Jingus

Ugh. This bothers me for a different reason. I've never heard of this guy before, but coincidentally one of my best friends is a TN worker who used to go by the name of Jay Phoenix. I can easily see people getting one confused with the other and this causing problems for him. Thankfully a couple years back he switched to his shoot name of Jeremiah Plunkett instead, which should probably cut way down on misunderstandings, but I still wouldn't be surprised if it came up.

That Hogan/Brock/Heyman promo recap made me remember just how awesome Hogan's run in 2002 was. The IWC at the time was ambivalent at best towards it, and the Undertaker feud was indeed pretty bad. But the booking and the promos were perfect. Hogan was portrayed as an aging guy who just didn't have it anymore, and knew it, even if he didn't want to admit it. But he just barely didn't have it anymore, and if his opponent was too cocky or made a crucial mistake then this is still Hulk Fucking Hogan that we're talking about and he might possibly snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Hey, is it surprising that the only time Hogan has been bearable in the past dozen years was also the only time that he was forced by circumstances into accepting a contract without his beloved Creative Control? Has anyone ever given a reason why that happened? Just typical Vinnie Roo idiocy with swerves for swerves' sake. Everyone naturally expected Gunn to be wrestling for the IC belt and Dogg for the Hardcore title at Mania, so Russo thought it was predictable and had them switch places at the last minute.

It's been said that there's no such thing as a bad six-man tag match. That's not quite true, I've seen a few terrible ones, but you still get the point. Having six guys in there seems to hit some kind of magical plateau where it just makes it a hell of a lot easier to have a really fun match. There's never an excuse to have any down time, because there's always a fresh guy on the apron who can be tagged in to keep the match going. And it's just few enough guys to keep it from turning into a clusterfuck and make sure that everyone gets their shit in. With eight guys or more, some can be left out in the cold when it comes to never getting a chance to shine; but with six wrestlers, as long as the match goes more than five minutes, there's always enough time for everyone to do something cool.

Pirating PPVs is less about how hardcore a fan you are and more about your online tendencies. Would it be pretty safe to assume that folks who pirate WWE ppvs are also pirating movies and other stuff like that? I certainly know that I've done plenty of both. But are there people out there who only pirate wrestling shows and nothing else? It requires you to both 1.be enough of a fan to give a damn about seeing the show in the first place, and 2.know enough about the internet to be able to do so for free. The overall number of people who fit into both categories is probably pretty damn small, when compared to the massive casual fanbase. Also agreed that TV ratings really should be listed by number of viewers. Why does the industry still stick to those old percentage numbers? They're so vague and open to abuse, since most people don't really know just exactly how the system works. Like goc said, a 0.3 now is a hell of a lot more people than a 0.3 during the Monday Night Wars. Just going with a straight "number of viewers" total would simplify everything so much. Not like that would solve everything; I know that Nielsen really needs to expand their survey base, they still posit the ratings numbers for the entire television industry based on a grand total of no more than 25,000 households. But it would still be a step in the right direction.

Jacobi did one hell of a defense for HHH here. I don't agree with his conclusions, but he did a finer job of backing them up than practically any other Captain Trips defender that I've ever seen. And to add one more, hasn't it been said that PPVs with Triple H in the main event do tend to draw better business than those without? Not saying there's a direct correlation, there's far too many variables to go drawing conclusions on something as vague as that, but it's another point in Trip's favor. How the hell do you lose 35 million dollars on a restaurant in one year? I know it's Times Square and ergo possibly the highest rent in the entire world, but that still seems excessive. It's not just Brock, though. Vince has been burned almost every time that he's pushed a new young guy as an unstoppable juggernaut. Hogan, Warrior, Austin, and Brock are the biggest examples, but you could also make arguments for Goldberg, Rock, and Batista. Every single time Vince has thrown the full WWE's weight behind a guy to get him over, they've eventually let him down or betrayed him for one reason or another. Except, ironically, Triple H. (And Undertaker and Cena to an extent, but their cases are more odd exceptions than anything else.) I understand how over time McMahon would come to think that it must be the giant push's fault, and being scared to give it to anyone else again. It's a stupid business philosophy which has resulted in the creative stagnation of the past several years, but I get the motivation behind it.

Hell, they could've been arrested for it. I'm pretty sure there must be some law against intentionally exposing public nudity to an oblivious audience of countless people. I guess since the WWF got away with the Miss Kitty deal, Russo felt like nobody would care. It just shows a contempt for, well, pretty much everything that they'd willingly go through with that. Especially since Lollipop had just recently gotten herself some brand new implants, to make the whole thing feel even more sordid. I talked with Athena's husband last night, a former indy worker and good friend of mine named Dan. He confirmed what I thought, that the office deliberately told Desire to go out there and yank Athena's pants off while intentionally keeping Athena in the dark about it. The week beforehand they'd asked her to flash her nipples, and she quite reasonably refused. Next week, this happened as unspoken punishment. Gee, what a great bunch of people to work for!

I don't remember even half of this shit. I started going to the show less often and paying less attention. Looking at all those horrible storylines, I believe I made the right choice. The miscommunication is that nobody told Athena this was going to happen. So either someone in the back was fucking with her and Desire by giving them different instructions, or Desire just randomly decided to rip the pants off for no apparent reason. So Athena basically went "...tha fuck is this bitch doing?!" and indeed held onto her britches like her life depended on it. Actually, Lollipop had flesh-colored pasties on her nipples. Which might arguably make it even worse, since it proves that the angle was intentionally planned.

Most of the story is your typical bottom-level indy scum shenanigans, outrageous and illegal and etcetera. But the one detail that grabbed me was the "ten bell salute". Just the idea of some guy literally speaking the word "ding" into a microphone ten times in a row... I've worked for several shitty fucking almost-backyard outlaw indy companies in my day, but even the people running those shows weren't that insane.

The cheeseburger story is actually true? I always thought it was just one of those wacky Sleaze List rumors. Here's another reason to love Smothers. He's in the minority of big name stars that don't give a shit about doing a job to local indy nobodies. Lots of indy promoters won't even bother asking stars to lose to their local guys, because most of the stars typically refuse to do jobs, especially on one-shot house shows with no angle. So most star-vs-nobody matches are booked either for the star to win, or some kind of lame no contest. However, there's a few wrestlers who genuinely want to help the young guys out, and will actually change the finish in the ring if the promoter is too much of a pussy to ask them to lay down for a rookie. I've personally seen Smothers do that on two separate occasions, with a philosophy of "hey, this kid has to come back here next week, I don't". Clean pinfall to the short skinny backyard-looking dude with Hot Topic gear, 1-2-3. He's not the only one, I've seen Ricky Morton and both of the Dundees do the same thing, but Tracy goes out of his way to put over the weekend warriors. That's a level of professionalism which is almost unheard-of and should be praised.

The biggest problem is that wrestling looks at subtlety as being its mortal enemy. The WWE always fucks up storylines in which the heel has a legitimate gripe, especially when it comes to anything involving race or politics. Look at Muhammed Hassan for the classic example: his character started as "fuck you for automatically thinking that I'm a terrorist!" but oh so quickly devolved into "fuck you, I'm a terrorist". Same deal with the Mexicools, who started out as an angry parody of wetback stereotypes, but were soon simplified into the very stereotypes which they were supposed to be mocking. Also, it really didn't help that the Gulf War officially ended over a month before Wrestlemania. Not really the WWE's fault, but that kind of shit can happen when you're relying so heavily on unpredictable current events. Yeah. It's kinda sad that nobody but the hardcores remember just how awesome Sarge was. Whenever I show his old matches to young fans, they're usually astonished by some of the bumps he took. Even now, in his yearly put-over-a-youngster nostalgia matches, he still looks pretty good.

Clicking around, I was reminded that Bobo actually held the NWA world heavyweight belt. Only for two months, he dropped it right back to Buddy Rogers, but still that must've been a huge deal at the time. The NWA didn't officially recognize the title change, for whatever reason. Anyone got a more detailed story on that? I was also little surprised to see he debuted so much earlier than Ernie Ladd and Abdullah and other guys I thought were around at the same time. If OWW's database is correct, he started seven years before Abby and a full decade before the Big Cat. Also, Wiki claims that he was in Atlanta's first-ever mixed race match... in 1970. Can that be true? I know Southern rassling always lagged a bit behind the times, but still, jesus that's awfully late to still be segregating anything.

Not sure how much of the Misawa disaster you should blame on Joe. He wasn't helping, certainly; but Misawa looked completely broken-down and apathetic, almost like he had the flu or something. Literally half the match was one long resthold with Misawa in control.

I just caught that one a few weeks back, and it doesn't hold up so well. Lots of the work is rather sloppy and indy-looking. Furthermore, in A Post Money-In-The-Bank World, the spots often come off as being fairly unambitious and pedestrian. It's trying to be a huge spotfest trainwreck, but they just can't get the level of sheer spectacle that they were clearly planning on.

I agree with all that. I've always found heel announcers who just make up fake bullshit to be really tiresome, especially when they keep insisting on something that clearly isn't true. Like saying the heel doesn't have a weapon when we're looking right at the damn thing in the guy's hand, that kind of bullshit. Gorilla was great at shutting the heel down when they tried that kind of thing, stopping them cold and keeping the time wasted on arguing to a bare minimum before quickly focusing back on the match at hand.

Was making Yoko the champ a step forward in racial progressiveness because they finally had a non-white as the top guy (well, excepting Pedro Morales), or a step back because it was a guy of one ethnicity portraying a nearly offensive stereotype of a different ethnicity?

Jesse always seemed to me like he was in cruise control in WCW. He didn't just completely give up like Heenan would later, but there definitely seemed to be an element of him coasting at times. And I thought he never had great chemistry with any of WCW's play-by-play guys, nothing that touched his rapport with Vince and Gorilla. Admittedly, I'm far from an expert on early-90s WCW and could've just missed a lot of his best work, but I never heard anything out of him in that company which approached his level of work on the early Wrestlemanias.

It's interesting, how WCW's color commentators got worse and worse in practically a straight downward line. First you had guys like Cornette or Terry Funk doing that job, and even though their announcing wasn't as strong as their promos they were still damn good at it. Then Jesse came in; and he was good, but not nearly as great as during his heyday in the 80s. Dusty floated in and out of commentary positions at various times, and well, it's Dusty and he comes with both good and bad aspects. Then it was Heenan, who usually didn't give a shit and was phoning it in. Then Mongo, who was harmless enough in his clownish ways, but utterly incoherent half the time. Then came Larry Z, with some of the lamest catchphrases and jokes you'd ever heard, and who actively hurt some of the matches by acting condescending towards those in the ring. And finally Mark Cunting Madden, the worst color commentator I've ever heard in my life. Seriously, every single nobody I've ever had as an announcing partner during my indy days was inevitably a much better color guy than Madden. Wrestlers who'd never announced in their lives stepped up to the mic and were instantly far superior to that braying jackass. Even in the anarchic delirium of WCW 2000, it's still astonishing that this worthless cocksucker actually called every Nitro and PPV for a goddamn year straight.

Schiavone got real, real bad in the later days of WCW. "The greatest night in the history of our sport!" and "the biggest match of all time!" and "sidewalk slam!" and pretty much anything he ever said while bantering with Heenan, were all just awful. Who knows how much of that was burnout and apathy, and how much of it was Bischoff feeding him stupid lines. Of course it didn't help that he was calling terrible product with an ever-worsening series of color commentators who acted like millstones around his neck. There never lived a play-by-play man who could carry Mark Madden to a good call, certainly. But back in his prime? Eh, flip a coin. Sometimes you could tell he was genuinely into this and trying hard. Other times, he was like the announcing equivalent to a Create-A-Wrestler, saying all the obvious things at the obvious times. Saying it well, he had a great voice and was indeed very professional and polished. But he relied more on delivery than content. It's sometimes a bit obvious that he used to be a baseball announcer, he still had a lot of the ballpark tendencies in how he called things. In baseball, you've got a pretty narrow range of things that can happen; it's one of the slower sports, and certainly one of the most rigidly structured. It's got little of the unpredictable, chaotic energy of basketball or football, where there's a thousand different plays that the athletes can try. In baseball, you've got a very limited number of things that can happen: either the batter hits the ball (and it lands in play or not, and the defense catches it or not) or he doesn't (strike or ball) and that's about it. With such a small number of possible outcomes to every individual action in the game, baseball announcers tend to be hype men, armed with a quiver full of repetitive cliches which they try to say in an exciting manner. It's hard to explain in articulate terms how that bled over into Schiavone's wrestling tenure, but I can hear it in his words. He tended to try to polish every match in a similar manner, whether it was a diamond or a turd.

The type of character they're portraying also has an effect. If a loudmouth coward type of heel gets beaten up by a big bruising monster heel, usually the crowd will cheer the monster. The Flair/Haku example above fits that type of scenario.

He's talking about Nick Gulas's son George Gulas. He was infamous for whining "Daddy said sell!" or "Daddy said bump!" to the heels when he was on offense.

In those specific matches, sure. I'm just talking about what I've seen in general of Stan not-in-Japan, and it feels like he tended to brawl on the floor a lot more whenever he wasn't working for Baba. It's not something he always did, but he did it a lot more in America.

Not exactly the same, though. In America, Hansen would do more crowd brawling and chair throwing and less of the relatively traditional keep-it-in-the-ring stuff he did in All Japan. And it seemed like he was a bit less stiff. Or to put it another way, in AWA he tended to play up the Stone Cold parts of his repertoire and play down the Vader bits.