Jingus

That sum is way above average for damages awarded to a single individual, but not unheard-of. Remember that some class-action civil suits against big corporations have netted much more than that; like the infamous Big Tobacco judgement which ended up fining them over two hundred billion dollars. As for Gawker: fuck 'em, they got what they deserved. I don't care who the person is nor how famous they are, nothing gives you the right to distribute their sex tape against their will.

Oh, it was nothing like the much more organized stuff that happened later, at least as far as I know. It was just Lawler goofing off with his friend and them body-slamming each other on the lawn (in back, where nobody could see them).

Caring about Bret can often be difficult. As a babyface, he's often annoyingly robotic. There's hardly any joy in him, any kind of enthusiasm or exuberance. He comes off as sour and dour, and when he's on offense it all too often devolved into him mechanically disassembling his opponent in a glumly emotionless fashion. Sometimes he wasn't even any damn good at portraying his sportsmanlike character's alleged sportsmanship; I remember his match with Sting at Mayhem '99, where a run-in by Luger got Sting disqualified. Bret, being a theoretical good sport, insisted that he didn't want to win that way and demanded the match be restarted. Thing is, Sting was the one Luger had ended up whacking in the knee with a baseball bat while turning on his lifelong best friend, but of course the ref had been bumped (fucking Russo...) and this all meant that Sting was selling his leg as if it were about to fall off. Immediately after the match restarts, what does Bret do? He immediately starts kicking Sting in the injured knee in the most heelish manner possible. Yeah, it's technically a smart gameplan, but it's certainly not a heroic one; and on THIS night, finally winning the world belt, he desperately needed to look heroic. Instead he looked like a total asshole, hypocritically demanding a clean fight and then immediately taking unfair advantage of his enemy's handicap.

The deal there was to make a political statement: "fuck Dusty Rhodes and fuck Dusty finishes". It was the first world title change since Rhodes was fired from WCW, and they were making a point to say that his tired old ref-bump-apalooza swerves wouldn't be ruining main events under the new regime.

Oh, he goes way beyond that. He's a star-struck obsessive fan of Tori Amos, and almost certainly the only WWF World Champion who would proudly make such a statement.

I kinda believe those two. Piper's goofy enough to do something like that, and Jake Roberts once mentioned that Garvin's nipples would get hard when he was beating you up.

By most accounts, not very. Stu's participation seems to be mostly limited to sadistically practicing shooter holds on oblivious teenagers. Bret claims that he got all his actual in-ring training from Kendo Nagasaki and Mr. Hito while they happened to be in Stampede for a season.

I read that, and it was awesome. The story had Hogan as a washed-up old hasbeen who sat around the gym all day, bragging to the young boys about how he trained Spider-man and designed his web-shooters and basically gave him the entire gimmick. Rey Mysterio made a special point to dress up as a different superhero or scifi character every year at Wrestlemania, so it's safe to assume he's pretty geeky. AJ Lee-Punk has an extra layer of official nerdiness which is hard to beat: she attended NYU's film school. Although, it's tough to beat the King in this category. Others may have their Youtube channels and whatnot, but Jerry Lawler actually booked a drunken Adam West to play Batman in a comedy sketch on live Memphis wrestling television:

Just kayfabe, Lawler never had proper training. He did the 1960s equivalent of backyard wrestling as a teenager with some of his friends, and then barely got a few sessions' worth of remedial training before being booked onto an small outlaw indy show. He was a radio DJ at the time, and the promoter figured the free publicity that Lawler would provide by plugging the show was worth putting an untried rookie in the main event, even if said rookie was so green that he didn't even know how to bump correctly; Lawler ended up whacking his head on the concrete floor during his first match and knocking himself out cold. Thing is, Jerry did indeed know Jackie Fargo, because before getting into wrestling he'd drawn a bunch of promotional pictures which the Memphis office ended up putting on TV and selling for merchandise and whatnot. So basically Jackie took him aside and said "if you wanna be a real wrestler, quit that outlaw shit and quit your radio job and come with us", and then Lawler got on-the-job training in the form of having Tojo Yamamoto beat the living shit out of him every night for the next few weeks. And the rest is history.

Just call it a tie. The whole "number of ballots, highest vote" data will be included with the list anyway, won't it?

I'm sure Ultimate Warrior has had at least ten very-good-to-great matches in his career, even though the hideous lowness of his lows certainly precluded him from being on my list. Inoki also comes to mind as a "lame on most days, but GREAT on rare occasions" type of performer.

Oh yeah, in terms of him being such a morally bankrupt human being who revels so gleefully in the misery of human suffering and treats all the very worst aspects of capitalistic selfishness to be sacred virtues, he's certainly effective as a "heel". Especially since you know he's the kind of chickenshit who would be left laying in a pool of his own blood, if some heroic babyface could manage to lock him in a steel cage away from all the cronies and toadies who protect him from the righteous wrath of society's justice. For the record, nobody laid down any official criteria for what counts and what doesn't. It's just that at a certain level of real-world damage caused by someone, I think that could disqualify them from being a love-to-hate-them villain. Like, we'd probably all agree that Bin Ladin wouldn't be seriously namedropped as "he was a great monster heel who really knew how to work the marks in his particular territory, and even though he only knew how to do one particular highspot he definitely knew when and where to do it so that it really counted". Even though all that is technically accurate, it not only trivializes the pain and havoc that person caused, it also kinda trivializes wrestling terminology and comparisons, making them look awfully trite and pointless in the face of real-world evil. And obviously Shkreli is hardly even a carrion worm on Osama's decomposing ass when it comes to being a truly despicable argument for legalizing ninety-seventh-trimester abortions, but I think the conversation just probably stays more fun if we try to keep it on lighter subjects like Donkey Kong.

Yep. I called one or two matches with her, way back in the day (including laying English-language commentary over the Mexican house show fancam where Dark Angel was apparently unmasked for the first time, oddly enough, and I have no idea how the copyright situation on that footage worked) and I have vague but generally positive memories of her being pretty good. I'm surprised Miz wasn't on the list; he's had his fun stooging heel tag teams and the Lawler feud and other stuff that people here liked. Is he the only Wrestlemania main eventer (barring celebrities) who didn't make the cut? EDIT: nope, checking the list, I see at least a couple other main-Mania omissions: King Kong Bundy and SID~! and I'm honestly rather surprised that nobody even ironically nominated Sid.

While I think this is easily the second-best match of the night behind Bret/Piper, I don't think it's that great. Flair and Savage would do better stuff in their 1995 feud. And really, Randy is just not terribly good at structuring a match around having to sell his leg. His entire style is based on perpetual motion, the idea that he's always running around like a madman; he's almost like an early Sabu in that fashion, he just never sits still. When the Flair Formula forces him to sit still because he's supposedly got a bum knee, Savage doesn't seem to have many ideas of how to work around that. And no matter how magnificent his facial expressions are, there's still a limited amount of how much anyone can get out of just laying around with an "oh yeah, I am in SO much pain" look on their face in the post-territories post-kayfabe era.

Half right. Game of Thrones does indeed come equipped with endless mountains of tits, so much gratuitous female nudity that it made the South Park episodes' weird obsession with the comparatively rare male nudity on the show to be outright homophobia. But it feels like the entire series has maybe thirty seconds' worth of dragons. We spend more time watching Dany worrying about the plight of her offscreen dragons than we ever do actually watching footage of the wyrms themselves. As for King of Kong: it's a fantastically-made movie, but I have read several articles which listed a number of various real-life facts that the filmmakers fudged or manipulated in order to make the story more compelling. Billy Mitchell was less of a heartless dick in real life than he's portrayed in the movie's cherry-picked version of his life, while the movie apparently went out of its way to gloss over the fact that Steve Wiebe was kind of an obsessive antisocial loner. In the end; hey, there's a reason why I tend to read books rather than watching documentaries when it comes to consuming nonfiction, because it tends to be easier to distort the truth with video than with print. And I feel kinda weird about including Martin Shkreli in with these other harmless examples. Everyone else listed here is just being mischievous about stuff which doesn't really matter. THAT piece of shit is committing massive financial fraud and denying lifesaving drugs to sick people and doing it all with pride. If he was suddenly killed tomorrow in a tragic piano-fell-off-a-roof-and-squashed-him-flat accident, I would legitimately celebrate his demise. Fuck that guy and everything he stands for.

I voted for him. Not high, but he was there. His feud with Vader alone was plenty enough for nomination, those two made magic together in a way that most of Leon's other opponents in WCW weren't capable of achieving.

On the Curt-vs-Ted dichotomy: don't forget that Dibiase's success was helped in great part because of the booking. He was the evil mastermind who successfully planned the end of Hulkamania's original championship reign. Mr. Perfect never got anywhere near that much of a push, he didn't even get a Rick Rude-style cup of coffee in the main event scene. In the in-ring section, I think Hennig's case is hurt by his lackluster post-injury years. Both Curt and Ted basically had their careers ended in 1993, but Dibiase never got in the ring again while Hennig kept trying to have an on-and-off career for the next decade, and aside from the Flair feud and the West Texas Rednecks he was barely ever watchable, let alone good. He never really figured out how to adapt his style into something equally workable, so he spent the rest of his career trying to put on Mr. Perfect matches but doing so at half-speed at best.

That's a good one. I was also kinda surprised when putting my final list together to discover that Awesome Kong was somehow never nominated. There's a lot of pretty damn good female workers in the American Joshi revolution of the past dozen years, between the SHIMMER mainstays and the best Knockouts from that division's golden days and so forth & so on, but pretty much none of them ever got mentioned. Which match?

Considering that the nomination process required writeups on three different matches involving the worker in question: no, Mayweather doesn't even come close to counting.

NASH. Do I really even need to list why? I can't think of a single other person who ever took so much from the business but gave so little in return. Aside from being a horrible wrestler (and he was quite godawful), most bad workers can't also claim "and then my ridiculously awful booking managed to permanently sabotage a major national promotion to the extent that it never turned a profit again".

Yeah, those were my points. They've already got the music ready of whomever might win the match. Remember, even on those rare occasions where something got horribly botched and the match had to go home early or the wrong finish happened, they still had the music ready to go anyway. Also, look at every one of the WWE scripts which have been leaked over the years: entrance music is always in the script, but the match results are never included. The company is really paranoid about spoilers like that, they never tell the production crew who's going over before it happens. I'm sure they have the music ready for all possible winners in every match, and Dunn just gives the order to play whichever track at the appropriate time.

Since when does production ever know who's going to win the matches or at what time any match will end?

Wasn't Patterson obviously involved? I thought that was common knowledge, we see him helping Bret plan out the match in Wrestling With Shadows. I don't see Vince involving anyone he didn't absolutely HAVE to; he's notorious for keeping secrets as close to the chest as he possibly can: -Shawn and Earl had to be involved to make the finish work. -Patterson had to be involved in order to suggest the sharpshooter spot to Bret. -Brisco was involved to help Shawn plan how to do it and show him some shooter moves if the whole thing got ugly. -HHH was involved because he was the one who first openly suggested the idea of the screwjob. Aside from that, who else would need to know? I guess Shane or Slaughter might have, since they were by Vince's side throughout most of the night, but even their knowing participation is a "maybe". I doubt that either Ross or Cornette would've been involved, because there was simply no reason Vince needed them; and anyone else is even less likely.

And it only took an entire decade.

Do you really count "anyone who's ever taken one training class" as being "trainees"? Because more than half of that list were people who'd already been wrestling for a while and were sent to train with Dory for developmental polishing. Heck, even Teddy Hart technically should be on there, he was in the same class with Edge and Angle and all those other guys.