Jingus

I like Kane. I got this.

Can't believe you guys forgot to mention a certain JC Ice, unless it's so obvious that nobody felt it was necessary to point it out. Weird that Dundee was running his own school around this time, because the Jarretts had their own official USWA school as well. Memphis isn't THAT big a city. Then again, like 90% of wrestling schools are basically some veteran taking a bunch of money from hopeless young fools who never had a prayer of getting in the business, and a territory like this one would certainly produce a legion of starry-eyed teenage boys whose greatest dream was to be a rassler.

If it helps, you don't really see the worst of the injury. By the time the camera gets a good look at Vader's face afterwards, it's already swollen up and basically just looks like a really bad black eye. The doctors managed to save his eye, but they did have to install a steel plate onto his orbital bone. That's come back to bite him on occasion, like when an unusually-stiff chokeslam from a still-learning Kane made the plate pop out of place.

He worked in the Global lightheavyweight division along with Lynn and Waltman. I wouldn't say he was "pushed", but for once he wasn't a total jobber. It's a shame his career never went anywhere. I know Ben, and he's up there in the Bobby Eaton category of "impossibly nice guy". He kept doing Nashville indy shows (complete with the mullet, until a few years ago) but I think he's pretty much retired now. He got middle-aged and chubby, and was always rather short, and clearly none of the bigger companies were ever gonna come calling.

Also: I haven't actually read any of Keith's reviews in forever, so I stopped by his site (they're often pretty funny, both intentionally and not). This quote is directly from his review of a mediocre Lawler/Foley match from KOTR '97: That oughtta provide a nice chuckle, considering this board's feelings for the King. Also, Keith seems legitimately shocked when Lawler throws a dropkick; I guess Scott just happened to miss the fact that Lawler does this in half the matches he ever had in the WWF/E.

Uh, Vic, that's not very nice. Uh, El-P, that's not helping things. Remember that ELP didn't grow up speaking English, so it's not surprising that he'd occasionally miss a few nuances regarding the implications of certain vocabulary. We still don't really have any firm cultural consensus on whether "retarded" is a slur or not, and it's really only in the past decade that "retard" has become taboo. Words go in and out of style, and change meanings; "fag" and "faggot" have had at least half a dozen completely different definitions, and "nigger" is basically just a mumbled corruption of the Latin word which literally means "black man". Standards change, and don't be too hard on Frenchy if he wasn't aware of it. Yeah, the instant this argument started I could tell that you had some relative, friend, or loved one who was (...shit, what's even the right word now? "Retarded" is too close to the slur, "handicapped" and "disabled" and "impaired" are also seen by many people as being politically incorrect, and "handi-capable" is a goddamn condescending backhanded insult used by pandering pussies to try to make themselves look sensitive. Any others come to mind?) ...who was born with cerebral issues which most of us never have to face. I've seen you get grumpy plenty of times, Vic, but never this fast nor this intense. We all have our personal hot-buttons, and I'm sorry El-P inadvertently poked yours. Back on track: yes, Asya was a horrible goddamn wrestler, and yes it seemed like she rarely ever took a bump despite being a heel for most of her tenure. That was Vic's point, that it was nice to finally see anyone hit her. Kinda like X-Pac in 2000 where you were just dying to see someone, didn't matter who, slap the shit out of him. (Although an incompetent half-trained greenhorn like Asya basically drew heat just cuz she was a big heel broad, and not because she was some kind of ring general who could skillfully manipulate the audience's emotions.) My point is that Sullivan takes FAR too much pleasure in happily reminiscing about various times that women were stiffed, humiliated, and generally mistreated by men in the ring.

Why? Funk's one of the few top guys from his era who is willing to do submission jobs. His world title loss, against Flair in the I Quit match... hell, he even tapped out to Punk in their incredibly disappointing ROH bout. As for the weird feeling to this match, apparently there was some backstage friction. Arn mentioned once that Funk and Sabu weren't happy about having Arn and Bobby involved in this, for whatever reason, so they structured the match to put the spotlight more on themselves and less on the guest stars. Which would easily explain why it didn't work like it should.

It was supposed to be a Texas Death Match (pinfall followed by a 10-count), but WCW was apparently run by such a pack of pussies that they refused to use the word "death" in this case.

Was this the first-ever female cage dive? Or, at least, in America? There had to have been some earlier examples, but none come to mind.

I'm with Loss too. Way too damn long, and half the match seemed to consist of one guy sloooooowly trying to crawl out of the cage while the other guy was grabbing onto their foot and trying to hold them back. How is that "action"? WWF cage matches can be done perfectly well, as has been evidenced on many occasions, but this was ten minutes of good stuff ruined by thirty minutes of pointless filler.

From experience, I can say with complete confidence that shots from kendo sticks really fucking hurt. I'd rather get clocked with a chair any day than ever get hit with with one of those goddamn sticks again.

Ah, Christmas break from school finally lets me peruse the semi-recent archives of stuff I missed here: Hilarious tidbit: do you remember The Complete Idiot's Guide to Pro Wrestling, by Lou Albano and Bert Sugar? (For the uninitiated, this was a series of books which was a poor ripoff of the far superior _________ for Dummies franchise. Iidiot's was basically the Gamepro to Dummies's Electronic Gaming Monthly.) At the back of this notorious book, they wrote a list of the ten greatest matches ever. Guess which match made the list! Yes, seriously. No sir, it does not. If they ever had a good night, I didn't see it. If you ever wanna watch the worst fucking match ever, track down the Varsities versus Chono and Super J from some Thunder in early 2000. And he booked that, too. What is Sullivan's problem with women in wrestling? I've heard him bragging about knocking the shit out of women in the ring, praising other segments where men knock the shit out of women, etcetera. Comes off like a real misogynist, even by rasslin standards. And for the record, Jimmy Golden didn't do much for me either. I didn't hate him, but found him pretty bland as a worker.

I'm glad everyone loved this. I've literally been pimping it for the past dozen years. It's a bizarrely forgotten match, considering that this PPV did a pretty massive buyrate. I do kinda wonder if they could have come up with a different finish, though; after Hulk Up, Legdrop, 1-2-3, new world champion... where else was the feud supposed to go? This looked like the climactic blowoff to a big feud, not a first match between these two. Depends on how much you like that Muta match in '93. (Not the one with Mutoh sans facepaint, it was forgettable.) And maybe the Tenryu one too, maybe. But yeah, not much else comes to mind from that timeframe. Hogan/Warrior is probably next on the list, and everything else good tends to be of the "well, that Yokozuna rematch didn't suck nearly as hard as I feared it would" variety. By that period, Hulk was clearly more interested in acting than in wrestling.

How long would it remain viable, though? The entire "EXTREEEEEEEEME" fad was something that was heavily centered in the 90s, and was pretty much dead and buried by the time the hipsters and emo kids started dominating modern young society. And let's not ignore the fact that ECW in 2000 was a hell of a lot less extreme or hardcore than ECW in 1995. They attempted to make the product rather more mainstream during the TNN run (note the lack of barbed wire matches, even on PPV) with mixed results. ECW On TNN spent more time on Impact Players promos than it did on blood. As for The Wrestler, I don't think it had much effect. Probably less than Beyond the Mat did. If any one factor is to be blamed (praised?) for killing hardcore, it's all the worrisome stuff about the wrestlers' health, especially regarding brain damage.

That's pretty close to the sort of stuff they teach you in sophomore-level business marketing classes. "This is the product, this is why you want to consume it, and here's a bunch of flashy or funny stuff to catch your eye so that our advertising is memorable." It's a fairly basic and standard formula, just slightly tweaked for the wrestling industry model. Even if he ever felt like watching that stuff, a lot of it is really hard to find and pretty much requires you to go out of your way in terms of tracking it down. The more convenient access channels like Youtube, PWTorrents, or WWE On Demand are all notoriously inconsistent when it comes to the selection they offer, and pre-80s stuff makes up a tiny fraction of the overall choices. You'd have to go to the old-school trouble of finding a tape trader who has that stuff, buying it, messing with all the shipping; in the internet age, how many smarks still want to go through that much effort? Especially a lazy fat fuck like Scott. That part's sadly true. You'd be amazed at the number of naive young smarks out there who still preface statements with "well, Scott Keith said..." The most common consensus seems to be "the matches were fine, but hardly anyone cared". Even if the booking hadn't forced Garvin into that infamous period where he never showed up on TV, it's doubtful if the crowd would have really gotten behind him. No, Joey Styles called it The Hart Attack. Hell pretty sure I have heard Bret call it the Hart Attack. Whenever I was announcing, I always just called it "a Hart Attack clothesline". All the wrestlers always referred to that particular variation as the Hart Attack, for what it's worth. Sometimes just one person can manage to influence the opinions of countless others, as Dave apparently did here. Perfect example: today's teenage smart marks largely tend to have the opinion that Combat Zone consists of literally nothing but a bunch of backyarders blowing all their spots in stupidly risky deathmatches. Why? Not because they watch the shows. Simply because the hilarious Botchamania videos have made "badly blown spots in a CZW hardcore match" into a running gag in those compilations, and MANY more people watch those videos than actually watch CZW shows. And sorry to necro-bump this part about Halftime Heat, but I didn't see it at the time: From anecdotal experience, I'd say it worked. That was the first wrestling match I ever saw. I didn't get hooked until a few months later, but I remember thinking "damn, this doesn't look at all like that phony old Hulk Hogan crap that I always ignored". Oh fuck yes. Even despite this literally being the first match I'd seen in my life, even I recognized that they'd broken the unwritten "rules" about how this sort of thing is supposed to work and laughed at it.

I've never quite understood the hate for triple-threat matches. They're like any other gimmick match: the can be done well, or poorly. Sure, the standard "one guy gets knocked out for a while so the other two can brawl" spot is a bit tiresome, but there's countless examples of that being executed very nicely and anyway gimmick matches often tend to have similar spots over and over. It's not like this is a scaffold match or reverse battle royal or something else which is almost literally guaranteed to suck. Also: there are still people who insist that Zack Ryder is just another jabroni who means nothing? (Outside of the WWE office, anyway?) Ryder has arguably done more with much less than anyone else on the roster, considering how often it is that he goes for weeks or months without showing up on anything but the C shows. The fact that he built up a cult online following with nothing more than a Youtube channel is quite respectable, as is the fact that he's managed to hold onto at least some of that popularity despite usually being booked as if the creative team actively despised him. I honestly don't even remember the last time I watched a new match in full, but all the hosannas for the TLC match got me curious and I tracked it down. You're all right, it's a damn fine epic struggle. It's the sort of thing the WWE is really good at, when they want to be: take a large group of disparate guys with more differences than similarities, throw them all together into a massive plunderfest with some genuine psychology, and do a bunch of spots which (mostly) look more dangerous than they really are. And their top-notch production team means that we don't get the cameras missing a bunch of spots, as tends to happen when old ECW and many other companies tried to film a match where you've got different guys fighting in different places in a massive donnybrook. I especially liked the finish. It just made so much sense. Out-of-control Ryback stayed down for like ten minutes after the Spanish Announce Table spot; but eventually he woke back up and now is whipping the Shield's ass up and down the ramp, until all three of them swarm him and get him onto the table. They're focusing on him and anyway the aisle is full of objects blocking their view, so they don't notice that Daniel Bryan is getting back up in the ring. At least, until Rollins climbs the ladder and notices him. (I love moments like that, which depend so heavily on the physical setup and relative positions and geography of the people involved.) Rollins is like "oh shit guys, go get Bryan, I can handle this" so they do. But oh shit, Ryback wakes up again and fucking kills him. BUT meanwhile the other two pin Bryan. Puts over the new guys, while still making the old guys look strong. Love it all. The thing is, the storyline gimmick of the Streak really does narrow down his possible opponents. It has to be someone important; it would be a waste to put, say, Santino in this spot. It has to be someone who can theoretically beat Taker, in order for those nearfalls to work in a "oh my GOD, the Streak is about to DIE" sort of way. But it also has to be someone who won't be tarnished by losing such an important match in such a high-profile environment. Ergo, it's pretty damn tricky to book some young up-and-comer in this spot; when they inevitably lose, it can have the effect of making it look like they're just some green nobody who isn't ready to fight in this weight class. Yet there aren't many real legends left, which leads to stuff like Taker essentially feuding with DX for the past four years in a row. Cena, Punk, and Sheamus are pretty much the only tippy-top guys who are available to wrestle and haven't already had a big match with the dead man. They're presented very differently, though. Watts and Gagne were playing barely-gimmicked versions of themselves; their personas were of three-dimensional human beings, who talked much more normally and off-the-cuff than your standard growling promo style. This ties into the second difference, which is: they were officially retired. They were done, and that was a matter of public record. Whenever they came back, it was essentially an all-star exhibition game; they weren't going back to being full-time professional wrestlers, they were breaking their own rules Just This Once (every time) to handle a personal grudge. Meanwhile, Undertaker is some kind of immortal undead wizard who simply disappears for months at a time without any sort of on-screen official explanation of where he's gone. He's still seen as being an integral part of the roster... he just doesn't show up that often. Also, if you wanna talk about watering matches down, the Streak is one where I do think that it really needs to be a singles match every time. The question should always be "can this guy beat Undertaker to end the streak?", and never ever "will the Undertaker be cheaply screwed over to end the streak?". And putting more than one opponent into that match, where Taker could lose without being beaten (and let's face it, the streak at this point is basically the most important title in all of wrestling) feels like cheating. One last thing: what's with all the noobs around here recently? We seem to have gotten a small flood of new members. This has always been a pretty insular little board, with mostly just the same guys hanging around year after year. Not complaining, nothing wrong with an injection of fresh blood, just kinda weird that there seem to be so many at once.

Anyone else fond the Orton/Angle minifeud from 2006? It's not really "great", but those were some neat little bouts and I rarely see those matches pimped anywhere. Although those were more interesting for how Angle was trying to change his style a bit, being less spotty and more focused on holds and matwork than usual, than for anything else. EDIT: for that matter, we've listed plenty of matches already, let's talk some aesthetics. How do you guys rate Orton overall? His offense, selling, bumping, general psychology, charisma (which should probably be narrowly defined as "how much did the crowd instinctively care about this guy?"), adaptability, his face work versus his heel work, all that kind of stuff.

Is "his best matches were all against his very most talented opponents" really a criticism? You'd expect that would be the case with most guys. You'll do better work with better dancing partners, more often than not.

Yeah, that's the first one that came to mind. His matches with Benoit that year were also quite highly acclaimed, though I didn't think they were anything particularly spectacular.

Yeah, but it's always fun to stick a pin or two into a windbag like that. Self-proclaimed "experts" who make a ton of egregious factual errors are the worst.

"Goldberg was gonna blast through the NWO and get the belt back, but then he cut his arm and was on the shelf" is an annoyingly common lie among that particular group. Hogan has said it, also. But these are the same guys who will say things like "Undertaker broke my neck with his tombstone piledriver during a match in Japan in 1973". Wrestling liars are sometimes infuriating. They'll tell you a pathetically obvious mistruth, one which can easily be destroyed with nothing more than the first five hits from a Google search about the topic; but they still genuinely expect you to believe them, just because. Which completely ignores the fact that he quickly had another, longer WCW title reign just a few months later. Didn't he also win it briefly in 2000?

There are plenty of states which have voters who are willing to experiment a little on the local level, but not in presidential elections. Tennessee had a Democratic governor for most of the last decade, but every four years the state's 11 electoral votes get handed to the Republicans.

What about those two guys who happened to die after they wrestled Ox Baker? From what I remember, those would at least kinda count. Nah, it was just a legends' battle royal. Spot had trouble breathing, went to go lean on the ropes in the corner, and collapsed there.

I always thought they rushed the Invasion angle because they panicked when the product really cooled off with the Austin/HHH vs. Taker/Kane feud. It was all of the above. And trying to run the XFL at the same time wasn't helping. Vince had WAY too much on his plate, and he tends to rush things and forget details and go back to his proven old standards when he's stressed like that. I don't remember ever hearing that. I can't believe Vince would even dream of giving up Raw on Monday nights.

Pedro always struck me as a shittier version of Bruno. Morales basically did the same shtick in the ring that Sammartino did, but wasn't nearly as good at it. Pedro often looked lethargic and bored in there, and his "fired-up" comebacks were frequently rather lukewarm. And he was wearing different stuff, too. Right before he took time off, he showed up on television wearing biker-ish street clothes and even sunglasses. Seems like he was already headed in that direction, but his injury leave made the gimmick transition much more abrupt upon his return.