Jingus

Worse than Mark Madden? I believe that you could actually record Bruce Prichard doing play-by-play commentary on his own masturbation in the Brother Love voice, and it would still not make me want to stab my eardrums any harder than Mark Madden's calls on your average 2000-era Nitro. I've never heard an allegedly-professional announcer who was such a jaw-dropping failure in so many different ways. That's a good point. When I was announcing, I was certainly much better at the big exciting matches. During the fuck-off nothings, I quickly got bored and ran out of shit to say. (Except for in the rare cases that the match was SO bad that I started subtly burying it, which was pretty rare.) When it came to ripping off the greats, I was better at copying JR during a main event than I was at channeling Lance Russel during a squash match.

Arn was the first one who came to mind for me. Rarely do you ever see such a clear expression of "I do NOT want to be here" on someone's face as poor Marty Lund was wearing during that Buff/Booker match. Piper was bad. He might have added energy, yes, but it was phony energy that everyone could tell was insincere. Listen to him trying to shill the Gobbledygooker's debut for a great example. And what's worse was his general style, constantly screaming and stepping all over the other announcers at every turn. A commentator who can't shut the fuck up and let the other guys talk is a detriment to your broadcast; Michael Cole sometimes does that shit when he's heeling out, and Jonathan Coachman used to be horrible about it as well. Dusty was great in meaningless fuck-off matches that didn't matter. When you're watching some sort of Renegade vs Ice Train endurance test, you want Dusty to be babbling a constant stream of wisecracks and bullshit, just to keep you entertained. But he was much less effective at selling great matches and top angles, often having a hard time turning off the jokes and being serious. And yeah, I loved Johhny Polo whenever he called a match with Monsoon. You could tell that Gorilla hated this kid and Raven was having fun needling the old guy in his own faux-oblivious manner, and the combination was hysterical. I wouldn't use that night as an example of anyone's typical work, since it was all too obvious that the announcers were ordered to go out there and bicker with each other as much as possible. JR was trying to be relatively neutral and call it down the middle, but everyone else was arguing like a bunch of lawyers on crack.

I think he means that Triple H match from Tribute To The Troops.

Sure, several. It all depends on who's being interviewed and who's doing the interviewing. Kayfabe Commentaries videos tend to be more interesting in general than RFVideo's line, just because the host is much better and willing to ask interesting questions (albeit sometimes hiding behind the YouShoot gimmick).

EDIT: nevermind, I don't care.

Oh, he certainly had periods where he was pretty fucking awful. And back in 1995, Rapada was a young kid who had no idea what he was doing. And he was never worse than when Bert was trying to push him as the Von Erich-like superface. But if you can find any footage from Prentice's USA Championship Wrestling (which is kinda worth it anyway, because they had the world's weirdest collection of random misfits and slumming ex-WCW employees and OVW trainees and Memphis veterans) from 2001, Rapada had a nice little heel run where he'd turned on Lawler and become an egomaniacal douchebag.

Guevara also aided the cause of nuclear arms proliferation, and openly admitted that he would've nuked the USA if he'd controlled the missiles. He also has a well-documented history of being a torturer and executioner. Let's not pretend that he was some kind sudamericano equivalent to Gandhi.

Mike Rapada is actually a perfectly competent worker in the right context. He's good enough at southern-flavored comedy, and makes a really fun arrogant cowardly heel. Nice guy in person, too. He simply was not ready for an NWA world title push, no matter what Bert Prentice thought.

From what I can tell, nobody even realized it was the anniversary of the slaughter. The problem is that these guys do all of Benoit's moves on a regular basis. Yeah, there's the kicker. I got a lot of whining on other boards that those moves don't mean anything inherently wrong and shouldn't be banned. My response is, what the hell is the point of doing them? This is only three or four things we're talking about here: diving headbutt, crippler crossface, maybe rolling germans, maybe the throat-slash taunt. That's a tiny fraction of a percentage of all the overall shit than any wrestler can do in the ring. What is so vital about those moves that they MUST be used? Why not simply do something else, especially when there's so many other options? There's hundreds and hundreds of other things which, y'know, don't remind the audience of a dude who strangled his wife and son.

Lita was plenty hot enough for the job, and she appealed to the goth/punk/emo niche that most of the supermodels didn't. A big problem with the hiring practices of these women (both Divas and Knockouts) is that the "hot" ones often tend to all look alike. They've got a very specific, very narrow idea of what beauty is; and what's worse, they assume that all the fans feel the same way. I was puzzled at Dave specifically naming Daffney as a girl who was below-average in terms of hotness. She's pretty much my favorite ever.

I'd characterize Russo more as the Marion Barry of bookers. Despite repeatedly, egregiously proving that he should not have this job... somehow he keeps getting hired for it.

Yeah, his official retirement date is listed as 1979, but surely he had some return matches in the intervening period. Otherwise, he couldn't have qualified for that "only man to wrestle in seven different decades" hat trick. And besides that, even if it were just '32-'79, that's still a helluva run. Yeah, that's weird. Of all the veterans that ROH could use, why those guys? They must be friends of someone important, is the only thing I can think of. ...this seems like a good time to mention my brilliant idea for popping ROH's business: hire Vince Russo as a heel manager who leads an entire stable of Attitude-era wrestlers against all the young smark darlings. And I mean the ones that all the smarks hated by the end of the Attitude era, guys like Bagwell and Godfather and Konnan and Billy Gunn and such. Maybe have X-Pac or Al Snow hanging around, just so we've got some ringers who can actually still have a watchable match. Have it all build up to a big cage match where Cornette beats Russo into a bloody pulp. It'll draw, I tell ya!

And oh yeah, one that all of us should have remembered before now: Lou Thesz. First pro match was in 1932, last one was in 1990.

I talk to a lot of them. And believe me, for every one guy who's seen any of the matches Bix named, there's twenty more who've seen several of Shawn's big matches on WWE's DVD releases. Not too many younger fans know jack shit about the decades-old midcard careers of guys like Dustin or Tito.

If you guys were to name a few must-see Dustin and/or Tito matches to convince noobs that they were awesome, which ones would you pick?

Also, let's not forget that most fans know him best as Goldust, largely from his 96-99 run. In his younger heyday, most of his matches focused largely on various Sportz Entertainment shenanigans and weren't exactly ever put in the position to be workrate classics. (I still have recurring nightmares of his PPV match with Warrior: fifteen minutes of no-contact stalling, one clothesline, and then a DQ.) So yeah, most casual fans and the more casual smarks are gonna be rather bewildered when you claim that the eternally-hyped main eventer Shawn Michaels is actually inferior to that fat guy who used to dress in weird outfits and grope himself.

Their power has always been overstated. If they actually had the irresistible Rasputin-like influence over the government which their opponents claim, then teachers would be paid and treated a hell of a lot better, and not constantly under the thumb of admins and school boards like they always are. As someone who has been getting the run around from the state of Pennsylvania for the better part of two months now as they keep finding reasons to delay my teaching certification (and in some cases not even telling me what those reasons are!), knowing this happens makes my brain hurt. Yeah. My mother is a teacher with excellent academic credentials and an impeccable employment record, and currently she's working a part-time gig as a tutor in between her shifts at fucking Walmart. Nobody will hire her, partly because she's too old and experienced and every school just wants the cheapest teachers they can hire. And she's also been repeatedly fucked over by the background tests; I can't begin to count the number of times she's been fingerprinted for these jobs, it's literally dozens if not hundreds of times. Meanwhile, not a week goes by where you don't seem to hear of some scandal about a teacher molesting his students and it turns out that they just forgot to do the background check or otherwise missed the fact that he's a proven sexual predator.

Welcome to our modern education system. And yet some politicians have the nerve to complain that the reason our classrooms suck is because we pay our qualified and competent teachers too much money.

They had a match on Raw the next year, and it was fairly short and nothing special.

Abby also outweights Mae by 300 pounds. It wouldn't be safe for a man his age/size to be taking any bumps. Hell, it's not safe for Mae either, but that much extra weight adds a lot more force to the impact.

At every school function like this, there's always someone shooting video. If this happened, where's the footage?

What. The FUCK. Was that?! Is all Japanese television just a nonsensical cacophony of bright colors and people constantly shrieking? I think every scrap of live action TV I've seen from that country (barring sports) all looks like something aimed at very young children. Do they have an equivalent to HBO dramas over there? It's weird that their TV is so goofy, considering how dark and squicky their movies often are.

Tommy's also got a huge number of hilarious and awesome backstage stories about him. Like, he was the first wrestler that an 18-year-old Missy Hyatt ever fucked. But my favorite goes something like this (although I sadly can't remember all the details): Tracy Smothers pulls up to an indy show. There was this worthless indy wannabe-tough-guy who has been causing problems recently for Tracy and various others. Smothers sees the guy in the parking lot as he pulls up, so he jumps out a still-moving car (the passenger and storyteller, Chase Stevens, frantically reaching over and mashing the brake with his hands) and runs over to the guy and starts beating the shit out of him. Wildfire runs out of the building, screaming: "Tracy, stop, what the hell are you doing!?" Smothers: "This asshole is trying to hurt all these young kids and end their careers?" At which point Tommy instantly calms down, turns around to walk back inside, and mutters "Aw fuck it then, kill him."

What was the name of that European group of fans that loved American territorial wrestling? "Real in Memphis", or something like that?

Does anywhere have any complete matches from the Buzz Sawyer feud which is hyped SO heavily by those who saw it live? Youtube only has one of 'em. And hey, why is old Georgia and Florida footage so hard to get ahold of, anyway?