Jingus

Heh, summer of '99. Over at TSM in our We Watch Shitty WCW club, we've learn to make the gesture of warding off the evil eye whenever the Summer Of Suck is mentioned. Despite plowing through all the top contenders for "worst show ever" like Bash '91 or Heroes of Wrestling or half the Thunders ever aired, we still unanimously agree that Bash At The Beach 1999 is easily the very worst show we've watched. The angles were so nonsensically simple that it wasn't Booking 101, it was Remedial Booking. And the entire roster was starting to get into that phase where damn near nobody gave the tiniest care about putting on a good performance.

I remembered another one: Eugene. That was one of the stranger examples of HHH killing someone's heat, since there's no way that a retard gimmick could come within shouting distance of being a real top guy. Was it just because of how insanely over Eugene was when he first debuted? Whatever the motivation was, Captain Trips took it upon himself to kill that right in the cradle. If Dinsmore ever got anything but the weakest of token offense on HHH before inevitably getting beat down and pedigreed over and over again, I can't recall it. Yeah, I was gonna mention that. He really thoroughly put Big Dave over in a way he's never done before or since. Either he just really liked the guy personally, or Trip was convinced that Batista would never be a threat to his own spot so it didn't matter how much he was put over. But even here you can come up with a minor quibble, it did feel like the vast majority of their Mania match was HHH beating the crap out of Batista for an indordinately long period of time. Also: funny how it Just So Happened that Benoit's very first match in the Fed involved him getting pinned by HHH. Heck, better than good. I still sharply remember the amazing high-pitched feminine sqeual from the crowd when Kurt kissed Stephanie that one time. Let's not forget Neocon Bradshaw, literally saying we should blow up the entire Middle East. Absolutely. Steiner hadn't really worked a full match in two years. He also had some lingering injuries with his back and his foot that hadn't healed yet when he was signed, iirc. And he looked more roided up than ever before. Throwing him into a half-hour PPV main event is somewhat akin to throwing a wheelchair-bound paraplegic into the deep end of a swimming pool and expecting it to all come out okay. Was it Hunter or someone else backstage that tried to knock Punk by saying he just tries to re-enact the puro tapes he watches?When Punk first came in, I agree with that general sentiment. Almost everything he did was a move or even a sequence of moves stolen directly from someone else. He did feel more like an e-fed or Create A Wrestler than an actual worker. Of course, he did get better.

Ooh, I forgot about that one! Steiner/HHH at the Rumble is one of the most blatant cases of sandbagging that I've ever seen, with one guy going out of his way to sabotage the other while still just barely putting forth enough effort so that he could say "hey man, I tried my best to get him over, he just doesn't know how to work". Trip has done this so many times that it's really quite shameless. You can tell how much he fears someone as a threat by exactly how he's booked with them. He's most threatened by the top guys whom he's forced to get along with: Austin, Taker, Rock, Cena. With those guys, he often tries to simply avoid them as much as possible. Considering how long they were in the company together, it's remarkable that Stone Cold and The Game only had a grand total of four singles matches on PPV. (And one of those was in 1996 at an IYH.) Most of the time they've been in the same ring, it's a tag match or a three-way or a six-way or some other big clusterfuck to hide the fact that Austin is so far above HHH's league in every way that it's not even funny. Same thing with Undertaker, who I think has only had two PPV singles matches. And then there's Cena, who's only had one or two also. I can guess his justification: "That's a big dream match, let's not burn it out!" Totally ignoring the fact that Rock/HHH was a money-printing machine during their endless feud in 2000. And gee, look how many times HHH feuded with Rock after that: zero. Strange how that happened, once Trips had office power. And then there's the others, the young up & comers. Jericho, Angle, Booker, RVD, and countless others. These are guys who get programmed into feuds with HHH and then somehow miraculously never seem to get a single meaningful win during the lengthy angless. What an odd coincedence! And that's not even counting the poor bastards lower on the totem pole, like the Spirit Squad or anyone else who Hunter frequently beat the shit out of during handicap matches over the past few years. And jobbing to his girlfriend Chyna like Jeff Jarrett did on the way out the door.Actually, do you remember who Jericho's first official in-ring feud was supposed to be? That's right, Ken Shamrock. Huh, weird that he just so happened to be paired with the most-feared shooter in the company for his welcome party. Of course Shamrock got hurt, and Jericho got thrown into mini-feuds with Pac and Roadie where he never seemed to ever pin them. I know this is conspiracy theory territory, but don't forget that the Fed often did this kind of jumped-in gang initiation type shit with guys from other companies at the time. Like how the Acolytes were noticeably stiff and not terribly cooperative with the Dudley Boys in those guys' first WWF feud. Funny you mention the Chyna thing, because I think that's where he finally got the office's attention. That was clearly supposed to be the gravestone on his young career, but Jericho instead carried her pimply non-working ass to the best matches of her life and made her look like a real wrestler for once. It was immediately after that (and a cup of coffee with Stiffy McStifferton, Bob Holly) when Jericho got bumped up the card to the Intercontinental level. I do remember at the time how powerfully strange that was. World Champion Stone Cold Steve Austin was subtly treated like the bumbling sidekick to HHH's supervillain. Heck, even the name "Two Man Power Trip" implies that they're both supposed to be on the same level, and if you think you're on the same level as Stone Cold during the Attitude era and your name ain't Dwayne Johnson, then you're a goddamned idiot. Heck, that reminds me of another one: the entire buildup to Wrestlemania 18. For this one, you have to go back to his injury. In storyline terms, it was technically Jericho who tore HHH's quad and put him out for a year. At least, if it was anyone besides HHH, that's how the story would have gone. Instead, we officially got the official story about how Trip injured himself and Jericho was just a bystander. When does that ever happen? When does the WWF ever say "yeah, this guy tripped over his own feet and got hurt" instead of blaming it on some worked attack? Strangely that's exactly what happened here, as if HHH was too paranoid to let anyone besides himself have the credit for putting him out. Anyway, back to Mania. If they even mentioned that HHH got hurt against Jericho during the buildup, I certainly don't remember it. Instead, what was the buildup? Oh yeah, Hunter versus Stephanie. Jericho, the freaking undisputed champion of the world, was reduced to being Steph's lacky. And then there was the damn dog! It's stupid enough to include Hunter's never-previously-mentioned cute little doggy whom he supposedly loves to death. But if you're gonna do that, at least go the Matilda route and have the heel do something dastardly to it. They were too pussy to let the heel intentionally hurt the dog, leading to that incredibly retarded bit where Jericho accidentally backed into the dog with a car like a total moron. And then there was the match, which Hunter seriously believed was more important than HULK HOGAN VERSUS THE ROCK. Trip starts super-selling his leg in like the first thirty seconds, sells it hard for the entire match like his foot is about to fall off, and then quite calmly just stands up and beats Jericho at the end. It took Chris eight freaking years to claw his way back to the world title after that.

There was that First Blood match they had a couple years ago. In which Trips won by busting Regal open with his bare hands.

Bring on the backstage stories, those are the ones I have trouble remembering. What exactly were Flair and Steamboat pushing for years, just to have Flair beat HHH one time? Anyone recall Bad Blood '04? Triple H's matches with Shawn always tended to be much longer than they needed to be, but this was fucking insane. FIFTY-TWO MINUTES. In the Cell, no less. They spent half the time just laying down selling. And it didn't even involve the title, that was wasted in a pointless Benoit/Kane match in the undercard. Also, Mania 22. Trips's promos up to that event were basically all shoot-burying Cena for being a lousy wrestler. And Cena basically just nodded and said "Why yes sir, of course you're right, I'm not nearly as good as The Game!" It was baldly calculated to make the Mania audience (in Chicago, which has frequently had a smarky, cranky crowd) to boo Cena right out of the building. And guess what, they did exactly that. HHH, the nominal heel, was cheered like a Road Warrior. And then he did the strangest ending, tapping out way too quickly to a submission hold that Cena had barely ever used before. It killed the momentum of the finish, and probably let Hunter dodge ever jobbing to Cena ever again. After all, John is one of the few guys that Hunter just can't bury politically. So he ate this one loss, did it in a way which confused and pissed off the fans, and has most likely been using the "but I tapped out to him at Mania already!" excuse any time someone even whispers the idea of him losing to Cena at any time in the future.

Whenever he's briefly opposed by someone who's further down the card than himself, Hunter tends to act like he just doesn't care about the other guy. They're trying to cut a serious promo on him, and he just smirks and makes gay jokes back. Recently with Punk was the most current example, but he's done it countless times. Hey, in all the years they feuded, did Kane ever get one single win over HHH? Or Jericho, besides that one "HHH threatens Hebner into reversing the decision" match? Trips is the king of one-sided feuds where the other guy is beaten over and over again. Probably the single easiest thing to point to is Wrestlemania 19. A buddy of mine put if perfectly: "It took three Rock Bottoms to pin Stone Cold. It took three leg drops to pin Vince McMahon. It took three F-5s to pin Kurt Angle. But bah gawd, it only took one pedigree to pin Booker T!"

Heck, could we make a full Confirmed Stories of Triple H Being A Total Douchebag thread? He's been such a constant target for smarks for so long, it's sometimes easy to forget that he has indeed done plenty of underhanded shit throughout the years. Several different posts here recently have reminded me of various tales about Trips and his backstabbing nature.

Why? He's half pureblood Samoan, for one thing. And his dad clearly has some white heritage in him. If his genetics are less than half African, why should he be considered "black"? Admittedly this is a social pet peeve of mine, and I don't understand why a hypothetical person with one black grandparent and three white grandparents is still usually marked down as an African American, as if their family had just gotten off the boat from Kenya last week. It basically boils down to subconcious mindsets holding over from the slavery days, where the "one drop" principle held effect: that is, "one drop of African blood = you're black, and we can legally own you". But more to the point Rock just never looked black to me, he's a fuzzy sort of multicultural melting pot which could come from anywhere. His exotic heritage could be Sicilian, or Israeli, or hell even Native American. It's not a case like with Booker or Ron Simmons where you look at the guy and instantly go "he's black" without even questioning it. So, Rock is an easier sell to the redneck demographic which traditionally dominates wrestling audiences. I think you answered your own question. Who knows what black guys might have drawn well in the top spot? Historically, none of them were ever given the opportunity to get near that level. The closest thing to an exception I can think of was JYD as the top babyface on a lot of the B-crew or C-crew house shows back in the mid-80s. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy: if a company has no minorities in positions of importance, then few minorities will want to even try having a career in such an organization.

That was an awkward night for me. While I was watching that match, my stepfather decided to walk in at that moment and start one of his frequent arguments about how I was wasting my life on this wrestling shit. "No, I really want to keep being a wrestling announcer, it's important to me" is a hard sell when at that very moment we're seeing the industry's most notable announcer getting the shit shoot-beaten out of him and bleeding all over the ring.

Speaking of missed-boat babyfaces, does Evan Bourne even work here anymore? Dude could've been a young white Mysterio, but they never had an ounce of confidence in him. As for Kofi and MVP, well, this is a company which waited until 2006 to crown their first and only black world champion. (For purposes of this discussion, Rock doesn't count as black, and ECW doesn't count as a world title.) The one thing that nearly every black wrestler in the WWE has in common is that they're never pushed as a top guy. It's a cliche to cry RAYCISM~! on these things, but, damn, one black champion ever? Those stages do correspond in an uncanny way to WCW's declining years. Stage 1 is 1997, 2 is 1998, and so on to the last stage being 2001.

Worse than Colin Delaney? That one never made sense to me. "Hey, look at this stupid fucking kid who shouldn't even be in the ring. He's a loser, he has no chance whatsoever, and you know this because we keep telling you over and over. Now watch as we build the entire show around him for months on end!" And then the sudden heel turn and the even more sudden release. What the hell happened there? Did Vince just finally watch ECW for the first time in forever and go "who the fuck is that anorexic midget? Wrap up his angle and pink-slip the little bastard pronto." Did we ever find out what the deal was with that time Boogeyman was fired and then rehired within a week? Someone asked about the weird Claudio deal earlier, that deserves a re-mention. Also similarly wondering about the Hebners and others being fired for bootlegging merchandise.

Another vote for "Norton's salary jumped off the screen and tried to punch me in the face" here. Jesus. What on earth could possibly be their justification for paying him anywhere near that much? Boring wrestler, bad promos, no name value, and they never even tried to push him. Why even bother? Someone else will need to refresh my memory on the details, but wasn't there some kind of obscure Turner accounting practice which artificially bumped WCW's net revenue up during the boom years? Something like crediting them with being paid money from some other branch of Turner which technically wasn't income, but was counted as such anyway. That's one reason why the 96-98 years were such vastly better financial statements than all the others. One thing that isn't mentioned much is that WCW had already plateaued before Goldberg ever got the belt. IIRC, wasn't the Goldberg/Hogan title match an impulsive response to Raw finally beating Nitro in the ratings the week before? That boat was already leaking. And as mentioned, always treating the world champion as of secondary importance to whatever Hogan was doing was a huge mistake. Goldberg only main evented a grand total of 2 PPVs during his six-month title reign, and he didn't even show up on two PPVs during that period. Mysterio wrestled in the opener, but otherwise you're right. Also Sir Not Appearing In This Film: Hennig, Bigelow, Rick Steiner, Bagwell, Windham, Stevie Ray, Kanyon, and every single luchadore who wasn't in the opening match. Granted, some of those guys were shitty workers, but they all had one thing in common: they weren't Jerry Flynn. They always (exaggeration) do Cena-Taker on every three hour RAW dont they?Yeah, and it always goes about 3 minutes, and Taker always comes out looking stronger.

I don't buy that. I've talked to Red, and his English is just fine. The real problem is that he's a shy, quiet little dude who isn't any good at cutting promos.

Subconciously self-loathing, then? Because despite all your credentials, you twice hit up the same "stupid fuckin' rednecks" stereotypes that so many yankees often make such an annoying habit out of. I'm just telling you exactly what I've seen, man. In all my time working in various food service gigs, I have never once seen a customer physically assault an employee. In wrestling, it's happened so many times that I literally couldn't remember them all if I wanted to count the examples I have personally witnessed. Yeah, there are accredited college professors who believe shit like that. I don't understand this bizarre unwillingness to admit that anyone but a legitimately retarded person might possibly have ever thought that wrestling wasn't fake.

What's with the racist anti-Southern shit you keep bringing up? (I say "racist" since there isn't an equitable term for the geography-based predjudice you're showing here.) That's twice now from you in this one discussion, and you don't even seem to be joking. And believe me, no, you don't have to be literally retarded in order to think it's real. That's what you clearly don't get. I've known many folks who were perfectly functional members of society who Truly Believed. Sure, they were not Mensa members. But I mean, even some who went to college. That's what I've been talking about this entire time. Seemingly ordinary humans, perhaps a bit dim but not actually handicapped, who genuinely thought that wrestling matches were real fights. I've worked in food service many times. It is a bad analogy, and no, they don't get assaulted anywhere near as often as wrestlers do.

Not even remotely. Entirely different models of human behaviour, with different contexts, different motivations, different goals, different psychological profiles, different everything. Oh yeah, that's a given, of course. But I was never talking about them. My simple comment was "I don't understand why anyone ever thought wrestling was real", followed by pages of people insisting that nobody ever thought it was real, no sir, never no-how. Which is demonstrably untrue.

And? 1. Wrestling is formerly a fixed sport, now an openly fictional entertainment media. It's a spectacle of violence. It has absolutely nothing specifically in common with some girl putting her arm around your shoulder while you order your buffalo wings. Your definition of "working" here is so broad and all-inclusive that you could make the comparison to anything. Like, as I mentioned before, used car salesmen. Or anything where one person is being less than 100% open and truthful in their dealings with another person, for any reason at all. 2. I don't see any relevance here, no matter how tenuous. Men go to Hooters not for the food, but because they're gonna get to eat the food while ogling the servers' cleavage and asscheeks. It's a more socially acceptable alternative to a strip club. 3. Utterly pointless. Yes, men stalk and sexually assault women. Not exactly breaking news there. I don't think it's because of the "work" like you're implying here. Stalkers tend to specifically fixate upon a single particular individual, and mentally imbue them with the stalker's own deranged fantasies of how this is the Perfect Girl and such. I don't think their flirting while bringing you a pitcher of beer has any real impact on that. If Hooters waitresses are stalked and attacked at any higher rate than women who don't work there, my argument would be that it was only because a stalker is more likely to meet the type of girl he's likely to fixate upon at Hooters since they employ only hot young women and then dress them in skimpy clothing so they stand out more, so it's a ready pool of potential victims. And even if this Hooters discussion had any light to shed on the wrestling discussion, which it does not, it still doesn't begin to address my original point about wrestlers getting attacked at a much higher rate than any performer in any remotely similar job. Just about any wrestler who's been in the game for more than a couple years has at least one if not several true stories of having to fight off violent fans. I doubt that the vast majority of veteran Hooters waitresses can say the same thing.

I don't see how it's relevant. The entire start of this discussion was me saying 1.I don't understand how anyone ever thought that wrestling was real, 2.there really have been a whole shitload of such people, I know this for a personal fact since I have met many of them, and 3.wrestling's disproportionately high number of incidents with fans assaulting the promoters, significantly higher than in any other similar field you can name, would seem to back up the first two points. Talking about Hooters girls and televangelists doesn't have anything to do with those issues.

Tom, what point are you even trying to make here? You're just listing examples of anything where human beings manipulate the emotions of other human beings for purposes of their job. You can find nearly infinite examples of that, I'm waiting for you to compare used car salesmen to wrestlers since they're both trying to work the mark.

I did consider stand-up, since that is another place where the performers often barely even try to hide their contempt for the audience. But even in that cynical field, an intentional provacateur like Andy Kaufman is considered to be unusual. Compared to wrestling, where there's typically at least one guy in every match who tries his hardest to make us hate him.

That's the closest I've found to a genuine explanation. I tried to sit down and think of other forms of entertainment in which half the show's goals involve deliberately pissing off the paying customers, and really there aren't many besides purorasslin.

That's hardly equitable, that's more akin to a customer breaking the no-hands rule at a strip club.

But it still doesn't take the place of physical attacks elsewhere. Nobody's running onto the stage to beat up Leno, or rushing the court to take a swipe at Kobe, or charging the octagon to get revenge on Brock for mowing down their favorite fighter. Yet you will see a guy run into the ring to try and knock Eddie Guerrero off a ladder. There was a while there at WCW that someone was hitting the ring on a seemingly weekly basis, despite the fact that the intruders always got their ass kicked and hauled away by security and even the announcers called them idiots. It wasn't glamorized, the act was depicted as immoral and stupid, yet it kept happening. Yeah, of course, but why is wrestling's rate of True Believers so much dramatically higher than any other medium? I don't agree with all that. Plenty of documented examples of fan attacks happening in various places and various time periods. It's not even a "it was just in the South, because southerners suck", lots of incidents happened in arenas like MSG and other population strongholds. Yes, Mid-south did have a disproportionately higher level of attacks than elsewhere, but one big reason those stories are repeated so much is because of Jim Cornette. He's the most prolific shoot-interviewee around, and if you notice, his talking points tend to get repeated a lot on the internet. He tells more Louisiana/Oklahoma stories than anyone else, and says those fans were the craziest around, so naturally the UWF Fans Were Fucking Psycho tales get circulated more often than other similar stories. Oh, if you bring other countries/continents into it, I'm sure it gets even worse. America is, sadly, one of the most civilized nations on the planet. (And no, don't start any "bullshit, Canada/England/Wherever is better!" arguments, I'm talking about compared to the vast majority of the other 200+ countries on this planet.) There's gotta be countless stories about luchadores getting attacked in Mexico that we just never hear about, maybe at an even higher rate than happened in America.

I'm not sure what you guys are even trying to argue here. That almost nobody now thinks it's real? Yeah, we established that (although I still strongly disagree with anyone who claim that there are no true believers, I've met these frightening people over and over). That almost nobody thought it was real in previous eras, and the general audience had the same attitude towards the show as they do now? The much higher numbers of fan attacks back then, compared to their rarity now, tends to prove otherwise. When else does that ever happen in any kind of fictional media? You don't see people rushing the stage to try and beat the shit out of Richard III. Nobody tried to kick the actor playing Biff Tannin's ass on the street because he was so mean to the McFlys. When something happens in other genres, like Dimebag Darrell getting shot, it's always a huge deal because of how rarely these things happen. Not in wrestling. Every single veteran who's been around long enough has stories of fans trying to beat them up or even murder them. Only in wrestling did you get this kind of violent behavior from the audience towards the performers on such a frequent basis. Why is that? Even real combat sports don't get that sort of thing, nobody was trying to shank Mike Tyson whenever he walked back down the aisle from another sicty-second squash match. Only in wrestling did you see rates of violence that high. I've always been curious as to why that is, but nobody ever seems to want to discuss the possible sociological roots behind the phenomenon. The debate always gets deflected into basically "well, they were just all crazy!". Why would wrestling attract such a staggeringly higher percentage of crazy people, more than either fictional entertainment or real sports?

I never said "every fan", I never even implied it. All I said was that there used to be a lot more people who thought it was real than there are now.