Jingus

It's hard for me to say on that one, because by the time I started watching Vince had already been wrestling. But I never minded him in the ring. He was a big guy with big muscles, and a natural charismatic performer whose matches were well-booked, and anyway he usually spent most of the time getting his ass kicked. Whenever he managed to beat anyone, it was typically portrayed as a total fluke or massive screwjob. Some people will still complain "but he's not a wrestler!", to which I reply: says who? He's obviously done his share of training, and has probably had a hundred matches by now. Yet some smarks will oddly cling to the idea that he's less of a real wrestler than some rookie kid in the curtain jerker. Besides, the fact that he's Vince F'n McMahon makes a big difference. He's the father of modern wrestling, period. He's not like Russo or Bischoff, some relatively untalented weenie who snuck in the back door of the business. If he wants to make himself a star, and if it succeeds (which it did, hugely) then I don't see the problem.

Why do they keep closing down a developmental fed in one place, only to open an identical one elsewhere? In OVW, Deep South, and now FCW they basically did the same shit over and over again. What does Stamford have that Louisville, Atlanta, and Tampa don't? (Except for much higher cost-of-living prices which will inevitably fuck over the underpaid young trainees, of course.)

Doesn't matter, because the celebrity's not in control. It's all about the booker/promoter. Kaufmann had one of the greatest creative minds in wrestling to book his stuff; Arquette had one of the worst, and who the hell knows who booked the Snooki crap in the WWE's revolving committee of writers. These guys are just actors and they do what they're told; and if they show up drunk or otherwise don't do what they're told, it's up to the boss to straighten them out. I didn't see it myself, I'm just going on my friend's description. If he didn't paint an accurate portrait of what was actually said, then nevermind. Huh?

Not just similar, but the exact same identical move. Check it out: here's Chono's injury, and here's Austin's. That's the correct version, iirc. After all, there's plenty of guys who use a move kinda similar to that and do so safely; it's not so different from a Michinoku or Rikishi driver. Which makes it really weird that a perfect ring general like Owen Hart would botch the move in such a "dude, there's no way this could possibly end well" fashion.

It always seemed to me like they were deliberately trying to sabotage Goldberg's title run. The best example is the bullshit they had him doing on PPV while he was champion: Bash at the Beach '98: meaningless title defense in the undercard vs Curt Hennig. Road Wild: meaningless battle royal. Fall Brawl: not even on the show. Halloween Havoc: a title match against DDP... which half the audience never saw, because the show went suspiciously long. World War III: not even on the show. Starrcade: losing to Nash. And they wonder why he wasn't so popular after all that bullshit? In what way did Andy Kaufmann "respect da biz" more than Arquette did? Hell, Andy's entire gimmick was that he didn't respect the business. A friend of mine watched this roundtable, and got really pissed off by how much JR was apparently harping on that respect-da-biz line; and since my friend was an indy worker himself, he knows how much a giant load of horseshit that line is anyway. Pillman's and Owen's families. I've seen that mentioned repeatedly, guys like Heenan have confirmed it. Flair also told a neat story about Arquette. After Dewey won the belt, he was sitting around backstage in a daze. Flair happened to walk by him, and Arquette (clearly uncomfortable with what had just happened) asked "Ric... what do I do now?" Flair told him to do what every old world champ used to, wear the belt down to the hotel bar that night and buy everyone a round of drinks. Apparently David took his advice to the letter. I don't blame that guy personally for anything that happened, he was just a victim in the wrong place at the wrong time in the middle of some of the worst bullshit that wrestling has ever seen.

It's not saying anything about quality, it's asking who the biggest star is. So that's a damn strange list for a question like that.

Mongo was a pretty bad spot-blower on a fairly frequent basis, though. I've seen him fuck up the simplest things in the most amazing ways. There's a reason why he's a common segment on Botchamania videos.

Who? I'd never heard of her. Looked her up, and still have essentially no idea who she is. Not exactly a fair substitution for Shaq.

I did not want to touch that one... John I always thought they looked fine. Hey, there's a thread idea: one in which we go into super-detailed discussion of strikes, and what makes them "look good" and why. That rarely gets discussed, it usually goes no deeper than "Lawler has better punches than anyone else on the WWE roster" which, while true, isn't very helpful for explaining exactly how that is so.

How often? I only recall that happening once or twice, in their months of feuding. And at the time, it was easy to cheer Jericho; he was doing his fiery, funny, smart-mouthed Conspiracy Victim routine which often made him a tweener anyway. The crowd certainly hailed Chyna as a conquering hero every time she was in there against Jarrett. And you base all this on... what?

I'd argue that bumping is pretty much the only thing HHH does better here. Brody's a more dynamic promo, more charismatic, better look, better tag wrestler, much better strikes. He's believable as a legit badass, as opposed to Trips who sometimes looks more like a bodybuilding cosplayer.

Becoming massively over and routinely receiving some of the biggest pops of the night counts as "failing"? It's bullshit that the audience won't believe a woman beating up a guy, because they obviously have bought it on many occasions.

Apparently his career was held back by issues of general professionalism. I remember Bert Prentice once shilling his weekly card, and actually saying on television something to the effect of "and we've also got Billy Joe Travis versus Jamie Dundee, in a 'if one of them shows up he automatically wins' match".

I heard from a guy who knew a buncha strippers that Borash used "hey, maybe I can get you a spot as one of TNA's cage dancers!" to score free lap dances.

I'm one of those dreaded "don't get lucha" guys. And I'm not even sure exactly why I don't get it. When I first saw Japanese wrestling, I instantly understood it. The very first All Japan match I ever watched (Kobashi/Hansen ftw!) made complete sense to me, and I intuitively comprehended exactly what they were doing and why. With lucha, it rarely if ever "clicks" with me like that. I'll see stuff like those '95 Rey/Juvi matches, and I just don't get the hype. Felt like they did better stuff as cruiserweights in WCW, in sort of a "RVD improved once the WWF made him focus his style and cut out a lot of his superfluous stuff" kind of way. It's not a perfect comparison, because clearly lucha is much more than just two little guys doing flips. But anytime I happen to turn on Galavision to catch a bit of it, I quickly find myself becoming bored and turning it off within half an hour or so. It's a style, mindset, and psychology where I frequently find myself wondering "...why the heck are they doing that?". No entiendo la lucha libre. (That being said, I'd love some example of easy-to-get matches where you don't need to be familiar with the gimmicks or long-term angles involved.)

You know there aren't any, because it never happens. Nobody's willing to even try it. But "competing against a male athlete at the top professional level" isn't what you said. You basically said that no woman can beat any male athlete regardless of their respective levels, period. Which isn't close to true, since different people have vastly different levels of talent, experience, and skill. Would the Williams sisters have any trouble destroying some random guys from a high school tennis club? Ah. I've only seen him work a handful of times, didn't know that.

If you wanna say that she couldn't compete against the top professional male fighters, that's one thing and I don't have a great argument against it. But it's ridiculous to claim that every man would beat her. I still vividly remember attending a jiujitsu class where this tiny little teenage girl was their best fighter, easily running circles around all the guys in the session. MMA isn't just about physical strength; if it was, then the stronger dude would win in every single fight and that's obviously not the case. Remember those early UFCs where Royce was usually the smallest guy in the entire tournament? He still had little problem in beating a ton of guys who were much larger and stronger than him. EDIT: back to the topic at hand, a common complaint I hear about joshi is that people dislike all the screaming. Women tend to have higher and thus more piercing voices than men; and for whatever reason, this trend seems unusually pronounced among Japanese women. So if they simply get an earache every time they try to watch Manami screeching her head off, I do understand that part. Kinda like how I often find Chono's weird muttering during his matches to be rather distracting.

The matches are certainly different from how they were in '99. There's very little floor/crowd brawling now, for one. In the Attitude era, you could inevitably count on the main eventers to do an ECW "wander around the area while punching each other" segment in their match, if not several of them. Now that's pretty rare, it's kept much more in the ring.

Flair had a much more conversational style in lots of his older promos. I showed the segment where Lawler challenged him for the belt in Memphis to some younger fans, and they were shocked at how different Ric sounded there. He'd often go all "wild crazy Wooo-ing Flair" in his fired-up postmatch interviews, but prematch and studio stuff had him in a much lower key.

I think he had another maintenance surgery on one (both?) of his knees while he was out for this most recent injury, so it might be another few months.

We need a "lucha for people who don't like lucha" thread.

If you could strap Russo into a chair and waterboard him until he was forced to tell the truth, you'd probably come away with some really interesting stuff. But in typical interviews, he's far too invested in trying to build up the legend of his own brilliance. He's up there with Nash and Hogan in terms of rewriting history in his own head to make himself look better. YouShoot will ask him harder questions than other interviewers would, but it still won't improve his answers.

Kudo/Toyoda certainly deserves a mention, because it also qualifies for the double hat trick of "deathmatch for people who don't like deathmatches". If there's ever been a better barbed wire match of any sort, then I haven't seen it.

Why?

Yeah. Two examples: there was a Lufisto vs Sabian match in CZW which I found pretty disgusting. Practically every spot Sabian did involved some kind of sexual harassment, to the point of obsessing on the "hey y'all, there's a wimmin in this here ring!" aspect of the match (which oddly didn't happen when Lufisto was in the Cage O' Death match with three male opponents in the same promotion). Compare that to a Chuck Taylor vs Candace LaRae match I saw from PWG, which handled the mixed-gender part perfectly. It only came up a couple of times, especially a hilarious bit where Chuck thought that they were doing the old "a man and a woman who are sworn enemies are in the middle of a heated fight, and then suddenly start kissing" routine, but a horrified Candace quickly shot him down.