Jingus

Wasnt sure about posting about that match here. But I was begging Angle to stop and stop now during the match. I had my younger friends in their Skype chat playing in the background last night. In between all of the "FUCKING TNA" and "FUCKING RUSSO" complaining, during the Kurt match they were basically just pleading and praying that he'd quit trying this shit. Even the inexperienced kids can tell that Angle shouldn't be doing this risky nonsense. Which is funny, considering that they otherwise refuse to ever treat any women like they might be a draw. Certainly the chicks are rarely pushed as anything more than an eye-candy sideshow to the real program.

Depends on exactly what you define as matwork, and in what parameters. Kurt Angle, by definition of being an Olympic gold medalist, has better mat skills than pretty much anyone else in wrestling. But clearly he doesn't dust those skills off very often, and is usually content to stick to "hey, look at the hundred different ways I can reverse something into an anklelock (and let my opponent do vice versa)".

Are... are you kidding? Dustin was nowhere near being one of the biggest guys on the roster. He was about 6'5" and maybe 260 pounds, which is respectable, but hardly a giant. In 1996, this company also employed Undertaker, Diesel, Psycho Sid, Vader, Yokozuna, Isaac Yankem, Ahmed Johnson, Mabel... in other words, lots of guys who were a hell of a lot bigger than Dustin. And the card was loaded up with plenty of guys who were near the same size he was, the Godwins and Bradshaw and Mankind and Fatu and Warrior and Duke Droese and Terry Gordy and Jim Neidhart and the Smoking Gunns and Ron Simmons and Barry Windham and Scott Hall and Tracy Smothers and The Rock and various other folks like that. Goldust's size didn't stick out at all. How did you ever come to that conclusion? And I'm still not sure what your point is here. No matter how much work was put into his character, the overall effect was still mostly a "boo the faggot" gimmick. That's cheap heat, by any definition. Well, except for when Vader did exactly that to Razor Ramon on his way out. (Supposedly, Hall nixed his feud with Goldust mostly due to sheer homophobia about the angle and how he might be perceived.) Meanwhile, they shunted Goldust down into a godawful feud with Warrior, where Dustin was made to look like a fool and a loser. Goldust was treated like a jabroni from the very beginning, and never allowed to get meaningful wins over anybody. He was briefly kinda pushed during his feuds with Savio and Mero, but that was the only time that he was ever allowed to pin anyone but jobbers. For someone to be perceived like a threat, they need to be booked like a threat and actually beat some guys. The office clearly never had any plans for him to get anywhere above the intercontinental level.

...if you wanna translate any of that into English, I'll be happy to continue the discussion. I have no idea what points you're trying to make here, nor even what tall guy you're talking about. But he certainly was by the time the feud was winding down; but the bookers still didn't let Goldust just beat him already. So why book Dustin against him if you're not going to let the new heel go over? That's shooting the new character in the foot right away, and telling the audience that he's not a tough guy. Which still doesn't change the fact that he fucking destroyed Goldust at Wrestlemania. That put the final nail in the coffin of him ever having any chance of being taken seriously as a top threat. In order for Goldust to have been pushed all the way to the title, they would have basically needed to book him completely different than they did, from the very beginning. They wasted no time in depicting him as a wimp who could barely beat anyone.

The difference is, those guys were monsters. It's always believable to put any belt on a big scary giant. Who took Goldust seriously as a physical threat? He was a pudgy dude with an effiminate gimmick, wearing makeup and dressed in a latex catsuit. That doesn't exactly scream "money-drawing top heel" to me, no matter how much cheap heat he drew from the homophobic demographic which makes up so much of the wrestling audience. And from the beginning, he was generally booked as a coward who could only win his matches with cheating and mindgames. He could barely stand up to an on-his-way-out Razor Ramon, which doesn't speak well for his position on the unofficial "who can beat who" hierarchy. After washed-up old Piper thoroughly kicked his ass at Wrestlemania, how would he have been a challenge for the current top guys anytime soon? (Yeah, I know the counterargument is that Triple H got his ass even more thoroughly kicked on the same show, but it was still over three long years later until he clawed his way into the main event.) Also, remember that the WWF was still fairly allergic to controversy back in '96, and were still a ways off from diving into the Attitude sewer. I'm still faintly amazed that they even did the Goldust gimmick at all. There's no way they would have actually put their belt on the guy. Also, considering how much havoc Shawn routinely caused backstage over the stupidest little things, would he have been willing to job his precious belt to a glitterly golden gay gimmick?

Uh, I'm pretty sure AA did listen to doctors and retire. But it was only 14 years ago, so he's still right. Yeah. And don't forget that Arn basically retired because of the exact same medical problems as Edge, after a career of almost identical length. Hogan couldn't have picked a worse example this side of Droz.

Wouldn't that just be Rock followed by Hogan? It would just be the four Usual Suspects: Hulk, Stone Cold, Rock and Nature Boy. When debating who's the biggest wrestling star of all time, how much should we take into account their fame among non-wrestling-fans? It just hit me that guys like Andre, Savage, Piper, or Ventura are probably more famous outside of the wrestling bubble than Flair is.

He claimed that he booked himself to be retired in the Road Wild match, so if that's true, no more than two months before Russo arrived.

I think they could benefit from having one or two jobber squashes on each show; as mentioned, it would let stuff happen like Evan Bourne finally getting some wins on television. But it's a pipe dream to think you can stuff the genie back in the bottle and go back to a mostly-squash card on Raw in 2011. The young fans today would hate that. "Who the fuck are all these nobodies? I want to watch the stars I care about!" It would be like telling someone that they're now only allowed to eat one meal per day instead of three, because that one meal will taste so much better.

Everybody's already mentioned most of the things I hate about Russo. I will add one more, though: he seems utterly incapable of booking anyone but a white male without turning their gimmick into some kind of clumsy, offensive stereotype. All the shit he pulled with the luchadores in WCW is the most obvious example, but there are plenty of others. Consider TNA's history of repeatedly booking evil Mexican stables, entirely populated by wrestlers who aren't actually Mexican. And he has a bad problem when it comes to women. He seems to see them like Joe Ezterhaus did, as interchangeable sex objects who are only good for getting into catfights, and who will always inevitably stab their man in the back.

They were still doing them as late as the TNN era, with the same theme music and everything. I wonder why nobody else has every really tried to do this montage-style of promo? It seems like every company out there has this standard pattern where they air the promos unedited and in their entirerty. (Which is often a huge goddamn waste of time; does Triple H ever really need twenty minutes to keep sloooowly repeating the same points over and over again?) The only modern company I've seen which even slightly experimented with changing up the standard format was Wrestle Society X, but even they weren't trying anything too unusual.

Depends on how narrowly you define "good". Their match at the 1990 All Japan summit was pretty decent, but it was only six minutes long and fairly simplistic.

He improved a little bit, but he was still very much a pompous jerk. All the constant abuse of anyone who ever tried to interview him being one huge example. What's with the WWE's obsession with constantly belittling and abusing the backstage interviewers? It's a rare occasion indeed when they're not treated as objects of ridicule, if not outright punching bags. Me. I watched Duck Soup once, and that was enough, I barely ever laughed at all. Their humor had a weird hostility to it, largely based on humiliating other people. The one scene I still remember is when Harpo and Chico mercilessly harassed this popcorn vendor on the street, cutting up his clothes and setting his stuff on fire and generally being vandalous criminals. Why the fuck is that supposed to be funny? The guy hadn't done anything to reserve such treatment, and the Marxes seemed like a couple of fucking psychopaths in attacking this poor bastard. I don't laugh at kids knocking over mailboxes with baseball bats, and I didn't laugh at this shit either. I have never, ever understood what's so funny about humor based on the pain and suffering of complete strangers who've done nothing (that we know of) to earn it.

Warrior was carryable in the right circumstance, but there were plenty of guys who couldn't heft that load. I forget who said it, but someone once brought up a great point when discussing this topic, specifically regarding Warrior. That being, his best matches are better than anything he'd ever seen from a guy like Brad Armstrong; but despite that, Brad was clearly the overall better worker of the two. Measuring someone by just a tiny handful of their very best matches isn't the best way to weigh their overall merits.

I've always felt the same way. I don't want my heroes to be some kind of warped Mary Sue character, where whatever the hero does must be right and good because hey, he's the hero! I have never, ever been entertained by allegedly heroic protagonists who go out of their way to inflict gratuitous suffering on random people. Whenever the Marx Brothers were harassing some poor bastard for no reason, I wasn't laughing; I was wondering what the fuck was wrong with these criminal motherfuckers that they'd cause such torment to complete strangers. It's the same thing when Austin would do stuff like Stunning helpless innocent victims for the cheapest pop in the world. Part of it comes from my indy experience. As a ring announcer and a referee, I couldn't begin to count the number of times that various wrestlers randomly abused me just to get themselves a tiny bit more over. I mean, every fucking night with that bullshit; never anything that was called by the booker, just guys going into business for themselves with shoving the announcer or mocking the ref or whatever. THAT GETS FUCKING OLD. But even before all that, I still didn't like stuff like Rock being so inexplicably cruel to everyone he ever interacted with, even his alleged friends and allies. What kind of incredibly insecure asshole are your supposed heroes, when they need to take advantage of the weak in order to make themselves strong? I think you're describing a monster heel, not a cool heel. Darth Vader and Jaws have more in common with Andre and Big Van Vader, giant monsters who can fucking murder you, but eventually lose in the end. That's not really what I think of when I hear the phrase "cool heel". To me, a cool heel is someone like the nWo, or Triple H during his most self-indulgent periods, or guys like the Sheik or Tiger Jeet Singh when they never lost; an unstoppable badass villain who mows down all the heroes in a nearly effortless fashion, laughing all the way. Someone who's positioned on the card and in the storylines as a heel, but whose actions seem more like those of a clever and gutsy babyface. The sort of heel who is selling more merchandise than most of the faces. That kind of heel undercuts the entire storytelling dynamic, and can sabotage a company in the long run if they're not reigned in soon enough. I remember Raven Mack wrote something along those lines in one of his rambling twelve-pack reviews. He was watching something like a Sheepherders vs Rock & Roll Express match, and noted pretty much the same trend. A dozen years later, the ugly bastards in camo pants would probably be cheered much more than their long-haired pretty-boy opponents. One of my favorite examples of that trend is Sting's makeover which blatantly ripped off The Crow... almost three whole years after that movie came out. And that was when wrestling was at its most innovative and ahead-of-its-time. Or even the ECW Pulp Fiction promos, again years after the original inspiration. Not really the first, there were plenty before them, going back from early Alan Moore all the way to the earlier works of Will Eisner and other of his ilk. But they were certainly the first "dark" characters to get incredibly popular and sell a shitload of comics, so I see your point. The problem there is that wrestling is a pretty shallow storytelling medium, and Austin never really had to deal with his flaws. They were hardly even mentioned; he'd always Stunner some poor defenseless schmuck who didn't deserve it, and we were supposed to cheer him for that. It's a really selfish, almost sociopathic attitude when you think about it. His antisocial violence towards everyone and everything (partly a product of Russo's writing; on his shows, two guys can never be standing in the same room together without getting into a fistfight) was just kind of ignored when Austin's place in the storylines was basically that of a tradional top babyface. He was micro-booked like a psychotic heel, but macro-booked as an upstanding superman.

Well, it's been oft-said that comedy is the most subjective thing in the world. Personally, I've never understood why so many people insist that Bill Hicks was some kind of revelatory genius. The stuff Hirota does just looks funny to me, it's hard to explain. Dunno, we've never really talked about that. They do an amateurish little podcast reviewing WWE/TNA shows, and everything else is just random matches I've been showing them on Youtube. The superindy companies are all very careful to make sure that none of their trademarked footage ends up on there, so the subject rarely comes up. They seem pretty neutral on the X Division, if that helps, in a sort of "well, that was kinda cool... now onto the next segment" sort of way. Part of it seems to be the "competitive sport" aspect of some of those matches. The younger fellows seem to prefer a recognizable heel/face structure to their matches, and don't much like the J-Cup style of Guys Doing Movez. And anytime the match starts with the traditional "kill ten minutes doing random mat wrestling", it loses them right from the beginning. They can appreciate the big flips and bumps, but they want the match to have more story to it than a lot of the spotty junior stuff of that era. And yeah, I'm sure that long years of having flyers like Styles or Mysterio on their screen every week has probably numbed them to the trailblazers of the past. It's an uphill battle just trying to convince them about all the stuff which Sabu popularized, let alone anyone else more obscure than him. (And incidentally, they love Tiger Mask/Dynamite Kid. Those matches were easily the best-received cruiserweight work that I've shown them so far.) Kind of, but they still want action. Tonight we saw a Hansen/Misawa match where they both loooked kinda lethargic and spent half the time sitting around in headlocks, and the kids could definitely tell that this wasn't either man's best work. They overall seem much less impressed by 90s New Japan than same-era All Japan, the likes of Muta and Chono have mostly gotten an "yeah, that was okay" reaction. But it's not just the size that counts; give 'em something like Hokuto/Kandori (also tonight) and they loved it, in an awestruck sort of "damn, that had to hurt" kind of way.

Scott Hudson's opinion was similarly extreme, but in the opposite direction:

What exactly do you call a semi-professional announcer who "retired" in his twenties? Your guess is as good as mine, man. But generally I've always leaned towards the term "smark". Someone calling themselves "smart" as a label always struck me as sounding awfully presumptious, while "smark" feels like it has an acceptable level of self deprecation for what boils down to being an expert in watching guys in their underwear pretending to fight. Ditto. Despite the fact that I have barely watched any wrestling over the past few years, probably more than half the forums I post on are all wrestling-related. There's been a lot of talk about tastes changing on this board recently, so I thought I might share something illuminating. At another forum (which has a wrestling section but isn't the main part of the board), I've recently fallen into a habit of getting on a voice chat and watching wrestling matches with a bunch of kids. Well not literally kids, only a couple of 'em aren't legal adults yet, but most of them are in their late teens or early twenties. Most of them haven't been smarking for very long, and only discovered the internet wrestling sites in the past couple of years. I've sort of been playing the wise old mentor, just correcting common misconceptions and providing random historical trivia of the sort which anyone here could. The point is that most of these young fellows just aren't educated at all in any wrestling outside of the American mainstream, and I've been showing them some of the other stuff that's out there. So with Youtube as my guide, I've been showing them all kinds of random shit from different promotions and decades (so far, the late 50s is the farthest back I've gone). It's been fascinating to see how today's young smarks view the old stuff. Some of the Usual Suspects end up beloved: anytime I throw on a Kobashi match, it's always a crowd-pleaser. But other stuff apparently hasn't aged well at all. I showed them Malenko/Guerrero from ECW, and it bored them to death. They seem kinda unimpressed by flippy cruiserweights in general, whether it's NJPW juniors or lucha or whatever. But show them two big heavyweights in a stiffness contest, and they eat that shit up. Stan Hansen is one of the current group favorites, and really everything from 90s AJPW has gone over well (except for Jumbo, whom they still seem oddly resistant to). Yet they've also got a weird appreciation for more old-school, theatrical stuff; everyone seems to love Andre's work, even in his later broken-down years. And it took 'em a minute, but after I explained enough of the psychology to them, they finally seem to be warming up to Baba. On the other hand, nothing I try seems to get Backlund over with them, or most mat wrestlers in general. Slowish technical wrestling tends to lose their interest in a damn hurry; even some old Johnny Saint carny magic gets a tepid response at best. But give 'em a Duggan vs Dibiase blood brawl, and you can hear these kids marking out over the Skype connection. Strangest of all, however, has been their reaction to joshi. These 15-24 Male demographics apparently love them some joshi. Part of it may actually be thanks to TNA; despite continually sabotaging their Knockouts division for years, it's still exposed a lot of today's kids to the likes of Ayako Hamada and Amazing Kong and whatnot. So it's remarkably easy to show them something like Toyota or Hokuto vs Aja or Nakano, and they go gaga over it. But, the absolutely strangest thing... well, there's no easy way to say it. You know who their absolute tippy-top favorite wrestler, male or female from any era, is right now? Sakura Hirota. I swear to God, yes, seriously. They LOVE her. I think we've already consumed every single Hirota match on Youtube (which ain't much, maybe a dozen total) and they still want more. Draw your own conclusions, I have none of my own.

Am I the only one who actually liked Lawler/Cole? It seemed like they accomplished everything they could have. Lawler beat the everliving fuck out of Cole, destroyed him, then picked him up and destroyed him some more. I didn't mind Cole getting some of his own offense, I don't see what the problem is there. And then after a super-happy ending, they obviously plan on continuing this angle so we got the Dusty finish. It seemed like the easiest, most painless way to keep the feud going and not have this be the blowoff, while simultaneously giving everyone the Cole beating that they wanted to see. She had her implants removed right after she retired last time, so that's one big reason why she looks thinner. Although I'd assume that living as a yoga instructor tends to pack on fewer pounds than the road-life of constant Waffle House meals. I still wonder why they didn't make her dye her hair again, she looks different enough from her famous old self that I can easily imagine some fans not recognizing her. And man, isn't it amazing how quickly they managed to devalue TRISH STRATUS IS BACK into her just being another annoying generic Diva? That's just Captain Trips going long. Almost any of his matches which hit 30 minutes tend to follow that formula. Remember the criminally long and dull Hell In A Cell match which he had with Shawn? Exact same deal in that one. I wasn't watching the show (my stream's audio was fine, but the video was crap) but Miz/Cena did sound awfully short. When they went to that insulting double-countout, I naturally assumed "oh, Rock will come out and restart it, and they'll go at least another ten minutes. But instead, they instantly jumped to the ROCK BOTTOM, ONE TWO THREE part. Zuh? So lame. Does this beat that HHH/Orton snoozefest from a couple years back for worst modern Mania main event? Because they did that spot in two of Shawn's big recent Mania matches and it got over like gangbusters, so Trips just assumed it would work as well for him. Christ. There's "SKeith standard idiocy", and then there's this. Dude sounds like Coey with a much poorer vocabulary. Sad that Scooter couldn't find anyone even close to relatively competent as himself to replace him on his own blog.

Duggan in WCW often seemed to have problems selling for younger guys, or doing anything which didn't make them look worthless. I just rewatched the Berlyn match last night, and Hacksaw wasn't giving Wright anything out there, to the point where Wright was trying to shoot-wrestle him into holds at some points. I recall similar things happening in a PPV match with Craig Pittman, and there are probably others I've forgotten about.

My point is that the WWE is even worse about it than most other companies. The independent contractor bullshit, the absolutely insane hours and travel schedule, the relatively low salaries for most of their employees compared to the amount of effort required, the unbelievably tense and hostile work atmosphere with a million stupid unwritten rules, the deliberate practice of management to mentally (and sometimes physically) punish and torture their employees just to see "if they can take it", the barely-hidden racist and sexist practices, and the company's various flagrantly illegal activities all combine together into a perfect storm of Fuck This Job. Yet they probably spend more time, money, and effort in gloating about what a great company they are than most other similarly-sized corporations. Sorry it took you that long to get out. I only lasted a week and a half at Radio Shack before figuring out what coldblooded bastards they were and getting the fuck outta Dodge.

It's not them acting like a typical corporation that bugs me; it's their usual hypocracy with claiming that they're not just a typical corporation. The WWE is far more shameless than most capitalistic organizations when it comes to lying about how much they love their employees or how they do all of this for their great fans.

I love how much the WWE loves to chant their "We're a family!" catchphrase, despite being totally willing to end someone's career at the drop of a hat if they might threaten the bottom line.

He did. Faggot. Considering WWE's recent dealings with GLAAD and being so jittery about any controversy causing problems with sponsors or networks, it could've been. So far, nothing.

Agreed on El-P about Snow. Sadly, he changed from a fun, good-humored, hard-working fellow into the generic bitter old veteran asshole with questionable-at-best philosophy on da biz. Blame his long stint behind the scenes in the WWE, I guess; nowadays he doesn't sound like he's even the same person from his interviews back in the 90s.