Jingus

How much weight should we put on coulda-shoulda-woulda speculations about how someone might have performed in circumstances which never happened? There's a lot of "Triple H got opportunities that other guys never did" points here. And while that's true, we really can't accurately predict exactly how another guy would've done in that spot. Another thing occurred to me: Trips never really had to work outside of the Big TV American Wrestling model. He barely had to ever work the indies, because WCW signed him just two years into his career. He only worked there for one year, and then jumped to the WWF and has remained there ever since. He's essentially wrestled exclusively in one promotion for the vast majority of his adult life. How might his career or performance style have been affected if he'd spent some significant time on the indies or in foreign territories?

I've stopped watching twice. 1. Around 2002-2003. Raw had gotten pretty bad, with the constant overwhelming Triple H super-dominance, Foley/Austin/Rock rarely being around, and a bunch of bland roided OVW developmental fucks being pushed as the "exciting new talent". I never watched Smackdown, because my home indy wrestling fed ran on Friday nights. I was working two or three shows every week, which led to some burnout. Also, I could attend the weekly TNA shows whenever I wanted to, which further added to my general feeling of oversaturation. Then I got back into it around early 2005, and watched semi-consistently for a while, and then... 2. The celebrity guest GMs. I hated that shit more than I can coherently explain. It was the saddest, most desperate form of pandering to the mainstream; and as the ratings showed, nobody in the mainstream cared. It ate up oceans of time, most of the guests sucked, and it made me simply not want to see Raw. And right when they finally gave up on it, here comes Screaming Heel Michael Cole to insure that I could never watch a single segment in peace. Add this to 1.me just never being in the habit of watching Smackdown and 2.TNA getting really bad at this point, and I tuned out.

I've repeatedly heard vague but consistent mention about how many production errors there are on ROH's live broadcasts. Can anyone elaborate on what exactly they are?

This has been depressingly common in ROH commentary since day one. They've always talked about how they're real serious really seriously real wrestling and bragging about how great they are. My thought process has always been: I've already paid money to buy your goddamn show! Stop doing this half-assed PR work and let your product speak for itself. But that's just part of a bigger problem: ROH's announcing has traditionally been pretty lame. Sapolsky was never any damn good, and it sounds like Kelly isn't either. Prazak was probably the best they've had, but even he seemed muted and bland compared to his older work in IWA-MS where he displayed so much more personality. I asked Prazak one time in 2005-ish why Gabe kept himself as the lead announcer for so long, when even Gabe had to know that he kinda sucked on the mic. Dave's answer was basically that Sapolsky could basically put over the angles and psychology exactly how he wanted, since he was the booker too. That's more of an excuse than an explanation, though, since you can easily just tell your lead announcers which points you want them to make. I never claimed to be Lance Russell on the mic, but even I would've done a better job in that chair than Gabe did. Some people just weren't born with the voice for this kind of thing, and Gabe's raspy monotone and nasal accent was simply never meant for a broadcasting career even if he had better instincts for the job.

Well, ECW was pretty goddamn misogynistic even by wrestling's standards. The female characters were pretty much all literally portrayed as whores, even when they were babyfaces. Between that and the unsavory feel of the male audience members, it's not surprising that few chicks would feel comfortable attending this shit.

I worked with the Harrises one time. Maybe I'm just ruined by all the shitty indy wrestling I endured, but I thought they were perfectly competent. Everything went smooth and painless. I got kicked in the head and H-bombed and hardly felt a thing. They didn't even get mildly annoyed when I blew the timing on one spot, he (I could never tell them apart) just calmly improvised something and moved along.

I'm digging your analysis (although I'd personally put HHH far above Nash). Making lists is so fun that I could do it all day, but for now let's go with just a few that have been kinda mentioned already: Road Dogg Billy Gunn Sean Waltman Chyna

This isn't that peculiar... just trying to name associate with a cool movie, The Big Lebowski. Yeah, but this was at least a year or two after the movie came out. (Which isn't unusual for the WWE, with their well-established history of jumping onto pop culture bandwagons long after their primes.) And absolutely nothing in Val's character, look, or gimmick even vaguely resembled anyone or anything in The Big Lebowski.

It's not quite the same thing, though. You can prove that the earth isn't flat with hard, indisputable mathematics. You certainly can't prove in a similarly concrete fashion that one artistic performer is better than another. The only quantifiable metric we have is the amount of houses/ratings/buyrates drawn; and by that scale, HHH actually ranks right up at the top of the list. (Of course with a big asterisk for various reasons, but still.) And I don't even like Captain Trips more than most of the other wrestlers listed in this thread, but my point is that it's not any kind of objectively provable argument.

Hey, this is a really fun discussion. Here's a few more random ones: Kurt Angle Keiji Mutoh Shawn Michaels Shane Douglas Rick Steiner Dean Malenko Mistico Taz Kevin Nash Scott Hall King Kong Bundy Sid Vicious Raven

I haven't watched the Ki match in a while, but I remember getting the odd feeling that Tajiri was subtly mocking Ki in that one. Tajiri took most of the offense, to the point where the match felt like half a squash a times, and kept doing this exaggerated "I'm applauding my young opponent's tenacity, everyone else applaud him too!" schtick when Ki was down selling.

I remember the Funk/Lawler JAPW match being just a billion piledrivers and not much else. The 3PW one was infinitely better, with a ton of fun selling from Funk making Lawler's punches look like murder attempts and Jerry working the Arena crowd into a frenzy. Haven't seen the MLW one.

It's actually not a bad work. Start by openly admitting that you're a worker, that you've been working people forever, and then mention "...except for this one part here, that's a shoot, pally!". Somehow, if you tell people you're a liar but then tell them that you'd never lie about one thing, they tend to believe you. It's sort of like a much more logical version of Russo's old "everything in wrestling is fake, except for what you're watching right now" booking on Nitro.

There's at least half a dozen stadiums in the USA which top out at over 100,000 capacity (mostly gargantuan football fields at Big Ten universities). I wonder why Vince has never tried to run Mania at any of those? Is he just afraid that the building might be half empty?

I remember owning a copy of that show that I think I got from Will. Overall, it's a pretty lousy show. The card doesn't mention that the first thing you see on this show is two dudes kissing in the middle of the ring, with the gay heels Christopher Street Connection making out. Ah, makes your own Rob Feinstein joke here.

Firstly: when the hell did FMW run in America? Secondly: how the hell did a match with that lineup manage to nab five stars? My first assumption is that Dave was there live for the show and succumbed to "people there live tend to rate a match better" syndrome. That one's an automatic request, if anyone can find it. Here's a few more requests, mostly from Scott's list, because they're not currently talked to death: -Ricky Steamboat & Dustin Rhodes vs. Arn Anderson & Larry Zbyszko (Clash of the Champions XVII, November 19, 1991 - WCW Tag Team Title Match) -Tsuyoshi Kikuchi & Yoshinobu Kanemaru vs. Minoru Tanaka & Jushin Liger (August 29, 2002 - IWGP Jr. Heavyweight Tag Team Title Match) -Kenta Kobashi & Homicide vs. Samoa Joe & Low Ki (Unforgettable, October 2, 2005)

Me too.

The fuck was Ole doing in the ring in 1990?

Yeah. A lot of the early episodes of Doctor Who have been lost for the same reason, the BBC just recorded other shit over them. Verne being in that nursing home room which was cheap enough that he had a roommate suddenly makes more sense.

I believe it's spelled "Princess Sugey", btw. At least, that's what I think she told me the one time we worked together, her English was almost as bad as my Spanish.

This pisses me off. As someone who's done some writing himself, I can't stand assholes who steal someone else's shit and have the BALLS to claim it as their own. What can we do to hurt this fucker?

Mike Awesome. His match at One Night Stand really highlighted how mediocre the last five years of his career had been by comparison. He never quite fit in at WCW, and really didn't fit in at the WWF. Yeah, he had a few relatively high-profile tours in Japan in the early 2000s, but that's not the same as having a good consistent spot in your own home federation.

Their approach to human resources is certainly worth several bullet points. In an age where all other big wrestling companies fund the medical bills for anyone who gets hurt in the ring, TNA still forces the talent to pay for their own surgeries to fix injuries that happened in a TNA ring. They're said to charge extortionate rates to loan their wrestlers to most indy companies, preventing some guys from getting booked as often as they otherwise would; but also take a large fraction of those few payoffs that the wrestlers manage to get. They've got essentially no Wellness Policy at all. This includes two important parts: firstly, the nonexistent drug testing... except for those couple of times where they tested people and many pissed dirty but the company did nothing at all in response. And secondly, a total lack of all those medical tests and physicals that the WWE makes everyone get nowadays. TNA has an awfully cavalier treatment of risk compared to the WWE, commonly insisting on more dangerous spots and sometimes putting people into positions where it's almost inevitable that they'll get hurt. They often don't seem to give a shit when they employ a dangerously stiff or sloppy or green wrestler, doing little to lessen the risk to their opponents. Then there's their completely random approach to hiring and firing people (Nikki Roxx/i Laveaugh, anyone?). And probably many more things I've forgotten. When even friggin' Vince McMahon treats his employees a lot more humanely than you do, that's a big fucking problem.

I don't understand why JDW is so vehement about disputing the Stevens/Rogers/whoever story. "Young fan Richard Fliehr was disappointed when his favorite wrestlers didn't do all their signature TV spots on the house shows" and "Veteran wrestler Ric Flair wrestled this style because it's a simple yet effective way of putting together a match with practically any opponent, which the crowd will invariably mark out for" aren't mutually exclusive. It's not hard to believe that one could lead to the other.

Yeah. The vast majority of the shows I've ever worked have constantly had some kind of power-struggle angles happening. Some are NWO "heel faction trying to ruin the company" stuff, some are Commissioner/President/GM storylines ripping off old Mr. McMahon storylines, and every once in a while you'll get a fed-vs-fed invasion deal. All of which would be nice if they didn't happen all the goddamn time on every goddamn show.