Jingus

Yeah, but on EVERY single double-missed-dropkick spot? That would be as if the wrestlers inevitably countered every single other move you named. It's just yet another spot that makes no damn sense; sadly, it's not like wrestling isn't full of those.

Wow, when I first read that, for a second there I got confused and thought you meant the Judas Mesias vs Abyss matches in TNA. That is not even remotely the same thing.

But how do you evaluate all of them "objectively"? Once again, I'm sure there's someone out there who thinks that Sid's selling, offense, execution, building a match, bumping, facials, etc. are all better than Bret's. And we may think that person's ideas are very very strange, but how can you "prove" him wrong? We all use our biased, imperfect brains to evaluate this stuff in the first place. Different people will look at the same thing and see different stuff. Yeah, I agree with all this. You guys ever notice how I tend to use a lot of first-person qualifiers in my posts? "I think", "it seems to me", "I never understood", so forth and so on. It's because I'm not a big fan of stating opinions as if they were rock-solid scientific facts. "Hydrogen atoms have one proton and one electron" is an objective fact. "Akira Hokuto is a better wrestler than El Gigante" is an unprovable opinion, no matter how large a supermajority of people would agree with it. Nothing. There are no arbiters. If you don't watch lucha, how else are you supposed to vote? I think I've only seen Dandy's WCW stuff, and he never blew me away there. He was kinda lost in the shuffle of all the luchadores, many of whom I liked a lot better than him. Yeah... but each person's take on greatness is also their personal opinion. Even when we try to separate artworks into "what I like" and "what most people whose opinions I trust like the most" (which is really all our concept of "greatness" equals out to), we're still using our own subjective tastes and biases to evaluate where we feel that artwork belongs compared to its other brethren in that medium.

But how do you prove that? If something is objective, it means there's no room for disagreement or interpretation whatsoever. You have to be able to support your claims with concrete indisputable evidence. It's basically a mathematical process. And if there's even one person who truly believes that Sid is better than Bret (and I'm sure there is), there's really no way you can prove they're wrong. The only hard facts we can look at are how well they drew money, and of course that's always been a rather tricky thing to determine.

Heh, yeah that would be hilarious, I don't think I've ever seen it. Like a goofy comedic version of both guys trying for a dropkick. Although, hey wait a minute, I just thought of something: when guys do a "simultaneous attempted dropkick" spot, they always complete the turn and land on their stomachs. But, uh, that's wrong. In a missed dropkick, you're supposed to jump straight up and then fall straight down on your back. The entire psychological point of turning on the dropkick is supposed to be that you're propelling yourself off your opponent's body with your feet, and you turn to catch yourself on your hands so the bump doesn't hurt. Heck, I think Pillman even explained that in an Apter interview once. So why the hell do both guys always turn and facebump on a double missed dropkick spot?

Yeah. I never understood why so many people complained about the nip-up, but then were dead silent about Hogan's hulk-up or Undertaker/Kane's sit-up or a thousand other similar superman comebacks. Of all the weaknesses to bitch about, that one's the strangest, yet I hear it all the time.

I've never understood the whole concept that a person's subjective reaction to a work of art is somehow different from, and inferior to, this nebulous idea that you can somehow objectively "judge" an artwork's merits in a quantifiable manner. If you like Artist A better than Artist B, why would you ever think that Artist B is better? I've always personally been of the "if it sounds good, it is good" school of critique. "I liked A more, but B is objectively better" makes no sense to me at all. How are we supposed to be critiquing these things objectively, when everything we think about this stuff is, by definition, our own subjective opinion?

I empathize, because I had the exact same thing happen to me. Less explicable was that the reverse happened as well: I also can't jump very high and the short guy seemed mysteriously incapable of ducking down super far. Both of us were involved on both ends of more groin-to-skull collisions than I care to remember. The only way I finally made it work was to go half a step to the side and swing one leg way high over the dude, which promptly got me mocked for "doing Wolfie D-style leapfrogs". On the less funny side, my partner picked himself up a pretty bad concussion, complete with constricted vision and everything. I dunno how he did that by repeatedly ramming his head into my junk, but somehow it happened. That could be your gimmick: Dude with junk of steel! Eh, Human Tornado already did it. And oddly, a never-ending running joke with a local manager (TNA's Athena) was her propensity for nut-shotting me every time the opportunity arose.

I empathize, because I had the exact same thing happen to me. Less explicable was that the reverse happened as well: I also can't jump very high and the short guy seemed mysteriously incapable of ducking down super far. Both of us were involved on both ends of more groin-to-skull collisions than I care to remember. The only way I finally made it work was to go half a step to the side and swing one leg way high over the dude, which promptly got me mocked for "doing Wolfie D-style leapfrogs". On the less funny side, my partner picked himself up a pretty bad concussion, complete with constricted vision and everything. I dunno how he did that by repeatedly ramming his head into my junk, but somehow it happened.

Definitely. And in my top 20. Depending on how I feel that day, maybe top 10. He simply does the kind of stuff that I like watching.

...because it happens often? "Mark Henry sucks!" generally draws a fiery response.

In hindsight, the speech made no sense. He didn't go anywhere; so, why'd he lie about going somewhere?

To answer JVK's question: no city in America even comes close to NYC's population. The next-biggest is Los Angeles, with four million fewer people than New York (and I'd guess the gap was much bigger back in the 60s and 70s). All the others are half of NYC's population or less.

If there was a blade involved, then that was one of the best cuts in the history of wrestling, because absolutely nobody saw a point where Cena might've gotten juice. He would've had to be smoother than Bret Hart at that shit. And no, getting busted open hardway doesn't work like that. It's a matter of skill, not force. Brock certainly wasn't hitting Cena as hard as he'd hit a shoot opponent. You don't just hit the guy in the head as hard as you can; you take a bony part of your body (knuckle, elbow) and bring it down onto their forehead at an angle which causes a cut rather than a concussion.

He's not trolling, he just has some opinions that don't match with the group consensus. As to Al's original list: if we're talking about just their overall skills and not specifically their championship reign, I wouldn't put Vince anywhere near the bottom. Match-for-match, he's an incredibly entertaining wrestler. His charisma, facial expressions, and pacing and psychology are all usually top-notch.

Didn't they send Spivey home from the Waylon Mercy gimmick just a couple years prior because his body was so banged up that he was basically incapable of wrestling anymore?

Ditto. Though he varies wildly in how annoying he is from week to week. Sometimes he plays up the heel schtick so much that I can't watch anymore and change the channel; other times, he's much more subdued and it's tolerable, but you never know which one you're gonna get. When he's in full-on heel mode, I literally can't listen to the damn commentary, it's so hideously awful in every way imaginable.

Is Steiner still officially under contract with them? I assume so, but the article doesn't say. Also, it still kinda depresses me that corporate gag orders are somehow considered a good idea in this country. Keeping confidential business secrets is one thing, but NDO's that basically amount to "you're not allowed to say anything about this company, ever" are downright unconstitutional. Geez, that seems like less than a star of Steiner's level should get. Does each TV taping count as just one "event", or does he get two grand for every episode he showed up on Impact?

It's a damn fine match, but iirc Adonis is the first guy to be eliminated.

I've tried to kick-start the meme of calling him "Captain Trips", which amuses me because it's also the name of the apocalyptic plague which killed 99% of the human race in Stephen King's The Stand, but it never caught on.

Yeah, of course. In theory, any story can be made to work in context, including the heel showing up the babyface with superior moooovez. It's just that most guys certainly ain't Bobby Eaton when it comes to combining highspots with psychology. As a general rule of thumb with many acknowledged exceptions: if you do a lot of flashy shit, you'd probably be a better fit for a heroic role than a villainous one.

Talking about Cody's bad facials, I wonder if that's another reason why the mask gimmick was such a boon for him. The problem with that is, it's easy for a heel to basically turn himself babyface if his moves are too good. That's something AJ Styles has run into several times in TNA when he was supposed to be a heel, the crowd often kept cheering him anyway. It's hard for a heel to stay hated if they keep doing cooler shit than the babyface does.

No way to prove he did, no way to prove he didn't. Kinda silly to argue on a definitive answer either way. It's a story, who the hell knows if it happened or not.

There's no possible way to know if the quote's true or not. I'd assume it's paraphrased at the very least, I doubt the ex-writer happened to be recording that conversation for posterity. However, the general tone of HHH's feelings towards Foley in that quote is consistent with, well, every single backstage report about how Paul Levesque regards Michael Foley as a company asset. It's no secret that Trips vastly underrates Mick in general, and most reports have the same consensus about it going back to his insecurities about his own stardom.

Well, that's... an incredibly grumpy response. Why not care? They're the ones who invented this jargon in the first place.