Jingus

Two interesting things I heard on there. First was a total inversion of an old internet story: that Vince McMahon was so out of touch with pop culture that he had never seen any of the Pirates Of The Caribbean movies, and that's why he killed the Pirate Paul Burchill gimmick. The writer (forget which one, maybe Bauer?) said that Vince was the one who originally suggested the pirate gimmick, because he'd just seen the movie and thought Burchill kinda looked like a pirate. Secondly: uh, was anyone else a little weirded out by Dave Prazak saying that they have a bar in the locker room at Shimmer? He explicitly said that he's usually drunk throughout the entire show, which kind of implies that some of the workers might be too. That sounds a bit like lawsuit-bait to me, if someone gets hurt in a match and their opponent Had A Few before going out to the ring.

For what it's worth, I've seen that spot cause absolutely zero fan response on several occasions. Usually when it's some green kid who is a shitty actor with no fire, and the crowd doesn't give a fuck about anything they do. Same deal with stuff like standard sleeper hold "the arm drops twice, but not three times" spots, which are usually a guaranteed reaction, but not always. I know it goes without saying, but any spot in the world can be fucked up either through poor execution or just fans who don't have any investment in the wrestlers.

Just rewatched that one, and you're right, it's longer than I remembered. It was seven minutes. And that's including a jump-start at the beginning, and one minuted devoted to a camel clutch. As a match, it's no better than average. If it weren't for all the blood, nobody would remember this one at all. And the fact that all the other matches on that card were so godawful probably didn't hurt its reputation either.

That's the part which doesn't seem right to me. That football field doesn't look like it's holding anywhere near that number of people. To put it in perspective, I think about my old hometown arena, Nashville Municipal Auditorium (home of Starrcades 94-96). It doesn't hold more than ten thousand people in the stands, but the seating area covers a hell of a lot larger square-footage than a football field. I know at the Silverdome they were packing them in as tight as possible on the floor; but even visually in the pictures in this thread, it just doesn't look like it's even close to being 13K, I'm not sure it's even half that much.

So do we have anyone who's spent some time in Japan who doesn't believe that Tiger Mask was a huge star? Sometimes a wrestler just becomes an inexplicable popular phenomenon which has nothing to do with what shows they main evented or what gates they drew; think of, say, Jake Roberts for example. The Goldberg comparison sounds like a good one; Bill's window of monstrous superfame was about the same length of time as Sayama's, and Goldberg was rarely in the main event or placed in a position where he could "officially" claim that he drew the house. Those matches were all of three minutes long, so I dunno who would pimp them beyond "hey, this wasn't as agonizingly painful as I thought it might be". Yeah, Sid/Sting at Road Wild 99 was perfectly tolerable (aside from the weird finish, which basically had Sid shrug off several Stinger Splashes as if he was getting hit by Nerf). Sid was always capable of having decent matches in the right circumstances.

Do they pay their taxes based on the claimed number of asses in seats? I would assume not. You've got different prices for different seats, plus comps and other freebies to figure in. He said that it was before they started blocking seats off, which I guess would mean the pre-Nitrotron days, probably in the earlier hot streak of the nWo era circa 96-97.

I've never been entirely sold that HHH going over at Mania is what caused Backlash to have such a freakishly high buyrate. For one thing, the much-hyped return of Steve Austin probably helped out a lot with that. But that year was just plain damn weird when it came to buyrates anyway. You had strange things like Unforgiven outdrawing Summerslam; and every single one of the non-Big-5 shows outdrew King of the Ring and Survivor Series.

I have heard that it's often a common practice for the building owners to exaggerate how many people their arenas can hold. So it's entirely possible that the WWF, NFL, and Pope numbers for the Silverdome are all worked to some extent. Since we can't exactly go there and count the seats ourselves, there's no good way to confirm the exact figures. But just basing from the NFL "sold out" numbers alone, I don't see how 93,000 is remotely possible in that building. There's a shitload of people sitting in the loose chairs on the field, but certainly not thirteen thousand of them. I've never even thought about that before, but it's an incredibly point. What the hell happened to VJM's assets after he died? Did they go to VKM, or elsewhere? Has this ever been reported on?

Ditto. It's a modern version of gawking at the freaks in a carnival sideshow. The only episode of Cabana's podcast that I skipped was the one with Sheiky baby.

What were the extra expenses for this particular event? I imagine that having folks like Ali and Liberace come in probably cost them a chunk of change, but it's gotta be more than just that if the entire company's success rested on the shoulders of this one show. Was the closed-circuit process a costly procedure? That's one thing which nobody really ever explains in-depth; most of the older guys who were around for the first Mania seem to take it for granted that everyone knows how closed-circuit broadcasts work, in both technical and financial terms, but there's plenty of guys like me who have little idea of what exactly it entails.

How true is this talking point? I've heard it forever as part of Official WWE History, but was it really that much of a risk? What would have been the specific consequences if it hadn't sold as well? The way the story's often phrased, it sounds less like an admission of vulnerability and more like Vince trying to retcon himself into a scrappy underdog who fought against the odds.

I just watched X-7 last night. They did mention the Streak several times, but it wasn't the primary focus of the storyline. (Although oddly the angle started almost exactly the same way, with HHH bragging about how he's beaten everyone and has no challenges left.) When Taker got the pin, Ross screamed "Nine-and-oh!" So while the streak wasn't yet as big a deal as it would become later, it was definitely part of the mix.

We need an evil IWC-themed smark stable. Including such individuals as Stiffness Vampire, Caucasian Puro Weeaboo, and Moooovez. And the inevitable big fat hairy guy in a cheap wig who wears a mask with a picture of a beautiful lady's face on it, and insists he is that woman. They're all led by the tyrannical Moderator, whose never-kicked-out-of finishing move is the Banning Hammer. (Although the victims of that move are allowed to come back next week and no-sell the effects of the move, as long as they disguise themselves as someone else.)

She's hardly a household name, though. That hilarious old drug PSA is almost certainly where most people would remember her from. The vast majority of her career has been spent in obscure little indy films; you can count the number of big budget Hollywood movies she's starred in on one hand. As big of a movie nerd as I am, I've only seen a grand total of two movies featuring her.

And hey, here's a fun subject for debate. At another board, I was arguing with some people who were saying that Jeff's actions weren't that unique, since plenty of people have showed up Not Ready To Perform (cue the usual Scott Hall jokes). My point was, I don't think I've ever seen someone SO fucked up in the ring as Hardy was on this night. (In a big nationally televised company, anyway, not some crummy indy show.) Can you guys think of any examples of anyone else showing up for a main event match, so wasted that they couldn't do anything, like Hardy was here? The closest examples I can think of were Kerry at Superclash 3 and Jake at Heroes of Wrestling, but even then I'd argue that even those guys on those nights were still a touch more sober than Jeff was.

All very true, but even WCW was smart enough not to put him in the damn ring for a world title main event when he showed up in such condition.

True, but it's a matter of degree. Hall never showed up so trashed that he couldn't walk in a straight line when he was booked in a heavyweight title match on a PPV.

Yeah, right after Spring Stampede 99.

What are the odds that this could affect his court case? The funniest part to me (well, aside from Jeff's shoulder being up when the pin was counted) was Bischoff's weird body language when he was talking to Sting. Go back and look what he does with that microphone at first. Bisch puts that mike so far behind his back, he's practically sticking it up his own ass. He wanted to make damn sure that it didn't pick up whatever he was saying. He only took it from behind his back when he started yelling at Sting to shake his hand, just to give some "Eric's just being a smug dick again" kayfabe explanation of what they'd been discussing.

When I asked my question, I almost added "and please don't tell me to just buy some massive DVD boxset from Will". I can barely force myself to watch more than two or three matches in one sitting nowadays, my interest in wrestling is so low. That's a damn fine summary, and it's exactly how I see him too. Uh... all I can think of are Ultimo Dragon and some of his shittier trainees, so, no. Technically you could also make a claims for Tiger Masks II-IV, but that doesn't help Sayama's case either.

What about making a quick-n-easy "Sayama ain't that good" primer? Like, a little list of Youtube matches to compare and contrast. Something along the lines of "here's this highly-pimped Sayama match, and then here's this Hamada/Fujinami/whoever match which does the exact same shit but puts Tiger Mask to shame". Or vice-versa, if you think watching the good match before the bad one is better. There's plenty of folks like myself who still enjoy those DK/TM bouts, but aren't very familiar with the early-80s NJPW cruiserweight scene and thus are relative strangers to the counterarguements.

Where is it? I looked everywhere imaginable on the free WO site, and it looks like they haven't posted any free audio at all for several days now. Yeah, this sounds odd. Don't think I've ever heard of a wrestling getting fired because they broke a camera.

Here's something a little bit sad to me personally: the oldest arena in Nashville, the Fairgrounds, is being torn down. Post-USWA fans would know it best as the "Asylum", where TNA held its weekly PPVs for the first two years. Apparently the current mayor has some kind of weird scheme to use the land for some other project. But the building itself is a fairly interesting piece of wrestling history. It was actually designed and built specifically as a professional wrestling venue, on behalf of Nick Gulas; it was even officially renamed the Nick Gulas Sports Arena two years ago. How many venues have been deliberately built for wrestling? I'm told the Dallas Sportatorium was, but I'm blanking on any others in this country. As a building, it's... okay. It's basically just a big concrete box, maybe a little bigger than the ECW arena. And the dressing rooms (plural, one for faces and one for heels) are infamously tiny. But still, a lot of folks will miss that place. Including me. I only worked there a couple of times (one of my fonder memories from the biz is commentating a Terry Funk match in that place), but I attended countless shows there as a fan. Even when it was pitifully empty, there was a certain unnameable charm which the good sports arenas always have. I saw half the guys in the American wrestling business wrestle in this place, and I'll be sad to see it go. For a little while, it looked like the last wrestling show there would be a house show that TNA ran a little while back. What a great legacy it would've been to have Pope Dinero vs Jeff Hardy as the last match in this place, huh? Well, thankfully, that's not the case. On January 29th, Reno Riggins's indy fed Showtime All-star Wrestling is holding the final show this building will ever see. Main event: Jerry Lawler versus Bill Dundee, bah gawd. With Dutch Mantell as the guest ref, too. A variety of other familiar old faces are on the card: Tracy Smothers, Wolfie D, Brian Christopher, Doug Gilbert, Tony Falk, Jerry Lynn, Kid Kash, and also a buncha younger Southern guys like David Young, Derrick King, and Chris Michaels filling up the undercard. If you can go, I'd recommend it; they're selling tickets online here (yes, this is a fairly reputable company and there shouldn't be any IWA Midsouth-style shenanigans with the tickets). I won't be there, I live too far away nowadays, but it should be a fond farewell.

I assumed he was referencing Eddie as the second guy, not Owen.

Was there only one Backlund/Muraco hour match? I'm almost certain that I've got 60-minute match with them on some crappy old comp tape I bought on Ebay a decade back.