just wait until he inexplicably becomes one of the most over babyfaces on the roster.

There's a couple of clip videos online of this guy, and I'm amazed that he didn't seem to last long in wrestling just because of his sheer size. He might've been a terrible wrestler (most of the videos don't include much ring footage) but he certainly had just as much "holy shit, LOOK at that guy!" wow factor as Haystacks Calhoun or Great Khali. I found a snippet from Memphis where he's standing next to Lance Russell, and it's a full-body shot so you can tell that Lance isn't ducking down or Harris isn't standing on a box to make him look bigger. And with both men standing flat-footed on the ground, the top of Lance's head doesn't even quite reach the level of Harris's armpit. In terms of a WWF run, though, he's got two things going against him. First of all, his size is the only impressive thing about his body; imagine if Giant Baba had a beer gut, and that's what kind of shape this guy is in. He's not fat all over like a King Kong Bundy, he's wearing all his weight right around his belly button and it looks terrible. They're always careful to keep him fully clothed and wearing a pair of baggy overalls to conceal his big belly as much as possible. Vince always liked giants, but he liked in-shape giants; comparatively, guys like John Studd or Giant Gonzalez had much better physiques. But the real thing that's probably most against him is one simple fact: he looks taller than Andre. And we all know how allergic Vince was to hiring anyone in the 80s who was taller than Andre.

Checking around it turns out that Chyna did say she dated Beefcake... when she was 18 and he was twice her age, so it's still something that Hogan probably shouldn't be mentioning.

There's a huge difference in American society between taking nude pictures and being filmed while having sex. The latter is seen as being MUCH more shameful than the former. Yeah, have people forgotten about that? Her book was maybe the single most painful-to-read autobiography from any wrestler ever, and most of it stemmed from just how neurotic and dysfunctional she clearly was, even during her "peak".

For the Great Movie Theory and the Consistency Argument, there's only one name in the world: John Cazale. He only starred in five movies in his entire life, but ALL of them were beloved masterpieces.

Exploding barbed-wire deathmatches. I don't have much justification for them besides "it's cool when shit blows up", but by GOD I absolutely LOVE me some exploding barbed-wire deathmatches. Even though the match is stupidly dangerous to the performers, even though they often turn out to be terrible matches, even though FMW was seemingly the only company in the world that knew how to produce them properly.

NJPW brought her in for a tour or two, about a dozen matches overall. She had a really terrible match with Chono at a Dome show (much worse than the one Chono had with Hogan a year later, if that puts things into perspective) and that pretty much ruined her chances there. Word. BBC's article about her passing called her "porn star" right in the headline, and half the comments were people bitching about how disrespectful it was to point out that she had done the porn.

Unless, like, she died in a car accident or something. Let's at least wait until we've got a cause of death before officially deciding whose fault her death was.

Thanks KJH. Any med school graduates here who can translate the jargon into layman's terms? I do think the brain damage was almost certainly a contributing factor, considering the stories we've heard about how Chris's behavior had become even stranger than usual in his final months. But I don't think it's the primary factor. From what I've read, Benoit's specific crime is actually common enough that it has its own subgenre of psychopathy: it's typically called "family annihilation". Almost every single time, it follows the same exact pattern: a husband first kills his wife, then his children, then finally commits suicide. The most common similarities in the individual cases are the perpetrator drinking heavily and having a history of domestic abuse or marital difficulties, and probably some other more complicated shit that I've forgotten. But the point is, it's happened often enough that criminal psychologists are aware of the phenomenon and have even developed some nomenclature for it. And from what I understand, brain damage or "roid rage" isn't a commonality in the vast majority of these cases. It usually seems to boil down to a controlling father with a rocky marriage.

Does anyone have any links to specific autopsy findings about Benoit's brain? I remember conflicting reports about that. At one point, people were claiming that Benoit's brain decomposed badly enough while his body was sitting in an non-air-conditioned room that it was tough to do much analysis.

So basically your argument is "none of the other people whose crimes were bad enough to bother me also happened to be good enough wrestlers to possibly be ranked, ergo Benoit is the only one who even counts for this"? Your point is that he's the only guy who's both a good enough wrestler and a shitty enough person to qualify for such special treatment? I just don't understand the idea of disqualifying anyone for anything they did in their personal life. Steve Austin used to beat the shit out of at least one of his wives, but he's still in my top 10. I didn't rank Invader #1 or Jimmy Snuka, but other people did. After that, it becomes a matter of: where do you draw the line? I don't see a point in drawing any line at all. Just grade the work and leave the extracurricular horrors out of it. Extrapolating it to another form of entertainment: despite OJ Simpson having stabbed two people to death, I still laugh my ass off at Nordberg getting beaten up by the whole universe in the Naked Gun movies. Roman Polanski is an unforgivable piece-of-shit child rapist, but that doesn't change my estimation that Repulsion, Chinatown, and The Pianist were all brilliant artistic masterpieces. John Landis managed to manslaughter a bunch of people including children on a movie set, but I still adore The Blues Brothers. The fact that the guy who played Half-Sack on Sons of Anarchy ended his life by murdering an old lady and then killing himself isn't something which keeps me from rewatching that show. I don't have a problem seeing old stuff with Robert Blake in it. I'm still impressed with the work Michael Jace did on The Shield, despite the fact that in real life he shot his wife dead. I'm still a huge fan of Charles S. Dutton in pretty much everything he ever does, despite the fact that he once stabbed a man to death in a bar fight. And that's not even getting into the list of "a celebrity hit someone with their car and killed them" list, which is surprisingly long. All those people did terrible things, but it doesn't change how I see the work they did from a professional standpoint.

Don's also one of those guys who is so friendly and cheerful that everyone just loved to be around him. He has a niceness and an upbeat sensibility which is downright infectious. When Bart Gunn showed up, the main reaction in the audience was "...who?". Half the crowd were Attitude-era marks who wouldn't remember Bart from anything besides getting destroyed by Butterbean. And Bart is a very generic-looking guy in a forgettable way, so most people didn't even recognize him.

It's a biker thing. Lots of biker culture has this weird fascination with Nazi memorabilia and symbology. Whether or not they're active bigots is anyone's guess. I've heard stories about them being generally dickish people in many situations, but never heard anything that specifically made them look prejudiced.

And a response of people going "LOL, that's so st00pid!" without being able to explain exactly why any of my points are supposedly wrong, and then some random personal heckling, as displayed by Dave here. Fine then, disregard all that and just stick to my several different examples of other wrestlers deliberately killing people.

By Judy's logic, every wrestler in the world is a total failure if they don't expect to be WWE World Champion. Some people simply don't want it, and most people can't achieve it anyway.

If I meant that, I would have said that. My point is that Benoit gets his unique treatment because he ended human lives, yet he's far from the only wrestler to have accomplished that tragedy. That would be because there is no logical point being made. Oh fuck off, Dave. My point is that there's plenty of mental illness and horrifying decisions to go around. And Benoit and Sweeney were both professional wrestlers who killed themselves via ligature strangulation while being attached to a piece of athletic equipment, which is an awfully specific similarity. Am I saying "depressed suicidal Larry Sweeney was equally morally reprehensible in every way as child-choking wife-throttling Chris Benoit"? NO, and you know fucking well that I'm not saying that. Stop putting words in my mouth. My point, which you have continually refused to acknowledge, is that Benoit is not the only crazy person in the history of wrestling. There have been other murderers, other maniacs, other criminals. Benoit's arguably the worst for the sheer monstrousness of his acts at the time of his death, sure. But there are others. And how do you measure that stuff? Take the example of Hardbody Harrison, who kept at least eight (probably more) women as literal slaves and perpetual rape victims, locked up in houses he owned for years. That is astonishingly evil. Is enslaving eight people that much less-evil than killing two people? How do you quantify it at all? I'm not making a single excuse for what Benoit did. I'm not on the "well, he was insane/concussed enough that we can't blame him" bandwagon. Right until his death, this guy kept performing a wide variety of complex tasks which indicate that his ability to comprehend the real world was largely intact. I'm simply saying that the wrestling business is so unbelievably full of sleazy shit that Benoit isn't as much of an unique outlier as many people like to portray him. As I said earlier, I personally know a wrestler who is now in prison for murder and a whole collection of other guys who've committed "lesser" crimes. The business is SO much scummier than most fans have any idea about.

Lesnar versus practically anyone on the roster whom 1.he wouldn't just squash, and 2.he hasn't wrestled already.

Kid Kash has some nasty chops. I've seen him leave handprints on guy's chests on countless occasions. Historically speaking, Gypsy Joe is infamous for being a tremendous chopper. And he didn't just rapid-fire them like a lot of guys, he'd make you sell each individual one separately. He was also one of those guys who (like Flair reportedly also does) had both a work chop and a shoot chop, and he'd vary them depending on if he liked you or not.

I'm not pretending it's ALL in the same ballpark. But I listed a dozen other wrestlers who have ended human lives, and I'm sure there are others whom I missed or who simply weren't caught. (Just from my personal circle of indy acquaintances: I know one convicted murderer, one bank robber, multiple statutory rapists, multiple domestic abusers, and countless drug dealers.) Yes, Benoit is probably the single worst example of a wrestler doing something hideous; but there's plenty of other examples of other guys doing incredibly evil, morally unforgivable things. Yet practically nobody seems to seriously suggest that we shouldn't vote for any of those other guys based on moral grounds.

Hey, wait a minute, that match wasn't even bad! Undertaker was acting like an extra-tall Sandman in that match, it was hilarious to watch him down that weeble-wobble out-on-his-feet selling. One of his few PPV bouts from 2001 that I actually liked. That's true. This is when I first got into wrestling, and his SatanTaker gimmick was one of the first things which made me interested in the product. He was still trying during that period, even though he was plagued by lots of injuries and shitty booking. The one part of his career I can't defend overall is the American Badass phase. Good matches were few and far between in that period, and we don't have the "well, he's playing a slow-moving no-selling zombie character" handicap to explain things here. He just looked tired and selfish instead, especially in those disastrous matches against various WCW guys during Invasion. Maybe this is WHY they focus so hard on the Immortal Legendary Undertaker gimmick at other times, because he's just not very good at trying to wrestle like a regular guy. Of course, if you have the opportunity to present someone as an unique special attraction rather than have them just be a regular guy, why not present them as the immortal legend? The crowd obviously cares much more about THEUNDERTAKER than they do about Mean Mark Callous, so there's no reason why he shouldn't be treated as the supernatural Very Special Guest Star since it obviously works.

I ranked him, pretty highly. He's still a few spots lower than he would've been in 2006, it's understandably much harder for me to get emotionally into his matches now, but his murderous actions didn't erase the body of work. It's not like the matches never happened, and we're only supposed to be ranking the matches here. joeg makes a good point: wrestling is FILLED with scummy people. Benoit is far from the only murderer: we've also got Invader #1, for the obvious example. Scott Hall once shot a guy dead in a bar fight. Jimmy Snuka (probably) beat his girlfriend to death. New Jack has allegedly slain several people. Verne Gagne, Kensuke Sasaki, Great Khali, Mayumi Ozaki, Big Daddy, Akitoshi Saito, Ox Baker, and whichever-opponent-knocked-Emiko-Kado's-brains-out all killed people with their bare hands by accident, plus a number of outlaw-indy nobodies who've also managed to kill people in the ring through sheer incompetence. I'm sure plenty of people died in wrestler-related car wrecks back in the territory days. And of course a large number of workers have deliberately killed themselves, some in horrifically disturbing fashions (hello there, Larry Sweeney). And that's just the killers; when you factor in the rapists, the domestic abusers, the thieves, the guys who were unforgivable liars or con men even by the disgraceful standards of wrestling... that's a pretty huge pile of absolute fucking crazy-and/or-evil people that we're talking about. And that's just the ones we know happened, the ones that became public. From guys who were in the business, I've privately heard a few genuinely nauseating stories about recognizable names, stories which never made it to the Sleaze List. For every Hardbody Harrison who was caught doing something unforgivably atrocious, there were probably two other guys who did the same thing but got away with it. Of course Benoit's crime is (probably, that we know of) the single worst thing on the list. I can't think of any other wrestlers who ever deliberately murdered a child. But let's not pretend that there aren't other monsters whose despicable actions were within the same ballpark.

Aside from everything else that's been said to debunk this nonsense: chops make more sense than punches from a biological standpoint in a worked match. You really can chop a guy in the chest as hard as you possibly can, a hundred times in a row, and have him still come back for more. In what universe can you punch a guy in the head as hard as you possibly can a hundred times in a row (clean shots, not the grazing jabs that count for points in boxing matches) and have them still be as fresh as a daisy, or even not break your own hand? One of the most common complaints you'll hear over and over again from non-fans after watching an average American match is "it's ridiculous that they hit each other that many times in the face and nobody even has a black eye".

Damn fine work, gentlemen. And admittedly I'm biased by how you guys always seem to crack into shocked "should we be laughing?" laughter of disbelief while reading my posts. But still, these shows are a lot of fun.