Jingus

Which was really damn dumb, in hindsight. The criticism, not the rubber. All of those "no pretty blue mats here in ECW!" masochistic tendencies are, thankfully, mostly gone out of the business now. Yeah, common whenever you have to bleed. There's a variety of different stuff you can take, but the most traditional combo is aspirin and alcohol. A couple of pills and one big shot of vodka are all you need, generally.

Nah, he bladed and it was pretty obvious. Yeah. It sure looked intentional on Flair's part, and Hogan never really seemed to react to the blood in a "yay, I just won!" sort of way. Having it be hardway blood and an improvisation is literally the only way this would make any sense, but unbelievably it looks like this was all done on purpose.

Fortunately, he found an instructor who was always available on Sunday, Monday, and Friday nights.

This is one of my all-time favorite power spots. Hogan has like a hundred pounds on Bob, at least. It's done from an awkward position, where Bob is bent way over and doesn't have any good leverage. And Backlund does the lift so slowly, showing off Bob's crazy level of control and balance. I've seen Benoit and Malenko do this exact same spot, and those guys were straining and grasping and the guy being lifted was doing half the work and they tried to get it over with as quickly as possible; Backlund simply stoops over and then slow-motion deadlifts Hulk Goddamn Hogan up to his shoulders, and then walks from the middle of the ring to the corner. A truly unbelievable feat of strength; it's not just Hogan's three hundred pounds, it's also picking him up in a deliberately difficult way.

Things I'm turning in for college credit today: a poem for a writing class, which is a rambling tale of an old veteran jobber putting over some kid in Hot Topic gear. At one point, I snuck in the phrase "self-conscious epic" because it fit the rhyme scheme. For realz, yo, that shit is officially making its academic debut.

RVD is one of those peculiar types who can't be booked like a regular guy. He has to be seriously pushed; and whenever that happens, the fanbase will inevitably get behind him. As a standard midcarder floundering around in search of something resembling a character, he's useless. Kinda the same thing with Goldberg and a few other guys like that. I don't recall anyone mentioning Rob's bumping yet, so let's just mention for posterity: Rob Van Dam takes some awesome bumps. Well, not so much nowadays, but in his prime the dude was a bump machine par excellence. As for post-2001 accomplishments: he had some really fun stuff with Eddie and Benoit in 2002, where both of those guys gleefully took full advantage of Rob's athleticism and built spots around the amazing stuff his body was capable of. Any match he ever had with Jericho was always worth watching. And then there was that period in 2006 when they were first restarting ECW, Rob was motivated like he hadn't been in years and was doing some really cool shit. He was having random TV matches with guys like Rey, Angle, Cena, and they were all pretty neat little sprints. Alas, then came the drug bust; after he finally came back, Rob and Sabu proceeded to have one of the worst series of matches that I've ever seen those guys do, and then TNA and rocks fall everyone dies.

Depends on how you define "got away with". Gunn was still trying pretty hard back in 97 and 98, which corresponds to the top of his popularity. Once they tried to push him as a singles heel with a buttocks-based gimmick, at the precise moment that his in-ring skills began to stink, the crowd quickly regarded him with channel-changing heat. EDIT: maybe we should narrow down the parameters of this thread? The original post: Some of the posts have devolved into simply naming guys we don't like.

It's not in the Chamber? I just assumed it was, looking at the lineup that's the obvious logical matchup. Is there only one Chamber match this year? The rest of the card looks pretty skippable. I don't see what they hope to get out of Rock/Punk II that they didn't get out of the first match, aside from maybe a slight buyrate bump on this throwaway stop on the Road to Wrestlemania.

For a guy who's in what may be my favorite match ever (Mania X), Owen has surprisingly few masterpieces that I can name. He's done several metric fucktons of fun three-star midcard filler, yet he seemed like he wasn't quite ready to be a top guy. Although I'd argue Owen is a better mechanic than Bret (and with better talking and facials, too), Owen seemed like he was just missing something to be The Guy. Maybe that's a trickle-down effect of Vince's reported lack of confidence in Owen as a top guy, it often showed in the booking. He would have benefited from being in a more heel-friendly promotion where his size wasn't an issue. Imagine 1994-era Owen transported back to 1984 and put to work for Watts or Crockett, he'd have a decent shot at being world champ.

I don't think those guys are nearly bad enough to list here. They were not very good and I usually fast-forwarded through their matches, but think of them compared to oh let's say Tank Abbott or late-90s Piper or most of the Divas or botchtastic indy wannabes with Hot Topic gear or Great Khali or other truly world-class bad workers. If nothing else, the Harrises were easy to work with; I can speak from personal experience here, they once booted me in the face and H-bombed me and I never felt a thing. They're just more on the Brody shelf of "their work doesn't come near their look". Nobody who has been in several arguably-great matches really belongs in a worst-of-all-time lineup, do they? He was fine as a Southern brawler. I don't think he was ever great, but he was perfectly enjoyable in a "wild tag donnybrook that gets out of control" sort of way. Even some of his earlier WWF work is okay, he was in the MOTN on the second Wrestlemania (which had less to do with him than with his partner and Terry Funk, but still JYD certainly didn't ruin it).

Is that match online? Because the half-dozen Daddy matches I've seen have all been just awful, atrocious negative-star affairs in which Britannia's biggest superstar looks like an embarrassing obese backyarder. Admittedly they were all from his later years in the 70s and 80s; but that was the time of his biggest fame and popularity, when everyone from the Queen to Thatcher publicly spoke of being fans of his.

Did that documentary of his ever get released? Outside of that, dude means nothing to me, I've only seen him in the Nasties matches and have it on pretty good authority that I need seek him no further.

On this board, someone's long list of movez isn't often considered a positive. Sounds more libertarian than Republican.

Why pick Sheik, when you've got his off-brand equivalent sitting right there with Tiger Jeet Singh? All the weaknesses, none of the strengths. Singh, Big Daddy, and maybe Vampiro are the only guys who come to mind as legitimate top superstars who were also incompetently bad wrestlers. Even a non-working stiff like Jesse Ventura is on another level compared to those three.

Backlund's one of my favorites, and I was kicking myself for forgetting him in the Top 10 US thread. He's good at doing stuff which usually shouldn't work: really long shine segments where he works an armbar forever, or his bizarro-world character, or the fact that Howdy Doody was a shockingly good grudge-brawler. 1982 or thereabouts, iirc. The match itself is kinda disappointing, one of those meandering heavyweight matches between a bunch of office-protected guys who aren't ever allowed to look like they're in much serious danger. Lotsa rest holds and feeling-out processes. And despite being a tournament final for some kind of tag championship or special prize (the winners get trophies), it ends in a damn DQ or countout or some fuckin' thing like that. But yeah, Slaughter rules too. Does he have a thread in here yet, and if not why not?

No need, I'm on it.

Some discussion about the Beast from the East began cluttering up an unrelated thread, so, here's a dedicated one. What's the current consensus on Bigelow's ECW tenure? I remember it pretty fondly, with Bam Bam carrying guys like RVD and Taz to long competitive matches which didn't suck. Also thought that the November 2 Remember match against Douglas was an underrated gem, which really had the proper Big Epic Battle feel. But everywhere else, yeah, BBB never seemed to accomplish much. He could occasionally pull out a miracle like the Lawrence Taylor match, but most of the time he seemed like a plodding dude with lots of rest holds and light offense and the worst moonsault in all of wrestling. I don't remember if he had a single good match in WCW, despite facing a fairly dizzying array of different "dream" opponents.

-Whatever happened to Vince Senior's fortune after he died? Vinnie K and his half-sister were Sr's only heirs, iirc. Did Vince Jr get all that money he spent to buy the company right back after his father died? It depends. I know that sounds like a cop-out, but really, it's complicated. Depends on the move in question, to a great extent. The bump-taker has much more control on some moves than others; with a hurricanrana, for example, the guy taking the move has to fling himself forward and basically controls the move from start to finish while the other guy spins around him and pretends he's actually doing stuff. But if it's a powerbomb, that's almost entirely on the guy doing the move; the guy taking it basically just tucks his chin, pulls in his elbows, jumps up for the move and prays that everything goes safely and that his opponent knows what he's doing.

I wonder how long poor El-P will last on this project. WCW 1999 is arguably the single worst year for any major American televised promotion, ever. Nash's booking, especially in the summer, is so bad that it makes Russo's first tenure (which is included!) look relatively awesome by comparison.

Corino's size hurts his believability for me. His general style is that of a heavyweight, but he's awfully tiny for that sort of thing; and never in great shape, either. The dude just has the look of a jobber, not a top contender. Great mechanic, sure, but I wouldn't buy this dude as anything but an underdog against many of his oft-towering opponents. I do dig his comedy spots, though.

If this is the Bundy/Race match I'm thinking of: no, Bundy wasn't always this good, this is above-average by his standards. But he was a guy who does often seem unfairly forgotten when it comes to discussing superheavyweights. Both Race and Flair have said in books/interviews that Kiniski went into business for himself, hogging the spotlight as much as possible and even almost completely botching the finish.

Nah, at least one or two people have voted for him... plus me. For rules, I'm going with "must be a natural-born American citizen, but the comparison includes their foreign matches". In adjusted alphabetical order: Steve Austin Mick Foley Terry Funk Eddie Guerrero Stan Hansen Shawn Michaels Rey Mysterio Jr The Necro Butcher Ricky Steamboat The Undertaker With "on a different day, I could pick this guy" honorable mentions for Kurt Angle, Bryan Danielson, Ric Flair, Jerry Lawler, AJ Styles, and Vader.

Okay, then, wiseguys. Two minutes. Anything under that? That pretty much leaves us with only the shortest of squash matches, and I've never seen a short squash that I'd ever consider a "great match".

Nobody's named anything under five minutes. By simple mathematical probability, there must be a minimum amount of time for the wrestlers to do anything meaningful. I don't see anyone ever having a great half-second match.

Hey, does Naylor still work for FCW? He's by far the closest we have to a "name", considering that he's done announcing for WWE developmental as well as major indy feds like Combat Zone. That certainly beats all of my claims to "fame", even if he rarely ever shows up here anymore.