Jingus

This is the exact same sequence which I described in some thread a couple of years ago, which occurred in damn near every indy tag match that I ever called. Back then, I got yelled at and lectured about how this was an effective formula and thus shouldn't be changed. What's different now, to get everyone to agree that this sucks when it's run into the ground? Hey now, let's not exaggerate things. Karagias was fucking worthless, to the point where he had shittier matches with Madusa than Ed Ferrera did. Kofi is more like a latter day Rob Van Dam: charismatic, appealing to the live crowds, very athletic, but tends to do the same stuff in every match and often sets up his spots in a rather contrived manner.

The problems are twofold. First of all, his worked shoot ideas are nearly identical to the same bullshit that Russo completely ruined WCW with. The idea that the Attitude-era audience would be captivated by the idea that the wrestlers might "really" fight and that one faction "really" wants to hurt the other is just stupid. Remember all the huge success that Brawl 4 All never had? And secondly, his ideas of who would be good as WCW's top guys are really out of date. He's listing Rick Steiner, Dustin Rhodes, and Terry Funk as the dudes who should be leading the invasion in 2001. His concepts here are nearly as awful as what actually happened during the Invasion.

That's actually an interesting point. You could argue that Davey Boy Smith headlined the best-attended wrestling show in UK history, far bigger than Big Daddy ever had. Basically, it comes down to how many points you subtract for his hideously awful "wrestling" and his selfish business practices. In many ways, Big Daddy is essentially the much shittier version of Dusty Rhodes.

In terms of big giant fat men, that ridiculously bad Akebono vs Big Daddy V match has become a favorite for laughter and mockery among my friends.

Well, Angle's generally a lot better at comedy than Cena is. Cena is a smirking, self-aware guy who appears to be intentionally playing a whitebread babyface as almost an act of trolling half the audience. Pre-bald-psychopath Angle perfectly inhabited the part of a clueless clean-cut boy scout who was totally oblivious to the fact that he was such a square. But even then, yeah, I never thought the milk bath was much more than a faintly amusing reminder of Austin's beer bath (which itself I wasn't a fan of, considering that they must have literally soaked the entire first dozen rows of the audience with that shit).

Doubtful. I like Cena more often than not, but I think it would be pretty easy to list a hundred people I like more. He might fit in my Top 250, but only in the bottom half.

The 2006 version was inconsistent. Sometimes it could get painfully bad, when Triple H would make homophobic jokes at Vince's expense for twenty minutes straight. But sometimes it was actually cute, like when Shawn has a meltdown about his ungrateful children on Christmas who ignore the expensive new toys he just bought and prefer to play with the box they came in.

It seems like cheating to count announcers for their time on commentary, of course they're automatically gonna win the count by a landslide.

All true, but he did occasionally have exceptions. Remember the shockingly good match he had with Angle on Raw in 2005? Flair dusted off at least a dozen ancient-school cheating tactics, stuff like fishhooking the mouth or distracting the ref before nailing a low blow or various other stuff which guys in WWE simply never do. For one night, he really did look like the dirtiest player in the game instead of a melting wax sculpture who chops a lot. Angle held up his end too, his control segments were accomplished via suplexes or amateur mat stuff, so it wasn't just "we'll both take a hundred bumps and then do anklelock/figure-four reversals for the last five minutes" like you might fear it would be.

Well, Benoit did get the cleanest win imaginable over HBK. Made him tap out, to the Sharpshooter, in Montreal, with Earl Hebner making the call (and when the match happened live, I laughed my ass off when they did the ref bump and Earl runs out as the replacement and the crowd gets so pissed off). That's pretty definitive. However, it's funny you say the match should've been one-on-one between Shawn and Benoit, because I remember a lot of people back in 2004 bitching and moaning about Michaels shoehorning himself into this feud when it was supposed to be strictly between Chris and Trips. And it's even funnier when you remember: Finally, it would've seemed much less like a gold watch title reign if they'd actually DONE something with Benoit during that tenure. They weren't even trying. Aside from endless rematches with HHH, what did he ever get to accomplish with the belt? He had a mini-feud with Kane in the undercard, and did some skits with a debuting Eugene. Whoopty fucking doo. They treated him like he was just a seat filler until the whole Evolution infighting was set up.

I always saw Benoit's championship reign as being kinda similar to Rob Van Dam's. Neither were much of a mainstream draw, but both were usually incredibly over with the people in the building (which differed from town to town, depending on how smarky the locals were). Both lacked good opponents, outside of rematches for the belt. Both were a little bit of an experiment, "let's throw this in the water and see if it swims" sort of thing. And both were very much not the primary focus of the company at the time, which had other Stuff To Do while the championship was defended in the semi-main. Would any of this Lifetime Achievement talk be happening if not for the moment at the end of Mania XX where the two best friends celebrated with the belts?

I think there were at least a couple of other teased fake turns with him, like trying to re-friend Sting during Russo's tenure in late 99.

Sinn was never a guy who was afraid to speak his mind. I remember commiserating with him about how badly TNA was botching his push with the whole New Church angle, back when they kept starting and stopping it in an infuriating manner in 2003.

Yeah. Upon seeing the videos I think I overestimated his weight before, he's probably more like 450-500 pounds, but he's still freaking huge. (and hey Loss, why is this the only rassling-themed Invisionboard where you can't imbed Youtube clips in a post?).

Sounds like Yoshi Kwan who had a short feud with Cactus Jack and I think that was about it for him in WCW. Yeah, it was around that time. Chris Champion was the guy under the gimmick, and they gave him a brief undefeated streak (before botching it completely, as Foley grumpily recounts in his first book).

It's the same reason that physicists make obscure jokes about stuff like the Higgs boson particle. The jokes themselves may be really fucking lame, but it's fun to share inside jokes with some of the few people on the whole planet who would actually understand them.

On social issues, no. It's easy to tell that they don't give a shit about Christianity, traditional family values, or any of that kind of stuff. Foreign policy? Who knows, but it wouldn't surprise me if Vince & Co. were all about kicking some ass overseas, just out of pure machismo. I doubt they're pacifists. It's economic policy where they'd line up most readily with modern Republican values. Keep government hands off big business, tax breaks, deregulation, all that kinds of stuff is something that the McMahons would go to bat for. Truthfully, their values generally lie much closer to the Libertarian party than the Republican one. But of course you're not gonna get elected to office running as a third party, so they made the pragmatic choice.

I was pondering this, and thought it might be worth a thread. Can any wrestler in America today be thought of as being a draw? It seems like the WWE does fairly consistent business no matter who's on top. John Cena is said to be the only guy who makes a real difference, although nobody ever really provides any hard numbers to back up those sorts of claims. And whenever he's gone for a while, business certainly doesn't go in the toilet during his absence. Meanwhile, TNA seems to be hellbent on proving that absolutely nobody is a true stand-alone draw nowadays. They've brought in a lot of guys who were fairly important at some point: Hulk Hogan, Ric Flair, Mick Foley, Sting, Kurt Angle, Kevin Nash, the Hardys, so forth and so on. Yet none of those guys made a lick of difference when it came to attracting a new audience. Maybe one could argue that TNA itself is some sort of magical anti-draw which drives away fans who would be willing to watch these guys on any other show, but still, you'd think someone out of that list would have popped some big ratings or buyrates. Never happened. WCW on its very worst day drew more viewers than TNA ever has (for top shows, I don't mean comparing the ratings of the best Impact to some random 2000-era Saturday Night). So what's going on here? How has brand recognition somehow become more important in wrestling than the popularity of the performers?

I like Race and love Backlund, but hated their match together. Sometimes two guys just have a bad night, and that one was awful. Killing time with go-nowhere holds is one of my pet peeves, and this one definitely felt like they were trying to run out the clock. You can never exactly know why two guys had a stinker like that; maybe one of the dueling World Champions didn't trust the other guy, so they weren't trying anything tricky or complicated out there. Or maybe one of them just had diarrhea that night and was physically incapable of doing more. You always gotta remember, there's usually a reason why a guy has a bad match, most of the time it's not something they'd deliberately choose to do. I once saw Hansen and Tsuruta have an insultingly boring match where they did nothing but barely-sold lackadaisical armbars the entire time; since we've seen both men do much better, including against each other, it's safe to assume that something was wrong with one or both of them which kept them from excelling that night.

It's rather astounding that nobody ever signed this guy to do anything but work little southern shows. For those who haven't seen him, he looks like King Kong Bundy ate Bam Bam Bigelow, but he can still do stuff like bumping off the apron through a table or take superplexes off the top. TNA brought him in for a week or two back in the Nashville days, but did it in the stupidest manner possible. They had him come in under his deeply unimpressive name of Edward Chaistain, and had him doing an anti-hardcore gimmick; which is totally insane, considering that he does his best work in blood-soaked brawls. He also provided a hilarious memory to me personally, when one time he screamed "MOVE!" at a section of the audience in NWA Wildside, and fifty smart marks leaped up and sprinted to get out of his way.

It's important because it shows how many people could have ordered the show and chose not to. A hundred thousand buys in 1987 is a lot more impressive than a hundred thousand buys today, because the total number of households that receive PPVs is so much higher.

I've mentioned on here my enjoyment of the Andre/Hogan match. Perfectly booked, expertly sold, facial expressions from both men were excellent. It was a tad slow, and yes the piledriver spot and Andre "head-butting" the post both looked like crap, but it got the job done and delivered everything it had to. On the other hand, it's not even in the same ballpark as the Hansen match. That one had a feeling of viciousness and hatred that Hogan couldn't begin to equal. Yeah, it's slowed down by the standard New Japan tradition of sitting around in holds for too damn long, but the rest of it is off the chain.

Thanks. In hindsight, the original list should probably be amended to include buyrate percentages as well. You really need both numbers (along with how much the show cost) to understand how well any given PPV did compared to all the others. And it's also weird that X did better than VII and VIII, considering the traditional wisdom that the guys who followed Hogan couldn't draw better than him.

What was IX's number? It's not on the list here. IV being considerably higher than III surprised me. And the first Summerslam did an even bigger number. Does more houses being wired for PPV explain that? It's funny how WWE looks back on Wrestlemania III as their crowning glory, yet they never mention IV despite it being a larger success (or V's MUCH larger success).

And Roddy Piper and Great Muta and a shitload of various fairly respectable people. Working for the Clowns doesn't really have any stigma to it, too many guys have done it.