Jingus

WRONG Just very wrong. Unless this applies to the Road Warriors and The Powers of Pain. In which case white noise. Demolition didn't do the gimmick nearly as well as guys like the Road Warriors. The first time I saw the LoD, I thought "holy shit, these gorillas look like they're about to murder someone with their bare fucking hands, I am in awe of these monsters". The first time I saw Demolition, I thought "...who the hell are these chubby leather-bar rejects in KISS makeup?" The Demos, although a perfectly competent team, didn't have anywhere near the menace or the presence that the Warriors did. I dunno about that. Both of them tower over Rey, especially Wolfie. And I think Jamie and Kidman are roughly the same size, maybe an inch or two's difference but nothing huge. But still, yeah, your overall point stands. The Bodydonnas are the only other shrimpy team I can name from that period who achieved anything close to mainstream success in the Big 2 in the mid-90s. (You could possibly make a case for Waltman's thrown-together teams with Jannetty and Holly, but that would be a stretch.) That changed by the end of the decade, with Rey/Kidman and the Hardys and Benoit/Malenko and so on rising to prominence, but it was a tough road for little guys in the earlier days of the Monday Night Wars.

Which I never understood, because that looked like it was all Shawn's fault. Vader was down selling, and clearly nowhere near the position you'd need him in for an elbow drop. But Shawn climbed up onto the top rope anyway. What the fuck was he expecting Vader to do? Sit up, roll over, and then lay back down in a completely different part of the ring and sell like he was out again? That made no sense, and I wonder if Shawn did it on purpose to prove that Vader doesn't know how to work or some bullshit like that.

Oh, you have no idea. I've got several firsthand stories about Jamie and/or Wolfie being nuts, but this one's my favorite. I was hanging out at a local TV taping one time, which was held at a nightclub called the Inferno Bar (which, ironically, burned down a couple years later). The boys used an upstairs karaoke room as the locker room, and they shot promos on a little stage they had in there. There was a local money mark who worked (very badly) as a manager, and he was one of those sort of almost-rich guys who always carried around a massive wad of cash. He was in the middle of a promo, fanning out this stack of hundred-dollar bills, when suddenly we see a JC Ice-shaped blur leap across the stage and grab for the money. He missed, everyone laughed it off, and Jamie pretended that it was just a joke. But talking with my friends later, we all pretty much agreed that if Jamie had managed to snatch the money that he would've been out the back door and gone. Yeah, the whole New Church was a fun gimmick. They were having really good matches which involved Brian Lee, which isn't something you'd expect in the 21st century. (Brian was a friend of mine at one point, but I won't pretend that he wasn't often a poor performer.) (Although, that's not something I would've said to his face. He's an excitable fella.) Several fun brawls between those guys and America's Most Wanted were frequently the highlights of the early TNA shows. But the promotion was booked so chaotically at the time that the New Church would frequently just vanish for long periods of time, robbing them of any momentum they might have had. The premise is actually that the ref doesn't allow a wrestler to grab the ropes to get the break, he has to be under the ropes. Heel grabs rope, ref kicks it away, because it's an illegal move. Seriously. If that ever was a rule, I think it went out of style at about the same time as disqualifying someone for throwing a closed-fist punch. I've never seen a show where they actually explained that as being one of the official rules. Nowadays, the "touching any rope in any way = rope break" is a pretty consistent guideline, so that archaic spot doesn't make any sense.

True dat, yo. In my little collection of "students" I've garnered recently, I always make them watch a bunch of Andre matches. Nobody was as great as he was at taking a massive pile of liabilities and turning them into positives. (Well, Baba kinda did the same thing, but his health was rarely as shitty as Andre's often was.) His charisma, his timing, his pacing of the matches, his selling, all of it combined into matches that even the current young fans will enjoy. I'll show the kids something like Andre vs Duggan at a meaningless house show from '89, and they love that shit. Also, somehow I missed these before: Fuckin' A. No way that these guys should have had the lame, mediocre matches that they usually did, considering the talent involved. Admittedly, half their matches were with Harlem Heat or the Nasties, which will ding your score down a bit automatically. But still, you'd think that a Regal/Eaton team should've done much better than they did. LOL at fuckin' Bruno knocking Hogan for in-ring skills. Both of them wrestled a nearly identical style, with tons of punching and similar fiery feels-no-pain comebacks and everything. Both of them broke out of the rut on occasion, you can compare Bruno's long matches with Baba to Hogan's mini-sprints with Muta when it comes to changing up the formula, but largely they did the same things.

Fair enough. But still, you can pretty easily compare how he was used in the early 90s in WCW and how he was used in the late 90s in WWE (and for that matter, how he was used shortly after that in All Japan) and tell that the WWF did less with his potential than anyone else did. Part of that were his infamous problems with the Klique and others who didn't want to get stiffed, of course. But a Vader who can't beat the shit out of his opponents is hardly a Vader worth watching. And the WWF was never quite as good at building up monster heels and keeping them over long-term as many other companies.

Oh yeah, of course that's true. You could also reword my statements to say "every shitty match I saw on these indy shows involved the basic shine-heat-comeback-finish psychology, ergo that psychology is a bad thing". Cliches become cliches for a reason, usually because (at least at some point in the past) they were true or they worked. The difference here is that I was never much of a fan of stalling even before I got "in da biz", and my personal experience on these shows only served to intensify my dislike to an exponential degree. I like to watch wrestling for the wrestling, period. I'm not a fan of talking. Whether that be an in-ring promo or a backstage vignette or a guy stopping during the match to jaw with the fans, I just don't like it. I know it's an integral part of the business, and something that is required to build up heat and hype for the matches. I'm completely aware of that. But I just don't like watching it. To a large extent, it doesn't entertain me. It's like the dialogue scenes in an action movie. You've gotta have them, the movie doesn't work without them, but I'm not here to watch that shit. I'm here to watch big shootouts and chases and explosions. If I want scintillating dialogue, I'll go watch Shakespeare (and I do, happily). I come to watch an action movie to watch shit get fucked up. And I come to wrestling to see guys hitting each other, not guys talking about hitting each other. And part of this does go back, once again, to my indy experiences. I know I talk about that a lot, but for chrissakes, I did it for five goddamn years and it's played a pretty huge part in forming my viewpoint of wrestling. When I was doing play-by-play commentary of a match, I hated having to call the stalling bits. What can you say? "Well, Jamie Dundee has stopped wrestling and is yelling at the fans... again... boy, he's got a big mouth." Fucking yawn. That's the sort of moment where I desperately hope that I've got something else to talk about, something to put over in the storyline or hyping up tonight's main event or anything like that, because what's currently happening in the ring is nothing that I can put much of a spin on. The job of an announcer is similar to that of someone who draws illustrations for a book; they don't tell you the story, the story is right there in front of you, but the announcer is there to fully flesh out the details and maybe point out a few little things that the audience might have missed. In stalling, there's not much to flesh out. There's only so many ways to say "man, Heel #1 sure hates the fans and loves the sound of his own voice, he really needs to stop worrying about all that and start worrying about his opponent". It's tiring to call that sort of thing, because it briefly makes whatever the announcer has to say fairly irrelevant. He's there to call the action, and for the moment, the action has stopped. The thing is that nearly every match on these indy shows did use the old Southern stalling schtick. Part of that was necessity: many of these shows were held in a really terrible ring, and in buildings with low ceilings, and other various roadblocks in the path to workrate. And nobody's getting paid much, which is a disincentive towards working hard. But regardless of the cause, crappy work is crappy work, and the vast majority of crappy work involved dudes doing the old Memphis bullshit during their matches. Another part of my dislike towards the style comes from all the sermons I've heard from veterans (or guys who like to pretend they're veterans) who preached that the old Southern style of heat-building was "real wrestling" and the only style worth a damn. They would rant and rave about how all those guys in WWE and TNA and ROH were all doing it wrong, and that the southerner with his cheap heat and his hidden chain was "what people really want to see". Meanwhile, they were totally ignoring the fact that this style was barely drawing a hundred fans to lackluster shows in shitty venues, while all that stuff which they insisted people didn't want to see was drawing a MUCH bigger crowd. Years of being force-fed those kinds of bullshit lies and justifications for not busting their ass in the ring have given me even more of a dislike towards matches involving that kind of thing.

By the end he did. In '98, he was losing to everyone from Jeff Jarrett to Al Snow. If he'd stayed much longer and the pattern had continued, soon he would've been laying down to Kaientai.

Oh sure, naturally someone's highs are more important for a "where would they rank among the best" argument than their lows. Nobody holds those matches with Gigante and JYD against Flair when discussing his GOAT credentials. Although the lows should still be held relevant to some degree, I forget who said this, but it was a great statement: Ultimate Warrior has had a tiny handful of matches that were greater than anything Brad Armstrong has ever done, but nobody in their right mind would claim that Warrior is an overall worker than Armstrong. My point about my own experiences was more about the subjective prejudices that we all have. Let's say for the sake of hyperbole that, when you were young, some pervert molested you with a popsicle. That's a fucking bizarre hypothetical example, I know, but bear with me here. In this case, should anyone blame you if you came to hate popsicles after that? You can't eat them, can't stand to look at them, can't even stand to hear the word "popsicle" at all. None of this has changed the fact that popsicles are tasty treats and most people love them; you've got a permanent wall built in your mind against the idea of enjoying these things. That's how it can be when your primary experience with some aspect of wrestling is negative. Let's say you went to some shitty indy shows featuring a bunch of backyarders who constantly did Canadian Destroyers over and over and fucking over again. Match in and match out, there were inevitably a bunch of flip piledrivers, many of them performed badly or sold poorly, and the Canadian Destroyer was always the finish. You'd come to fucking hate the very idea of watching a Petey Williams match after that, wouldn't you? Never mind the guy's own merits, or how good his matches might be. After you've seen that move done several times per show on a weekly basis, you hate it so goddamn much that you never want to witness another one again. Well for me, these Southern comedy and cheap heat spots are the popsicle or the flippy piledriver. I've seen them done SO many times (and often done very, very badly) that I never, ever want to see them again. I don't care how well they're done, or how skilled the performers are who are doing them. I just plain don't want to see that shit, at all, period. It's not something that I intellectualize, it's not a deliberate choice I've made. It's that when I see a guy bailing out in the middle of the match to grab the mic, or a game of hide-the-chain, or any of that kind of action-killing bullshit which stops the match dead in its tracks: I've got an automatic, instinctual, emotional reaction of "oh fucking hell, not this again." I know that some other people love it, I know they don't understand why I don't love it, but none of that changes the fact that I hate it from the bottom of my heart and there's basically nothing that can change that at this point.

Bundy was gonna be my example as well. He practically fell off the face of the planet after Wrestlemania 2. Hell, where was he even working from whenever he left in 87 to whenever he came back to join the Million $ Corporation?

Probably depends on what mood Vince was in that day, and what his cronies and yes-men were whispering in his ear. I could see him reacting positively or negatively to both of those reactions.

I've seen them have perfectly decent matches too, but many more that were boring stall-fests where they barely took any bumps and just in general seemed like they didn't want to be there. Admittedly, many of these were on Tony Falk-promoted shows where they weren't getting paid jack shit, so that might've been a factor. And admittedly, you've looked at matches I thought were boring stall-fests and declared them great, so clearly we're judging from different tastes and standards here. But still, from everything I've seen, PG-13 in big promotions in the 90s put out a hell of a lot more effort than PG-13 in little indies in the 2000s.

And also, just thought about this, another problem for me is that some of the old Southern comedy spots just don't make logical sense. Like this one: I hate that spot. Never liked it, even when I was just a fan. Hated it even more when I was the referee in question who was kicking the heel's arms. Why the fuck would the referee kick the arms? Any other time a wrestler grabs the ropes, you call for a rope break. This is the only time you ever have a ref physically yanking a wrestler away from the ropes when they've grabbed them. Worse yet, it only happens with the babyface doing the sunset flip, you never see the roles reversed. How does that make any sense at all? It's kind of like the common complaint that nobody ever happens to fall conveniently onto the second rope unless they're in a Rey Mysterio match; except worse, because in this instance you've got a referee apparently breaking the rules he's supposed to enforce. So I've always found it to be a bit insulting to everyone's intelligence. Lots of other similar spots are the same way. Like, I mentioned the one where the babyface somehow convinces the heel to get into a game of leapfrog which ends with the heel flinging himself out of the ring. Or the one where they do a criss-cross running spot, the babyface bails out, and the heel is stuck just doing an endless marathon back and forth. I've never liked spots like that, because it makes the heels look like they're literally retarded. Or those cheating spots which makes a referee look like he must be "the stupidest son of a bitch to ever shit between two legs" (to use an old wrestler-ism), where they have to be so blind and/or dumb to miss the cheating that the audience gets mad at the ref instead of getting mad at the heels. It devalues your characters to make them look so moronic and incompetent. Which is fine, if their gimmick is being a retard; doing this with, say, a comedic masked jobber isn't gonna hurt him. But I've seen those done with guys who are allegedly supposed to be real threats, in title matches which are allegedly supposed to garner real heat; and it completely torpedoes any heel's menace or any referee's authority when they're made to look like fools and geeks.

I haven't seen enough of the PYTs to comment on them, but on the others: there's a sliding scale for me here. Those tactics you mentioned at the end, I don't have a problem with all of 'em. My problem comes when a match grinds to a halt in order for them to do their schtick. A heel talking shit while he's beating up the face: fine. A heel sliding out of the ring to go grab the mike and talk shit while everyone else just stands there: not so fine. I want the action to continue during the gaga, not for them to be two separate sections. Hiding a foreign object and continually using it is okay; but doing that bit where you play hide-and-seek with a chain for five minutes while the heel moves it around and the ref keeps searching for it, that one makes me sigh. Cutting off the ring shouldn't be named in the same list with stalling, because they've got nothing to do with each other. One is wrestling action, the other is not. And even then, I'm okay with some exceptions. If Tracy Smothers stops a match to do a dance-off, that usually entertains me. As mentioned once before, I'm completely amused by the sort of tomfoolery that you get in a Sakura Hirota match. So this isn't a consistent "stop that talking, all talking bad, all workrate good, bow down at the feet of Davey Richards!" sort of it's-still-real-to-me-dammit smarkitude. It's just that, in general, I'd rather for them to actually be making physical contact and wrestling rather than doing almost anything else. When someone stops the match and stalls, my instant reaction is "get on with it!" and that's not even stopping to think about it, it's my genuine feeling upon seeing this sort of thing. It might just be familiarity breeding contempt, with me having seen these same southern spots so many goddamn times that they've entirely lost their effect on me. Like, in this PG13 vs Spike/Mikey match I'm watching now. Jamie grabs the mic and says to some lady in the front row: "I was gonna tell you a joke so funny, it'd knock your titties off... but I see you already heard it!" I've heard that lousy line a thousand times, and repetition does not make it funnier. Meanwhile, I haven't seen the comedy spots from Hirota or Cabana or most other non-mainstream types on a billion different occasions, so their stuff is newer and fresher to me. Maybe if I'd seen their stuff as many times as I've seen the southern spots, done as badly as I've seen many of these southern spots done, then it would be a different story. Same thing with watching older PG-13 matches; you see, I've watched Jamie and Wolfie wrestle more times live in person than I have seen them on tape. In those live matches, they're middle-aged and pudgy and barely putting forth any effort much of the time. So I probably associate any mention of that team (in a subconscious fashion, not deliberately) with my own memories of these fat older guys half-assing it, rather than their glory days of being the rambunctious young troublemakers. Which isn't really their fault, nor mine because I'm not doing it on purpose, but it's still an obstacle to get past when we're talking about this and you're talking about fiery young hellcat JC Ice and I'm picturing fat old toothless Jamie Dundee.

Partly because we say it is. "Screw" and "fuck" have identical meanings, in both literal and figurative terms, but one is held to be vastly more naughty than the other. Same with "crap" and "shit". But in this case it's slightly different, because it's a word used to denigrate what used to be a powerless minority. "Dick" doesn't pack the same punch that "cunt" does for much the same reasons that the n-word is considered to be way more offensive than "cracker" or any of the other lame ethnic slurs for white people. When it's a word which has historically been hurled at targets who couldn't fight back (we've had plenty of dicks as President, but no cunts), it becomes much more forbidden and taboo once such prejudice has started going out of style.

Oh sure, not saying they weren't good wrestlers, of course they were. Not great, but good. The thing is that PG-13's extra something special that they bring to the mix is the aforementioned gaga, so it leaves me unmoved. I'm not saying they suck, I just don't like that style. I've never watched much MPro, so I can't speak to that. In general, I find the more simplistic, southern style of comedy is just not my thing. All too often it tends to require the heels to pretend to be legitimately retarded in order for it to make any sense; like the spot where one guy drops down and leapfrogs over the other one until the heel eventually chucks himself out of the ring. That's the kind of stuff guys would call "midget spots", from it supposedly being common staples of minis matches in the old days. I can only watch the same trick so many times before it stops being funny. And as I've said before, I worked a lot of southern indy shows where untalented wrestlers would lean hard on the walk-n-talk bullshit every night because they were either unwilling or incapable of doing anything else. Five years of watching chubby wannabes cosplaying old Jimmy Valiant spots is a great way to murder your ability to enjoy that kind of thing.

A large part of how much you'll like PG-13 is simply based on your preferences towards Southern schtick, the kind of walk-and-talk matches that they call "Shakespeare". I personally have never been fond of that style. Even the best stallers, like Tracy Smothers, still leave me with an automatic emotional reaction of "just shut up and wrestle already". A guy stopping in the middle of the match to jaw with the fans or bitch on the mike is generally FF material with me, no matter how much cheap heat they're getting. So even though I worked with both Wolfie and Jamie plenty of times and liked them (or, at least, found their craziness to be more amusing than off-putting) they wouldn't be anywhere near the top of a Best Teams Ever list for the simple reason that I just don't like the Memphis ga-ga.

But that might be an insurmountable problem to fix, just from the nature of modern televised wrestling. Stars wrestle on free TV pretty much every week. Combine that with the rarity of jobber squashes, and you've got a situation where the same guys are destined to wrestle each other over and over again. Which produces two different problems: the "these guys feuded for months and Wrestler #1 always beat Wrestler #2, so it sucked" and "these guys feuded for months and traded wins every week, so it sucked". Walking the fine line between the two is something that's nearly impossible for wrestling writers to do, especially in a climate where Vince changes his mind at least twice per day about the entire direction of the company. The only alternate solutions would be to either go back to the Attitude model of constant fuck finishes (which really isn't an improvement over where we are now), or to change the whole model of the way they tell stories. And I don't see them doing the latter anytime soon.

Was Great American Bash '87 a PPV or closed-circuit? They main evented in Wargames for that one. But astoundingly, overall you seem to be correct on this one. (Canadian Stampede '97 wasn't in the states, so technically doesn't count.) You'd think for sure that the LoD would've been in a big main event at some point or another, but I can't name another one besides the exceptions I already mentioned.

3.You didn't respond to anything said in your first shill thread. 4.Your second shill thread should've just been another post in your first shill thread. Loss, ban this fucker if he doesn't actually start talking and explaining himself.

Roller derby's still around, believe it or not. There's a group that ran in the Nashville Fairgrounds for years (I dunno if they're still there now) and regularly outdrew most wrestling shows in the same building by a large margin.

Jesus fucking Christ. What a mark. I've seen all this shit done countless times, and it never fails to amaze me just how dumb some people can be about the wrestling business. 1. Never, ever try to work the internet in this grass-roots fashion. NEVER. Teenage kids at mark forums can tell what you're trying to do, and it builds resentment more than curiosity. Real professionals either laugh or shake their heads at guys who spam a bunch of forums trying to "build up their name" or whatthefuckever. It's the sign of a wannabe who can't get booked through traditional channels, so is desperately trying to make his name through viral marketing. Any promoter worth his salt will take one glance at that and make a mental note to never book you. Especially trying to do it in such a cowardly fashion as "hey everyone, look at this awesome wrestler!" under an assumed name. Especially doing it in your first post as a new member on a forum. It makes you look like a total fucking backyarder who's never cut promos outside of an e-fed. 2. Here's another tip for aspiring wrestlers: never start your promo by pointing into the camera lens and growling "Lemme tell ya something!" And never EVER keep repeating that phrase over and over again. That's one of the surest signs of a fucking amateur hack who is cosplaying at old promos he marked out to, rather than someone coming up with their own shit. That "_______ is my business, and business is good!" is a tired old cliche as well. Also, shooting all this shit ECW-style in your basement displays a marked lack of creativity. Find an interesting setting to do your mediocre "Sid imitating Piper" promos in front of. 3. And oh yeah, that gimmick? It's laughable. It's like a 12-year-old boy's idea of what a "scary villain" is. Coming out to the Terminator 2: Judgement Day soundtrack? REALLY? (And some chick valet for no reason, who wears street clothes and generally looks utterly clueless; maybe that one was forced on you by the promotion, but it certainly doesn't help.) And wearing a black trenchcoat, and using a murder weapon for a gimmick prop, and having goth-wannabe facepaint, and walking around the crowd and acting crazy like Bruiser Brody. Nobody's fooled, brother; you're still the same unthreatening, unintimidating wimp you were back in junior high. Pallid skin, thinning scraggly hair, facial hair like a teenager, and pointy man-titties all combine to make a general impression of "I can totally kick this guy's ass" in every fan in the crowd. Some guys were born to be frightening dudes; you are not one of them. Accept it. You're trying to be this dark force of chaos, but you look more like Eugene on Halloween. You've never strangled anyone, you never will strangle anyone, and everyone in the crowd can tell that by just looking at you. 4. Learn how to properly upload your goddamn Youtube videos. Nobody's impressed by watching a jerky video which looks like it's had a stroboscopic visual effect added to it. This shit is moving at about four frames per second, looking like a webcam from a decade ago. I was gonna critique Diego's in-ring skills, but the video of his match with Duggan is literally unwatchable. And a quick glance at a couple of the others proves that they all seem to be that choppy. Uploading a shitty malfunctioning video like that is worse than no video at all, because it makes you look like a fucking idiot and gives a general "don't bother ever giving this guy a shot, he has no idea what he's doing" vibe. In conclusion: either get some brains and some savvy and some subtlety and grow up a bit, or get the fuck out of this business. Indy wrestling is being choked to death on an overwhelming flood of untalented wannabes like yourself.

No idea, I'll let those who know about those things answer. Someone give this fellow Lynch's contact info.

I understand all that JDW; but to the Time Warner AOL guys, Vince's strategy there doesn't matter. They had to know that the company was worth a hell of a lot more than four million; Vince and others would've been willing to pay a hell of a lot more than that. It's just odd to me that they were SO desperate to sell it that they'd knowingly throw away millions of dollars just in order to see the back of it asap. Vince easily would've paid triple the amount he did, if not more, if they'd stuck to their guns and negotiated. Or if not him, Eric's Fusient investors, or someone. I've just never understood them treating WCW like a ticking bomb which had to be disposed of right now as opposed to a month later.

WWF had that weird first-right-to-buy deal going on from the Razor/Diesel lawsuit, where if WCW were ever up for sale, WWF got automatic first crack at them. Which, in retrospect, seems like a really odd thing to ask for back in 1996; how was that even part of the settlement? But the strange thing there was the low price of the sale. Several of the top wrestlers have said that they'd gladly have purchased WCW themselves, if they knew it were going for such a ridiculously low price. Kevin Sullivan has implied that one of Turner's executives took some sort of bribe from the WWF in order to sell WCW for so bizarrely little money, fwiw.

That's long been a problem in too many wrestling feds. Back in my old indy company, there were long periods where the tag title match would be the main event, because the tag teams were the top draw (insofar as you can say that anyone's a "draw" in front of 120 people, but some guys drew less than half that and it was easy to tell which was which). But too many companies are addicted to the idea that their top heavyweight belt singles match has to go on last, no matter what. You should go with whatever's hottest at the time, regardless if it's cruiserweights or women or tag teams or a Euro-Continental Television Title whatever. During late 99 until Invasion, though, there were more than just those three teams involved. You also had the Outlaws/DX, Too Cool, the Hollys, the Acolytes, Kaientai, the Radicalz, T&A, Right To Censor, and plenty of other fairly established, relatively cohesive teams. And when they put two singles stars together for more than a month at a time, it made the belts look important when Rock & Sock, Two-Man Power Trip, or Brothers Of Destruction were treating the tag belts like serious trophies that they really wanted.