Jingus

Can anyone think of any examples where Meltzer got caught deliberately lying like that? For all the people who whine about him making up bullshit, I can't think of a single case where fiction-reported-as-fact didn't trace back to a source giving him some bad info. Yes. Isn't it usually true? Dave's not the only guy I've heard that from.

That's actually a good point. Getting a win over Trips is such a rare thing that it really does mean something. Well, as long as it's not structured to subtly make the guy look weak, and as long as HHH doesn't just shrug and pretend like it doesn't matter and act his opponent's still an unworthy pretender during his 20-minute promo the next night on Raw.

Med's advice is all really good. The communication aspect is one thing that never really gets talked about online, because it's one of those rare things that you really don't understand unless you've been in the ring and experienced it. You've got to be able to speak quickly, clearly, concisely, and do it all in a weird vocal manner so that the wrestlers hear every word but the fans in the front row have no idea what you're saying. As for showing emotion, that's a tough tightrope to walk. I only ever did it when it felt like the moment really needed it. Like, one time we had two guys going to a double countout. Specifically, the sort of double countout where supposedly they get so caught up in brawling that they just don't notice the count and don't get back in the ring. In those situations, the heat of the finish usually goes right on the referee; the fans get pissed off that you were such a by-the-book martinet and didn't allow the wrestlers enough leeway, and the inevitable "five more minutes" chants begin. Well, to make sure that shit didn't happen, I just added a couple of extra yells in between counts. "FOUR... come on guys, you gotta get back in the ring! FIVE..." and then progressively acting more annoyed as they didn't listen, leading to "NINE... LAST CHANCE! ...TEN, ring the bell!" Slowing the count down a little bit as the numbers get higher is also a nice shortcut to get the crowd not to hate you, since it looks like you're giving the wrestlers a fair chance and they're just being dumbasses who won't listen so caught up in their vicious blood feud that they eschew all codes of gentlemanly fisticuffs. Like I keep saying, the last thing you want heat on is a supposedly impartial official. Heh. One time I was working for a ladies' promoter who brought in this really awful girl from Germany who spoke no English. The match was sucking about fifteen or sixteen dicks and the crowd knew it, so in desperation I started to do a little bit of comedy by doing all my counts in foreign languages... in every language except German, of which I speak zero. Shiiiiit, brotha, that's all you had to say. I dunno what it is about completely incompetent egomaniacs that make them think "hey, I'm the shittiest wrestler on the entire goddamn planet... I should promote a show AND be the ridiculously super-dominant top villain!", but I've seen several of 'em. Fuck guys like that. Never met one who wasn't a complete prick.

Oh yeah. Nine times out of ten, when the referee sees something he shouldn't, it's the wrestlers' fault. I can't begin to tell you how many times I felt embarrassed while reffing matches when wrestlers would do something really fucking stupid, right in fucking front of me. Illegal moves, weapons, blatant rope-grabbing during holds and feet on the ropes during pinfalls, all kinds of insulting shit. And then the crowd usually gets mad at the REF, not the heel who is supposed to be getting all this heat via their cheap-ass tactics. But if you actually enforce the rules, then you get yelled at by the workers and the booker for supposedly ruining their stuff. Of course, everyone has a breaking point. Here's a story of the only time I ever shot on anyone as a ref. One time I was reffing a tag match, where the heel on the apron was this horribly untalented backyarder named Fez. We're in the heat, and the guys in the ring are doing a false tag spot. They're inching closer and closer to the face corner, and I naturally position myself reasonable close to the heel corner so that Fez can distract me without either of us having to walk halfway across the ring. But Fez isn't distracting me. He's sitting there like a bump on a goddamn log. The face in peril is within a foot of making the tag, so I mutter out of the corner of my mouth "Get me, Fez, get me!". I still have no idea what the fuck he was thinking, but he grabs me and starts punching me. Worked punches, but still! And then he bites me on the forehead like he's fucking Hollywood Hogan. I grabbed that little bastard by the scruff of the neck and hit a "B-Boy elbowing JC Bailey" forearm smash with all of my might. Knocked his ass right off the apron, and I proceeded to scream profanities at him on the floor for the next several seconds. But even at a "family show", none of the fans cared about my swearing because everyone could tell how weird and fucked-up this was. Long story short, he never got booked again.

Reliability and invisibility. Don't fuck anything up, and don't draw attention to yourself. If the referee's doing his job right, you should never even realize he's there.

Hasn't ROH done pretty much all of these at some point?

Not saying it's always like that; after all, I haven't watched a whole lot of this stuff. But it's something I've noticed repeatedly on the occasions when I turned on Galavision, that they often seem to spend a reeeeeally long time on segments where one guy just beats the shit out of another guy without much in the way of reprisal.

Fairly solid but with very few MOTYCs typically held down by over booking and poor agenting. It seems like they have a lot more blown spots than the WWE does, for whatever reason; and I think their camerawork and editing is much worse, which makes matches seem suckier than they really are. But overall the shitty booking even reaches right down into the matches itself. Having a clean fight between two opponents without any stupid outside shenanigans is a terribly rare occurrence in TNA.

That's one of the things about the lucha style that I never got used to. Sometimes the matches feel like they're sharply divided into different acts, and in each act one guy will beat on another guy forever without any receipts. The control segments often seem more sharply delineated and strictly observed than in almost any other territory. I can't explain exactly why I don't like it, but it still feels weird and forced to me when the entire primera caida is the faces beating up the heels unanswered, then vice-versa for the segunda, and then back to the first plan for the tercera caida. I guess I've just been programmed by all the other styles of wrestling to expect more back-and-forth reversals than that.

Not just running over a dog. If the heel deliberately ran over the babyface's well-known beloved dog... well, that would still suck, because animal mascot angles never work. But still, they did it in literally the worst way possible. We'd never even known that HHH had a dog until that very episode of television. Stephanie ordered her man-bitch servant Jericho to take the dog out for walkies, which he did. And then he accidentally backed a car over it, looking like the biggest dumbass on the planet. There wasn't one second of that angle which didn't make Jericho seem like a chump, completely ruining all of Rock's recent hard work to build Chris into a legit top guy.

Does it really? In such a world, any triumph is necessarily going to be fleeting and tenuous. As it probably should be. Things are way more interesting when the heel gets the upper hand more often than the babyface. It makes the babyface moments of revenge stand out more and makes them satisfying. Fleeting for sure, but that's really the whole point. You guys are making wrestling kinda sound like a Ravenloft campaign. Yeah. Superhero comics are probably the closest analogy to wrestling in terms of how their storytelling methods work. And people completely accept that the heroes win most of the time, but the villains usually keep coming back anyway. I've never understood the whole old-school mentality of "if you do one job it completely destroys all your heat"; that's total bullshit, the fans don't see it that way.

Which still doesn't explain why he kept sucking and never learned how to do this shit correctly. It's not like he didn't have the opportunity, he was still working with a shitload of great talent in WCW.

One wrestler stiffing another in a match is a whole different can o' worms from a wrestler attacking a non-wrestler in the back. When it happens in the ring, there's not much chance of legal recourse: "Well, your honor, I knew he was gonna be hitting me and I'd signed a complete waiver; but he wasn't supposed to be hitting me that hard!" isn't a great legal strategy.

Firstly: those are all WWE, not TNA. Secondly: that's still a much shorter list than you had in previous decades. Thirdly: you could only name two real examples of this stuff even happening in the last decade. There's more examples specifically involving Shawn Michaels getting the shit kicked out of him in the 90s than there are in the entire industry today. See my point? Things have changed.

Ditto. Most of the other guys named at least look like they've washed their gear sometime in the past month. Balls's outfits always looked like they were in the middle of decomposing. Heh, I still remember a 1998 Bruce Mitchell column where he made the compelling argument that the Flock was a veiled, coded version of a specifically homosexual cult with Raven as the leader who "turns people to the dark side". Not in a whiny "...and that's offensive!" tone, but just analyzing their individual roles and comparing them to traditional negative stereotypes within the gay community. Early young Kidman was the archetype of "the runaway teenager, desperate and broke, picked up at a bus station" iirc.

This isn't a normal work enviroment. This is the completely backwards prowrestling work enviroment. She isn't going to go to HR when someone is offensive. When Mark Henry did the functional equivalent of going to HR when he was offended by a backstage guys behavior, it was criticized within the wrestling community. "Why did he complain instead of just punching him?" It's wrestling. Lashing out violently is the normative behavior. No it's not normal, not in today's corporate environment where there are parent companies and stockholders who are open to lawsuits from such actions. Locker room beatdowns, which used to be a common occurrence (and still are on the outlaw indy scene), have become pretty rare in big televised wrestling. How many other examples can you name from TNA in the past few years where something similar happened? Hah! That's awesome. When did this happen? Why did people think Taz was some kind of legit bad ass for years? Guess they were just good enough at getting over their characters that people believed. Taz worked a faux-MMA style back when nobody else did that, and the character was performed and booked very well. Not really difficult to figure out, he was basically portrayed as Short Goldberg, except his background was in judo rather than football. Although, I'd argue that Taz shootplexing a knocked-the-fuck-out Paul Varelans was a more impressive accomplishment than anything Low-Ki's ever done. That was one big goddamn sandbag of dead weight, and Taz still lifted and planted him perfectly. What's Ki ever done? (On purpose, not a "whoopsie, sorry about that broken nose and concussion!" sloppy-ass sucker-kick?) He choked out an aging, possibly-not-sober Chris Candido once; but that's hardly an accomplishment considering Ki managed to pick a fight with the one guy who might be even smaller than himself.

The main problem most critics have with that move is the contrived nature of the setup. Wrestlers rarely just happen to fall into that exact position, kneeling down with their arms draped over the middle rope... except in Mysterio matches, where it's guaranteed to happen almost every time. It's kind of a powerbombing-Kidman sort of spot, one which almost never happens except in this one wrestler's matches. Admittedly about half the time the setup involves Rey doing something to specifically plant his opponent there, but people do Just So Happen to fall into perfect 619-ing position a lot when they're facing Mysterio.

Diego should certainly be on those Ghetto Assassin shows, or whatever exactly they're called. Since they actually kill characters, he'd finally get to "strangle" someone!

I also remember hearing a story once from someone who was backstage at some WCW show as a kid, and Teddy randomly came up to this group of kids sitting around and bought all of them ice cream from a nearby vendor. He's said to be a truly amazingly nice guy. As to why he's popular, I'd say that he does his job well enough that nobody really complains about him, thus never leading to deep discussion. He's not exactly Laurence Olivier out there as a performer and his stuff can get repetitive, but he's consistently decent and that's all he needs to be widely accepted yet also be kind of an afterthought.

It's amazing how long it took for most people to catch on that Ki is an unprofessional prick. Hell, even fuckin' Necro Butcher went on record saying that Ki stiffing him in the face is the absolute hardest that he's ever been hit in his life. (In the same match where Ki is putting his hands SO far up to block weapons shots that he still sells, that the crowd starts booing him for it.) He's always been one of those guys who picks his spots on when and where to be a bully, and of course is notorious for never wanting to job and various other shit.

Wouldn't t he Gobbledygooker count for this? They spent weeks if not months hyping that egg, only for it to turn out to be a dancing luchadore in a turkey suit (yet nowhere near as fun as that sounds on paper). He wasted about fifteen minutes of PPV time and then promptly vanished, never to be seen again (well, except for the Gimmick Battle Royal).

The problem with that model is that TV costs now generally overwhelm whatever you'd make at the live gate. The days when TV studios were happy to have wrestling on their channel are dead and gone. It's mostly treated as paid programming now, with the promotion actually having to pay a set fee to air their show; and for anything resembling a decent timeslot, the fee will not be small. They can try to recoup some of that money by producing and running their own commercials, but it's pretty difficult to find local businesses which are willing to sponsor a local rassling company.

Maybe it would have felt better on a different show, but I didn't see much to like about it. That kind of match should've been a fiery blood-soaked Southern brawl, with Robert trying to beat the evil out of his turncoat partner. Instead, it was a sluggish work-the-leg match with Ricky eating up way too much time on offense.

I've seen it done properly exactly one time: after a heel punched out a referee, the promoter said that the ref was gonna get the wrestler's pay envelope for the night. That's perfectly believable, and not naming a number gets around the fact that the pay envelope probably held no more than ten or twenty bucks. But man, I have seen a lot of fines where the amount charged is stupidly huge on these tiny outlaw shows.

Fines are still used all the time on indy shows, and are laughable to the point of insulting the audience's intelligence. The promoter will be blabbing about how this guy is being charge thousands of dollars for doing whatever, and anyone with a mastery of simple arithmetic can look around the crowd and quickly calculate that this phony fine is a larger dollar figure than the show's entire ticket sales that night.