Jingus

Iceberg. Southern indy guy, 600 pounds, shockingly mobile.

In any state without an athletic commission that presides over wrestling shows, age doesn't matter. The commissions are the only things keeping minors from wrestling. Back in Tennessee, you could theoretically put a toddler in the ring and technically it was perfectly legal.

The only building that I've personally attended that felt like it was worth a damn was the sports arena at the Nashville Fairgrounds. That one has the rare qualification of having actually been originally built specifically for pro wrestling, back in the Nick Gulas days. It's basically just a concrete box, not a hell of a lot bigger than the ECW Arena, but it's got that indescribable Something Special about it. (As a spectator, that is. Actually working shows in the building is a different matter, the dressing rooms are WAY too small, to a nearly claustrophobic extent.) Honorable mention for the little converted one-room-schoolhouse that NWA Wildside/Anarchy called/calls home, for sheer quaintness. The old theater that housed all the Memphis shows in Evansville is neat too, if no other reason than the labyrinth-like maze of backstage rooms. Watching on TV/video, I was always a fan of Hammerstein Ballroom. It kinda reminded me of Shakespeare's Globe Theater: lots of vertical space, stretching upwards from the show floor. It doesn't look quite like any other venue, and I always thought it must be a neat place to watch a show.

WHAT IS IT!? This never got answered.

Regarding the Shane McMahon thing: I've got zero problem with him in the ring, or with any wrestler selling for him. When he first started out, he did indeed wrestle like a noob and got his ass handed to him by pretty much everyone. But that changed over time, because he kept having matches. How many times do you have to wrestle before you're still "not a wrestler" anymore? Same thing with Vince: when he was first getting beaten by Austin constantly, he was little more than a punching bag; but eventually he go to the point where he could hang with the competition, at least temporarily. Once these guys have been around long enough, they're no longer just some regular man-off-the-street, they're official full-time characters on this show and I don't see the issue with them having semi-competitive matches.

I can. Shit, a sizable fraction of my posts on this board have been made while fairly wasted. My ideas and opinions may get stranger, but my typing stays relatively perfect.

I've recently seen several people here hating on the Kurt/Shane street fight. Why? It surprised me to see it, since that's literally the first time I've ever heard of anyone disliking that match. Aside from the unnecessary danger of the idiotic "suplexes through glass walls" spots, what did you think was wrong with it?

Check out the tag match from MSG with Piper/Schultz vs Snuka/Andre for something more along the lines of what you wished for.

Pirates who get morally indignant over being persecuted for their theft is something that never ceases to amaze me. YOU ARE THIEVES! And I say that as a thief. I've downloaded tons of shit, probably hundreds of gigs. But I never try to pretend that somehow I'm doing the right thing. I wanted it, I couldn't/didn't want to pay for it, I took it. End of story. And pirate who claims differently is a fucking liar and hypocrite who is either trying to assuage his own guilty conscience or look better in front of other people.

Heck, that was already clear when Bischoff was GM. Whenever a babyface annoyed him, his go-to response was: "Fine! Then tonight, you've got a match against THEMONSTERKANE!!!"

And oh yeah, meant to comment on this earlier: That's as succinct and efficient a phrasing as possible to describe the problem with trying to "elevate" new champions and challengers by having them work in the semi-main under Cena. That's always annoying, until you see it so often that it becomes funny. Especially when it's the same people bitching about someone being too strong AND too weak. Lots and lots of free money poured directly into their pockets by all the investors who bought stock, that's why. Most of which was promptly pissed away on the XFL, but hey, I guess it's the thought that counts!

I don't think Cena's "clean" losses were all that clean. This one involved a ref bump, with Orton tapping out while the official was down. Yeah, I know that's the mildest and cleanest form of fuck-finish by today's standards, but it's still not like Orton just definitively beat Cena without any shenanigans. Not remotely clean, Cena slipped on a banana peel and accidentally fell through a table during a tables match. It was a lame copout to get the title on Sheamus without actually having him beat anybody. What? Who did Bruno ever put over clean? Certainly not Billy Graham (referee distraction, feet on the ropes), nor Ivan Koloff (injury angle, iirc). Bret didn't do much jobbing either; his only clean title losses in his WWF singles career were the one to Bulldog at Wimbley (at which point he wasn't quite a top guy yet) and to Shawn at Wrestlemania 12, and that one's only "clean" if you don't consider the sudden-death portion of the match being sprung on him without warning to be unusual.

I think we can all agree that title belts don't mean quite as much as they used to. Whether it's having too many championships, or too many title changes, or too many cheap finishes during said title changes, or too many title matches on free TV, or whatever: clearly they're not as important as in previous eras. Having gotten that bit of Captain Obvious out of the way, however: just how important are they nowadays? The WWE has seemed like they've been on a mission for the past dozen years to make their world titles as meaningless as humanly possible. The fact that they have two championships which are both supposed to be the Best In The World type deal (although of course in their eyes, Raw >>> Smackdown) suggests that they're not terribly serious about blatantly saying "the guy wearing This belt is the best in the world, period". But, is that just a symptom of how they do business nowadays? Aside from the bizarro asterisk-marked popularity of John Cena, Vince & Co. have been very reluctant to push any one top star as The Man ever since Austin and Rock took off. It's much more about pushing the WWE brand as a whole, rather than "come out and see Hulk Hogan! ...and thirty other guys you probably don't care about" of yesteryear. The days where the champion was considered so important that he got a percentage of every house are long dead and gone; has that been reflected in the way they book the championships? (Oddly, this is one of those rare areas where TNA often does better than the WWE. They've got fewer belts, fewer title changes, and their promos tend to have a lot more talking about how important those championships are.) So how important are they now? If Santino wears the US title, does that devalue it because he's comic relief who rarely ever defends it, or does it make it more important because it's getting a long reign around the waist of a very popular character? When Punk inevitably carries his belt into a semi-main on PPV while Cena has the top spot, exactly how hard does that tarnish the prestige of this particular trophy? And is any of this even close to as bad as it was back around 1999 when belts would change hands practically every other week and never with clean finishes?

I hear that a lot online. I mean, a lot. But is it true? Hmmm... this merits further discussion.

Only six matches? Lame. You could easily fit more than that on one disk, most of the choices are pretty short. And most of the ones chosen were pretty obvious gimmes; except for that one Raw tag match which appears to just be wasting space. Why the hell wouldn't the Cena match be on there, too?

She does look considerably more haggard there than she did in other semi-recent photos.

Give it a couple weeks & we'll see. I wouldn't be surprised if they both get implants & then go back to WWE. Even in their Maxim magazine interview this month they said they can't wait to go back to WWE. Why were they let go?

One important aspect about Kane that we personally don't see is apparently how safe and easy he is to work with. According to all reputable sources, no work ever looks at the card and goes "aw shit, I gotta work Kane tonight". And it's not like Kane is just doing simple easy Hogan-style never-leave-my-feet stuff out there; he's doing clotheslines off the top and hitting his opponents with weapons and kicking dudes in the face and taking some surprisingly big bumps for a guy his age/size and chokeslamming the living fuck out of people, and yet he apparently never hurts anyone. That's a hell of a special skill to have in this business. Yeah. Seriously, can you name a worse-booked longterm employee than Kane? The guy has had so much Wrestlecrap foisted upon him, they might as well call him a toilet. He's been in several worst-angle-of-all-time contenders, and rarely ever gets booked in a good one. And he turns face or heel at least once per year. Yet the crowd's never once abandoned on him. They always see him as a legit threat to anyone, able to win any match at any time; but at the same time, he's not an invincible monster. The audience will believe Kane pinning Cena, or Santino pinning Kane. He's incredibly adaptive at working nearly any role at nearly any spot on the card and always staying over no matter how much the office does to assassinate his character. Kane's got plenty of charisma and rapport with the audience, is the only way to explain how he's still employed and not been working at McDonalds for the past dozen years after all the times they've tried to kill him off. Is that the one where Show press-slammed him over the top rope, right to the fuckin' floor? NASTY bump, no hands down, a legitimate ten or twelve foot drop for Kane straight onto the barely-padded pavement. Never seen the appeal of that guy. I've seen him have plenty of outright bad matches, even atrocious negative-star encounters. But I've rarely seen him do anything better than "I guess it was watchable, thank god it was short". Except of course for that period where he was dating Lillian Garcia and working in silk pajamas and mock-raping dudes, that was all shockingly entertaining. You're the first guy I ever heard say that. By most accounts, Studd stank. And oh yeah, I'd add the Kane/Benoit match from Badd Blood '04 to the list. I know someone might see that one as the murderer carrying Kane, but the big red lug kept up his end of the match just fine.

IIRC, I found that one to be too short and rather underwhelming, especially since it was positioned as a big blowoff to the months-long Kane/RVD storyline. If you must have Kane in a PPV match versus a skinny inconsistent spin-kicking opponent who used to be his partner, the X-Pac cage match from Armageddon 99 was much better. I almost peed myself when frigging Kane did a cage dive.

From what I remember, the minstrel aspect was the entire point. This was one of those "the office amuses themselves at the audience's expense" gimmicks.

It's getting hard to remember the last time that WWE or TNA didn't feature a bunch of non-wrestlers or retired workers squabbling over political power. Even ROH is getting in on the action; what the hell is wrong with the idea of Jim Cornette just being a manager or commentator, why does he have to be the GM?

Funny how the women get fired or quit more often because they're making their own secondary careers. I wonder why that is? Also, they sure do seem to be on the receiving end of a LOT more backstage reports about "Superstar X has heat because of their bad attitude and/or ego", which happens to the women so often that one must assume it springs mostly out of sexism and misogyny on the part of the company and its employees.

Same thing goes for TV ratings. I've recently started wondering if industry types don't hang onto these archaic and confusing percentage-based stats because they want the process to be difficult for outsiders to understand.

Ross seemed to do it more often than the other announcers; though the whole industry is so homophobic that it 's hard to call this out as being unusual. As for Patterson being okay with it, when has Vince ever given a shit if the victims of on-camera ribbing and mockery in the WWE are okay with their torment or not?

But not Mr. McMahon, that's the important part.