Jingus

A lot of wrestlers tend to end up with this paranoid mindset about everything being a work. Especially any other pro sports. It's a pretty common delusion among workers. Yeah. There have been a few suspicious fights, but even if there weren't it's still pretty safe to say that someone's taken a dive. Whenever you have gambling money on outcomes, you will eventually have cheating, period.

What is that? I've seen that in almost every indy tag match I ever called. It's another reason that I'm not on the "FIP = always great" bandwagon. When the fresh guy jumps in and starts sequentially bumping both heels with one punch apiece, two or three times, then he grabs one of them to do a rope-running spot while they other heel either powders out or is suddenly grabbed by the FIP who was near death just seconds ago, and this happens MULTIPLE TIMES ON EVERY SHOW... ugh. Formula only works if the guys doing it don't always stick exactly to the formula. The audience wants the happy ending, but you've gotta make them believe that it might not happen.

Great tags have FIP segments, but shitty tags have them too. I've had my appreciation for hot tags almost entirely killed from seeing SO many formulaic indy matches where the guys were either unable or unwilling to deviate from the formula even the slightest bit. It's like they took a Remedial Wrestling Psychology class and then decided they were ring generals and never needed to learn more or experiment in any way. Many a "hot tag" has been lukewarm if not icy cold, just because most of the audience can tell that the guys are going through the motion and the vitally important suspension-of-disbelief simply never happens. Along with what Jerry said about interference: basically any time that any move is magically more powerful in certain situations. When it's a street-clothes-beatdown, guys are laid out unconscious by offense that they would have shrugged off in the ring. Or when a wrestler is a guest referee, and suddenly becomes just as vulnerable to one-hit-knockdowns as the regular officials. Or in a tag match, where a guy's partner is saving him on pinfall attempts after moves which never get the win. Or in big elimination matches, where non-finishers miraculously gain the power to earn pinfalls.

It's especially infuriating considering how WWE management has a long tradition of preaching that the talent need to work hard and get themselves over, that nobody is just handed a push. Which is double nonsense; guys get handed pushes all the time, and there are countless examples of wrestlers being held back despite their hard work and/or popularity with the fans just because they don't fit the office's incredibly narrow-minded view of what a "superstar" is supposed to be.

That's a far cry from actually coming out and saying "it's all fake!". Shawn said much worse, more kayfabe-breaking stuff than that back in the early days of DX, which everyone still seems to love. It's mildly dickish, but nobody besides the hardcore fans would know what the hell he's talking about.

Ditto. I first saw that when I was just renting old Manias from a Hollywood Video, and judging from my once-per-year State Of The Industry perspective, I thought Warrior's match with Hogan was a lot neater than the Savage encounter.

I think that point's a bit overstated. Michaels' wacky bumping in that match isn't really all that different from what he used to do whenever he was a heel and wrestling some guy a lot bigger than himself. And I'd argue that it improved the match; what the hell else are you gonna do against Hogan in 2005 to make it watchable? Compare the wretched Hulk/Orton match from next year for a good picture of how it might've gone otherwise. Wait, what? I don't remember that part at all. So does that mean he counts Kennedy Anderson at that level, too? Because Shawn did a clean job to that guy on Raw once during their feud. That one really stuck out as being a shock, because it's true that Shawn rarely loses to anyone but top guys.

I've actually had the classic wrestler's anxiety dream a couple of times. You're at the building, it's time for your match, and suddenly you realize you don't have your gear. Which is especially weird since I've only wrestled a dozen matches, and had anything resembling "gear" in maybe half of those.

I do seriously wonder if Savage/Warrior would be so fondly remembered if the Liz reunion angle didn't happen afterward. Never quite understood why people insist that was Warrior's best match ever, let alone one of Savage's best bouts. Wait, are you including the KotR final? That one didn't have time to be anything, it was less than five minutes long. The whole match was basically one long injury angle for Jake Roberts, played to a goofy melodramatic level; in both kayfabe and shoot terms, that guy shouldn't have been in this tournament final. It was such a squash that I was able to count all of Jake's offense: two kicks, six punches, one clothesline.

Which one? They had a few encounters together in various settings, most of which were indeed really good. Those two had freakishly great chemistry together.

This was the first live wrestling show I ever attended. Sigh... There were, at most, a thousand people in the building; maybe much less. Said building was Municipal Auditorium, aka the home of Starrcades 94-96, and holds at least ten thousand people at capacity. It looked sad. I paid for a shitty seat, but moved up to a much better one and absolutely nobody cared to challenge me. I got there late and missed this. Can't imagine I missed much. It was weird, seeing a wrestler for the first time in person that I already knew from television. "Holy shit, it's really The Wall!" And three years later he was dead. Ugh. Not much to write home about with this match. Dustin tried a bunch of pandering-to-the-crowd stuff, talking on the house mic and gesturing for fan support. None of it got over, the crowd seemed to be resentful that he was trying that. There were two laughs: first when Berlyn claimed that someone pulled his hair, and then when the announcer didn't realize that this was under three-way-dance elimination rules and the first pinfall didn't end the match. No memory of this whatsoever. I recall this one being pretty disappointing. I was still a very inexperienced smark at the time, so I thought "young cruiserweights in WCW = automatically good wrestlers" and probably expected way too much outta Vampiro. Best singles match of the night. Luger played the cowardly heel role to the hilt, stooging like crazy for everything Meng did. MOTN, sadly enough. Flair/Crowbar were shockingly over live with their crazy act. Crowbar kept taking bumps for no reason, at one point even flinging himself into the ring steps just for the hell of it. This is also where my infatuation with Daffney started, cuz she was working her ass off at ringside. Oh man, this PISSED ME OFF. The whole reason I went to this show was to see Ric Flair live. I figured, how much longer could he possibly be wrestling? I wanted to see him in the ring in front of me, while I still had the chance! Sigh. The match was total crap. Nash was the commissioner at this point, and before the match started he announced that the figure-four was banned. Then he sloooooooowly beat up Ric for about five minutes, with Flair not even getting any hope spots worth a damn. Complete squash. At the end, Flair finally got a thirty-second comeback, and then locked on the figure-four. The referee was Lil' Naitch, Charles Robinson; so you'd naturally expect him to show Flair favoritism and overlook the ban and have the babyface win and send the crowd home happy, right? WRONG! He promptly disqualifies Flair. Nash gets up, and he and Jarrett stomp on Ric for a minute. Then everyone just walks to the back. SHOW OVER. Good night, everyone, drive home safe! This FUCKING company. Nash's ego wouldn't even let him do a harmless job at a goddamn house show; hell, if memory serves, he didn't even take a single bump. Gee, why did they go out of business?! What was the deal with this?

Heyman will happily tell the truth whenever it suits his point, and generally tries to weave as much fact into his arguments as possible (so that it will make the fictional parts easier to buy). Russo seems like he's a compulsive liar at all times, and has a terrible memory as well. He all too frequently just glosses over everything and rewrites history in a really lazy fashion, like claiming all kinds of bullshit about ratings numbers when anyone can look up the publicly-available figures.

Whoa, hey, let's not forget Summerslam 2001. Austin was the driving force of that match, but it's not like Angle was just there. He's a perfectly decent fiery never-say-die babyface.

1. This show better have Diego Corleone! 2. Any wrestling promotion with the word "extreme" in its name sounds dated and desperate. Especially if they misspell it by dropping the first E. 3. Calling indy wrestlers "superstars" sounds even more desperate. 4. You're wasting your time posting anything here. I doubt that anyone on this board is going to your show. If you'd bothered to look around before shilling (in the wrong folder), you'd notice that there aren't many people here. This ain't DVDVR, it's a fairly small and insular community of people who've mostly known each other for a long time. There's maybe only a hundred members who post here frequently. Taping a single flyer to the wall of one gas station is more likely to draw people than cluttering up this board with your ad.

That one was indeed epic. It's hard to pick out just one favorite line, but I'll always remember this one from Punk talking about Necro's toughness: "I'm gonna bring my car around front and run the sonofabitch over. If he kicks out at two, I'm driving straight into the ocean."

The commentary for IWA might be my favorite part. Very profane, totally irreverent, blatantly pissing on kayfabe's corpse.

And how! I remember Chuck Taylor telling me that he stopped doing 90% of his old high-flying offense, because Ian's ring was such a piece of garbage and the ropes were so shitty that he couldn't get the proper spring.

He did? I know they brought in the Rock & Roll for one or two shows around 2003; and Russo being Russo, he promptly turned them heel. Although at least they were booked against AMW.

They've had some nice runs with tag teams as well. They've had a good mix of indy spotfest guys, old slumming veterans, and genuine joined-at-the-hip longterm teams all thrown together willy-nilly. America's Most Wanted, Motor City Machine Guns, the Dudleys, the Young Bucks, Beer Money, the Naturals, plus the million different variations of LAX and Team Canada are just the tip of the iceberg. As always, this goes with the provision that at least 80% of their matches were fucking ruined by ham-handed booking, stupid gimmicks, mind-boggling stipulations, constant outside interference, and some of the worst finishes known to all mankind. It's almost like they've got a system in place to deliberately avoid workrate of any kind. But every once in a while, a good one will sneak through anyway.

Most people typically name that AJ/Joe/Daniels match from 2005 as their best-ever. There's plenty of good X division matches throughout the years, you've just got to wade through all the ones that were ruined by stupid booking and gimmicks in order to find the ones that miraculously got left alone.

As a cardiovascular stunt, it's pretty amazing. As a match, it's monotonous. They'll sit around in a hold for a few minutes, get up and do a spot or two, then the other guy will get a hold and they'll sit around for a few minutes. I've just described the entire first half of the match. They do some more interesting stuff towards the finishing stretch, but it's still a long haul to get there. Maybe we should call this a Self Conscious Epic, since "holy shit, look at how long we're staying in the ring!" was the overwhelming primary gimmick that completely overran every other consideration. Is that the one where they both took three different falls from a scaffold into a net of barbed wire? If so, I thought that was the epitome of everything that's wrong with modern American deathmatches. It started out with them both climbing up and jumping off intentionally for apparently no reason whatsoever other than to prove They're Hardcore. And then it didn't even have a finish, the match just suddenly stopped and Pondo gave a speech about how awesome and tough they were. Wait... Pondo? I might be thinking of a different match.

Aside from the obvious tastelessness and stupidity of the whole angle, what really pissed me off was the fake ten-bell salute to the fake dead guy. The ten-bell is the ritual that we enact at wrestling shows to honor those who have passed on. It's essentially a funerary rite. I've done several of those; as in, been the guy actually ringing the bell for someone we knew who is now gone. So to have that sort of very solemn tradition perverted just because some douchebag on the writing team thought that Big Nasty Bastard would be funny is something that I don't find even remotely amusing.

Because I don't think I should be defending anything here. I'm saying that I find him fairly average and forgettable in a lot of ways. The countering side of the debate is the one claiming that Henry has uncommon stand-out qualities. That's the more extraordinary and statistically unlikely claim, so the burden of proof is on your side. Besides, basically any time I list any reason why I don't like this guy, I get what's often a fairly snippy "you're just wrong, period" sort of answer which doesn't go into much detail (while sometimes saying that I should be the one going into detail). I dunno if any of you even realize you're doing this, but the Henry fans seem rather more defensive about him than most other wrestlers mentioned on this board. Probably because he's been shit on for so long by so many people who hate him; that's understandable, that you'd be grumpy about criticisms towards a favorite whom you think has been criminally underrated for a long time. But man, it seriously seems like you can't say a negative word about the guy sometimes without a bunch of people showing up to defend him in a rather cranky manner.

No. Is that one of the recent times he got hurt again? There's kind of a "defend your position!" vibe towards me and other non-Henryites here, which is odd from a logical debate standpoint, since I'm not insisting on some kind of particular truth here. I'm just saying that I'm not a Mark Henry fan, never have been, and don't see in him whatever it is that other people see in him. He seems to me to be a fairly unremarkable worker, and I don't get what it is about him that is supposed to be so amazing and unusual.

I'm not a big fan of superheavyweight wrestling in general, but plenty of guys that big moved faster. Vader, for one, got around a lot quicker than Mark does. Hell, so does Big Show at times. Oh don't get me wrong, Nash usually doesn't want to. But occasionally he'll put on a burst of speed when he's in a situation where he's being forced to work hard. Sometimes Henry looks like he's literally incapable of running or moving much faster than a casual stroll. He's so nonchalant about it, taking his sweet time to do almost everything, and I simply don't like that sort of a crawling pace.