Jingus

Stan Hansen used the lariat in America, of course. I think Hogan used the Axe Bomber in the States as well, before the Hulkamania era really kicked off. I imagine Rick Steiner pinned plenty of jobbers with the steinerline. And quite a few indy guys today use a lariat as a finish, with Homicide probably being the most well-known example. I understand Loss's point about the shotay, in that he just thinks it looks weak. That's a perfectly credible complaint. (If someone can't get into Giant Baba matches just because all his offense looks so flimsy that he couldn't break an egg, I understand that, even if I don't agree with it.) Personally, my bigger problem with moves like that is how they seem so easy to hit. If all you gotta do is just hit the guy and you instantly win, why aren't you doing that all the time? Same thing with Big Show's knockout punch. A finishers which doesn't require any setup and can be hit with ease in practically any situation is something that does bother me sometimes. If it's as simple as punching the other guy, why don't you keep trying to punch him over and over again until you hit it? Why would you need any other moves?

The huge Shane McMahon-style bumps were definitely a stunt man, and not Steve Borden.

That Sabu ladder match was awesome and I hate ladder matches. Even my little brother, who is not a wrestling fan despite all my attempts to make it so, admitted that "I'd definitely go watch a Ken Shamrock vs Sabu match, especially a ladder match".

I was present live at many of those shows, so here's some rememberences and clarifications. Even worse, it ended in a damn DQ. Apparently NOAH insisted that Omori couldn't do any jobs, but TNA either didn't know or didn't care before they booked him in a pointless world title match. If you ever need a good go-to catchphrase in any argument against Russo's few remaining defenders, here it is: "He tried to turn Ricky Steamboat heel." If that's not the sign of being the worst booker on the fucking planet, I don't know what is. I wouldn't blame the latter on Truth. Hall was still just as lazy as he was in WCW, if not moreso. And poor Hennig was so bad at that point that he was actually worse than Hall. Nobody could get anything out of Mr Perfect anymore. That one actually had a neat, almost Japanese finish. Russo tries to give Jarrett a guitar, and babyface Jeff angrily smashes it apart over the top of the ringpost. Then he hits Truth with a Stroke. Even at that time, the Stroke was, shall we say, not terribly over. Truth kicks out strong. So as he's getting up, Jarrett grabs him and hits the move again. Truth kicks out again... at 2.9, and is slow to get up and looking woozy. So finally Jarrett yanks him by the hair and gives him a super jumping Stroke with extra mustard to finally get the pin. I dunno if they were planned to be a team from the start, but it just made sense. They were the two top guys in Bert Prentice's local promotion that he'd been running out of the same building. The match which got them hired by TNA was against each other. So it was logical to put them together as a team. We never figured out why these guys didn't get used more. Oddly, the office must've had some plans for them, because they commissioned a special pair of tights to be made for each. Specifically, tights with a fake cloth penis sewn on the inside. Yes, I'm not kidding, I actually saw them, TNA really did this shit. It's sad, because both of them were damn fine workers. But they were both mediocre at best on the mike, and both less than six feet tall, and the promotion didn't even try to give them any kind of personality. It was just "Hey, here's a heel team of two little guys who happen to have the same last name, boo them!" and then they wondered why there was deafening silence. Nobody had any idea why the fuck these guys kept getting booked. Like a much shittier version of the SATs and nobody cared about them. A worker friend of mine kept referring to them as the "mean-muggin' no-sellin' midgets". Trinity was pretty quickly taken away and given better stuff to do, but not quickly enough. Mortimer wasn't useless, he was actually pretty decent. He was just absolutely the wrong guy to put in that spot. They kept trying to make Styles some kind of Ric Flair type of traditional heel champ, even long before he was actually managed by Ric Flair, but everyone else (besides TNA) could see that was all wrong for him. Chris Rock was shooting a scene for his movie Head of State in the ring after the show, so that's why he was there that one night. I think Dustin Diamond actually had some kind of boxing match with Tiny, iirc. Nobody cared about most of the celebrities, but the Titans brawl was a HUGE deal. Every local news outlet had that as their lead story the next day. Even TNA would have to know that they should've followed up on that, but it led to nothing even on the very next show. I'm assuming that the Titans management (if not the NFL higher-ups themselves) had a very stern talk with the players afterwards, ordering them to never do such a thing again. It's one of Russo's shitty pop culture jokes. He was making a reference to the phenomenon of Elvis impersonators who are Asian, which really is a popular thing in some small circles. And the name is an oh-so-timely reference to the 1994 Nic Cage movie Honeymoon in Vegas. In his title shot, Brown damn near killed Killings with a sloppy-as-hell suplex on the floor. That might've been part of the reason behind his time off. But still, he was over, you'd think they could've stuck him in a tag team or something. It wasn't soap. It was supposed to be soap, but it was quite clearly an entire can's worth of shaving cream. The Piper segment did seem a bit shoot-ish. Russo came out there looking very uncomfortable, and he's not that good an actor. And then the Harris brothers came out to get between Piper and Russo, also not looking like they were acting, but more like they really were protecting their boss from this crazy old wrestler. But then again this is Piper we're talking about, he's infamous for going off script in his televised promos, so who knows what the deal was. Poor Athena. She's a friend of mine, and got a pretty raw deal from TNA. They treated her much the same as the WWE treats Zack Ryder, in a "you're not allowed to get over unless we let you get over" sort of way. And once they finally hired her, they gave her a mute role as a generic ring girl and cheerleader. This despite the fact that half the fans in the building were already familiar with her from the local promotions, and everyone knew her best work was done as being a slutty conniving heel manager. TNA had her do a couple of brief things here and there, but nothing important. And then Sonny Siaki dropped her on her head twice in a row, on two consecutive weeks, doing the same move both times. What a great fuckin' company to work for. Funny thing about that match: its unusual quality was basically an accident. Someone backstage pulled a Kidman and fucked up the timing of the show, sending the main event into the ring much earlier than anticipated. As you may guess, most of these guys are of the "script the whole match in the back" school, and they didn't have any extra spots planned out to fill the extra ten minutes that had suddenly been tacked onto their match. The solution: just beat the living shit out of Red for eons and eons, until it's time to go home. Red did the best Ricky Morton impression I've ever seen, to the point where Don West actually stood on top of the announce desk and started leading the audience in chanting for him. That was hilarious. I could tell that Russo imagined it would be this great image, with him literally chopping the company's logo to splinters. Well, he hit it once, and the ax promptly got stuck. He was yanking on that thing like a masturbating teenager, desperately trying to pry it out of the sign. Once he finally got it out, he was winded, and he just said "hell with it" and hit it one more time and yanked the sign down.

I'd probably rather watch TNA than XPW. XPW's local undercard guys were a pretty untalented bunch, the deathmatch garbage was pretty bad, the announcing was some of the worst I've ever heard, and of course all of Rob Black's backstage shenanigans put Dixie Carter to shame in the total-fucking-scumbag territory. On the other topic: how narrowly would you define "unquestionably good"? Even a company as dogshit horrible as TNA will accidentally crap out a watchable match, sometimes even more than once on the same show. Not really an "if this was on a Tokyo Dome show, it'd still be awesome" level of quality, but certainly along the lines of "if this was two indy nobodies doing the exact same match in a National Guard armory, I'd think it was pretty damn good".

I only enjoyed WOW as the guiltiest of pleasures. The gimmicks were backwards to the point of practically being offensive, the storylines were almost nonexistent, the production was often pretty bush-league, and the wrestling stank like week-old fish. Even being a mark for a couple of the girls like Jacklyn Hyde didn't help making the rest of the show any easier to watch. I'd argue that half the TNA PPVs ever were better than those two shows. They were Russo at his worst, unfiltered and with near-total creative control. The vast majority of the matches on those shows didn't even go ten minutes, there was constant outside interference and shenanigans, and the booking was the usual swirling diarrhea flush of nonsensical swerves. At least most TNA shows will give you a couple of nice long workrate matches with (relatively) minimal foolishness, as a half-assed apology for the reeking bullshit which makes up the rest of the card.

The only time I can remember the office blatantly punishing a guy was that Perry Saturn vs Mike Bell incident. Otherwise, it often seemed like it was open fuckin' season on the jobbers in most territories. The offices seemed like they never gave a shit, since 1.it "got their wrestlers over" as being tough or something, and 2.there's always an infinite supply of wannabes who are starstruck enough to come get the shit beaten out of them and walk away with a dazed smile.

True, but this isn't some guy manning a cash register 9-5 that we're talking about here. It's a (theoretical) celebrity, risking life and limb in the ring, on a nationally televised program which is viewed by over a million people every week. And they've got twin money marks in the form of Panda and Spike funding this thing, and the main eventers are all millionaires. Yet apparently their lower-half employees don't take home more money than they would at McDonalds, even including PPV payoffs.

Yeah, at least in part. I wonder exactly what TNA's policy about paying medical bills is, regarding the top guys. Do they foot the bill for Hogan, Angle, and Sting getting their various surgeries? It would be typical of them to do that, buying healthcare only for the guys who can already afford it. But I'd be interested to find out the details of how they handle that sort of thing. They might just say "hey, we're already paying you millions of dollars per year, just deal with it" or maybe go halfsies, or who knows.

He hasn't been out long, though. Ink Inc worked at Sacrifice, which was only a month ago. So either he hasn't been careful with his money; or more likely, TNA was paying him so little that missing a couple weeks' worth of salary was enough to practically bankrupt him. Especially considering that he's got a big advantage over most other injured TNA wrestlers, since he's a military veteran and gets free healthcare.

For everyone except the main eventers, I doubt it. No way that ROH pays its undercard workers a living wage. They've gotta supplement their incomes by working a bunch of other indy shows.

They are indeed still doing that. I forget who the most recent examples were, but they were guys who'd actually worked for TNA in the past. They KNOW exactly what those guys can do. I'd assume that it's probably a fuck-off message to people they don't really want to deal with, or to test exactly how "committed" they are to TNA.

No, there are plenty of hate-fueled young smarks who literally want it to be dead and buried. How long ago was the offer? How much money was in the contract? Would they still want him? And would they actually do anything with him, or just use him as a jobber on Superstars and then give him the old future-endeavouring? Considering that every other guy that is churned out from FCW looks pretty much exactly like Roode in size and build, it's not like they don't have plenty of options to choose from. They're drowning in semi-talented young guys with good bodies. It really is a seller's market now with wrestling, and WWE can pretty much cherry-pick whoever they want and pay them whatever WWE wants, with the young wrestlers having absolutely no leverage.

Where else are they gonna go? Guys like Foley are one thing, since he's established enough of a multimedia presence to have different employment options. And the ones like Jesse Neal or Taylor Wilde are getting paid so little that they might as well quit or retire, with only the ephemeral "exposure" being any reason to stay there. But those in the middle are pretty much stuck. Where else would Beer Money go? Japan and Mexico probably aren't realistic options, there's just not enough open spots for gaijin/gringoes now. TNA probably pays them at least as much as they'd make on the indies, if not more. So if WWE doesn't want to hire them, what are their other choices? That's the one thing which makes me disagree with people who wish TNA would just go out of business. It is providing a paycheck for a few people who otherwise couldn't be full-time professional wrestlers. Because if you want to really be employed in this business, your options are more limited than ever. The indies don't pay, overseas isn't what it used to be, and there's essentially only one big American company in a near-monopoly of the industry.

Yeah, TNA's done plenty of jaw-droppingly incompetent bullshit in the past couple years which merits further summary and discussion.

This got mentioned in another thread, and thought it might be fun for its own debate. Which company is the all-time worst wrestling federation to ever air on national television in America? One problem with the comparison is just differences in era. TNA is gonna have a hell of a lot more promos and backstage skits and such, because that's just how they do things nowadays. UWF was much more match-heavy, but the matches were often pretty godawful. I admittedly have seen very little UWF, so I don't have much of a dog in this fight. Just a few scattered matches here and there, and I rarely caught the show when it was re-airing on ESPN Classics a while back. It did look approximately as mind-numbingly awful as its reputation would suggest. But for those of you familiar with the product, I think this would be an interesting discussion. And if anyone else can make a compelling case for any other national promotion being the worst-ever, that'd be relevant here as well.

It just seems like a petty and nitpicky thing to attack him over. He spent a grand total of two sentences talking about the rides, in a post which stretched on for seven paragraphs. Who cares? Why does it matter? Hell, he probably spent a larger percentage of his second book Foley Is Good blabbing about roller coasters than he did in this one blog.

Considering the number of wrestlers I've personally known who have done exactly that, this statement is much less of a joke than you realize. Yeah, that's it in a nutshell.

Yeah. For a guy who usually goes out of his way to be complimentary on a wide variety of factors in every company he ever worked for, he's had remarkably few good things to say about TNA. You can already feel his early apprehension in his Countdown to Lockdown book, and that's when the company was actually pushing him and giving him some measure of creative control. I'm sure it was all downhill once Bischogan arrived.

How so? It's in relation to a tattoo on another wrestler, which people claim is concrete evidence of this person's internal beliefs. I'm just illustrating that the ink on a person's skin isn't exactly a rock-solid predictor of their actions. It's just something which comes up on occasion. People mention how they're certain that Punk couldn't possibly ever do drugs, and I feel obligated to repute that claim. I liken it to the various sex scandals involving politicians here recently, where people act all Shocked~! and Appalled~! that a rich and famous man might happen to enjoy poking some strange pussy. It doesn't matter how whitebread they are, nor how much they preach about Family Values and such; we all know that this kind of thing happens. South Park did an episode about that a year or two back, where the entire nation deeply pondered the esoteric mystery of why celebrities cheat. We all know that the tendency is there, but we act shocked every time we hear a new example of it. And more pertinently, we act a hell of a lot more shocked if we liked them as a performer or if the person had a "wholesome" image. Now apply that to wrestling. How many times have we heard wrestlers claim they do drugs, and at some point we knew they were lying? Too many to count, right? It's happened over and over and fucking over again, up to and including the all the biggest stars in the industry. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to consider wrestlers as a group guilty until proven innocent on the drug issue. Thinking back to my various close friends in the business, I can't offhand think of a single one who didn't do some form of drugs at some point, even if it was just roids or pain pills. So then we come to this one particular wrestler who claims to not do drugs. Why do we believe him? Well firstly, his gimmick in both kayfabe and real life is that he doesn't do drugs. Okay. And? What does that definitively prove? It's simply his word. (Cena falls into this category too; a surprising number of people will say that they think he never does anything, including steroids, just because he repeatedly says that he doesn't do drugs and he doesn't "seem" insincere.) We have no idea what he really does behind closed doors, we're not there. For all their public exhibitionist nature, wrestlers are often pretty goddamn secretive about their personal lives. And the other factor is simply that most of us are a mark for the guy, and nobody ever wants to believe that their heroes in the media can be just as fallible and flawed as any other human beings. And once again, I want to stress, I'm not saying Punk does drugs. Whether he does or not is, for the purposes of my point, actually quite irrelevant. My point is that he could do drugs, but he gets a massive level of extra support from so many fans who give him a benefit of a doubt that practically no other performer gets. Only Lance Storm, Bob Backlund, and Mick Foley are anywhere near Punk on the "everyone knows these guys never do drugs" public perception. Never mind that there's probably several other workers out there who are just as straightedge as those guys, if not even more so; they're simply not as well-known, for whatever reason. Kinda like how on the flipside of the coin Jake Roberts and Scott Hall are the go-to punchlines for drug and alcohol jokes, despite the fact that there's probably dozens of guys out there who imbibe just as many chemicals as those guys. In conclusion: I've just seen too many people claim "there's no way ________ does drugs, nuh-uh, that's totally impossible!" when such a statement is clearly not based on 100% documented factual reality. You can't prove the absence or nonexistence of anything in that manner.

I'm not saying it's impossible that he's drug free, nothing like that at all. My point is, why do so many people insist that it IS impossible that he might ever do drugs or otherwise break the rules of the lifestyle he claims? The conversation usually goes something like this: Someone else: "CM Punk definitely never does drugs." Me: "How do you know?" Them: "Because he says so." Me: "A wrestler tells you something, and you automatically believe him?" Them: "There's also the tattoos!" Me: "(previous Undertaker anecdote)" Them: "WHY DO YOU SAY THAT PUNK DOES DRUGS" Me: "Never did. Why do you say he doesn't?" Them: (either they repeat a previous statement, change the subject, curse me out, or storm off in a huff) And I've had that exact exchange at least half a dozen times, if not more. The point isn't about Punk himself, the point is that wrestling is full of lying motherfuckers and you should practically never 100% trust any of them just at their word. Especially when it comes to things they're bragging about which make them look good.

And the Undertaker had "SARA" tattooed on his throat, but he still divorced her. It's not that I'm saying Punk is a big fat phony, he probably is drug-free. But that's a probably. He is still a professional wrestler, which is an occupation which tends to be one of the most drug-friendly demographics on the entire planet. It's funny how much fury and rage some people go to when you suggest the very idea that Punk's straightedge gimmick might be a work. People refuse to believe even the remotest possibility that he might have ever done anything but practiced what he preaches. This guy works in an industry which is deceitful and drug-fueled to its very core, and it wouldn't shock me at all if he had "lapses" which never became public knowledge.

Not necessarily. Just because a guy doesn't do something repeatedly, that doesn't mean he can never do it on rare occasions. I've seen plenty of odd one-time-only moments where guys try something that they seldom or never tried before or again. That being said, the spot in question looked like a simple botch, so until evidence comes up to suggest otherwise that's what I assume it was. Yeah. You see the worst of this with spot monkeys and deathmatch wrestlers on the indies, where being tough and absorbing legitimate pain seems to be something that they get off on. Like, any deathmatch which involves salt or lemon juice or ammonia or any other shit which hurts really bad if it gets in your cuts. What's the point of that? It doesn't help anyone win the match, like a real weapon could. It doesn't even have to be real, you could use Mello Yello and sugar instead of real lemon juice and salt, but you just know that the Corporal Robinsons and Madman Pondos of the world insist on using the real shit. Why? The audience can't see that it hurts, like with a stiff strike or a big bump, and the guys rarely bother selling it too much because they're so focused on being tough. That's even worse than unforgivable bullshit like where a guy will do a balcony dive and then completely no-sell the pain. Even fuckin' New Jack knew better than that.

Not really, no. Intentionally blown spots are very hard to identify, and it's probably the sort of thing that most wrestlers wouldn't discuss in a shoot manner. And hell, who would blame them? If a wrestler claims "I meant to do that" on a trainwreck botch, most smarks would just scream that he's a filthy liar.

Blown spots aren't a problem as long as 1.you're not doing them all the damn time, say as or more often than Sabu; and 2.you don't throw an Orton-esque tantrum or elsewise let the audience know "oh shit, that wasn't supposed to happen!" Take the infamously weak ring explosion in the Funk/Cactus exploding barbed wire match. They built up the ring explosion to be HUGE deal, and then IWA's shitty explosives just go "poof" like you'd set off a single bottle rocket on each side of the ring. You can hear the crowd starting to shit all over it, but then Funk gets up to his knees with this absolutely perfect expression of "what the hell was that?!" in his face and body language. He let the fans know that he didn't understand it either, and it instantly got the audience to forgive the wrestlers and get back on their side. Or when Sasuke botched that springboard towards the end of his J-Cup match with Liger in '94, and Liger awesomely responded by sarcastically clapping for his opponent, which somehow made the sudden finish right afterwards even better. Along similar lines, as a commentator of indy matches featuring inexperienced guys, I'd have to cover multiple blown spots every single week. In that position, I could never outright lie to the viewing audience (all dozens and dozens of people who watched the show at midnight on a home shopping channel) because that would kill my credibility forever. You can't just claim that a badly whiffed move really made contact, or any other similar lying. So you've got to pretty much instantly come up with some improvised explanation which helps the audience to accept what they just saw. Just admitting that the wrestler botched the move, in a kayfabe sense of course, is often all it takes. If they're trying some tricky headscissors spot and they both wind up falling to the mat in an awkward sense, just admit that one guy was trying one thing and the other guy was trying something else, and they met at cross purposes and then basically "rocks fall, everybody dies". If they make the rookie mistake of immediately repeating the spot, there's an easy answer: one guy was bah-gawd determined to hit this move, and his opponent tried a different way to reverse it this time, but he couldn't make it work and the first guy managed to successfully hit it this time. One time on a horribly whiffed superkick where the guy bumped despite a solid two feet of daylight in between his head and the kicker's boot, I just blurted out "he saw that superkick coming, tried to duck down out of the way, but he threw himself too hard and bumped his head on the mat!" to explain his selling. Wrestlers don't have the same luxury I do of being an impartial observer sitting behind a microphone, but there's still ways to convey to the audience "yeah, I know that was bullshit, sorry" in a way which doesn't ruin their suspension of disbelief. But the biggest problem comes when guys blow a spot and then react in such a manner, that it's like a Shakespearean actor blowing his lines in mid-dialogue and then screaming "SHIT! LINE?" while another actor is audibly telling him the lines he's supposed to be saying. That's the very worst, when some dipshits badly blow a spot and then freeze like deer in the headlights, doing everything but turning to the audience and asking "what do we do now?". As mentioned, Orton is sometimes particularly bad about that bullshit, throwing a tantrum and pounding the mat and screaming at his opponent. Announcing a spot like that, I basically throw the guys under the bus and side with the crowd. I've actually said "...your guess is as good as mine as to what happened there, folks" a couple of times when some assholes pulled out an absolutely un-cover-up-able Botchamania highspot. Then maybe I mutter a theory about one of the wrestlers whispering a really nasty insult to the other one, which might've caused the emotional weirdness in the ring. Like I've been saying: above all, I just want it to make sense. Everybody makes mistakes, everybody blows spots, just find some way to work it into the story you're telling (or even tell a whole new story, like when Eddy worked Test's leg after the latter clumsily got it stuck between the ropes at Mania X-7) so that the marks never know the difference and the smarks largely don't care.