Jingus

Heh. Got links to these?

I think this was alleged to be one of Vince Russo's big booking ideas when he very briefly returned to WWE in 2002. Given that it's Russo we're talking about it's certainly believable, but it could also be one of those exaggerated stories that his opponents used to bury him as his ass hit the door on the way out of the company. Wasn't the story there that Russo had some kind of lingering contractual entanglement with the WWF? That he showed up for work and pitched the very worst storylines he could think of (and when Russo is trying to be bad, whoa, just imagine) so that they'd quickly terminate his contract so he'd be free to go work for TNA, where he did show up soon afterward.

SLL's writeup is dead wrong. Totally missed the entire point. Ignorant to the extent of either retardation or insanity. ...everyone knows that Ernest Goes to Jail is clearly the best movie of the series. But seriously, I feel mostly the same way as he did. Let's face it, in most of its incarnations, wrestling is pretty goddamn dumb and a very lowbrow artform. There's more intelligence and psychological depth in your average comic book than on nearly any episode of nearly any wrestling show. The plot twists on Lost typically make more sense than wrestling swerves and turns. On those rare occasions when a booker manages to craft a genuinely smart storyline, you can bet that the followup will not be as good. And the bad points are INCREDIBLY bad. In the year Two Thousand And Freaking Nine, our next wrestling PPV is going to involve an arrogant, lying transvestite wrestling a defenseless middle-aged widow and mother... in a pig pen. And the tranny is the good guy and we're supposed to cheer him as he beats up and humiliates a widow who can't possibly defend herself against her athletic opponent. And this is the GOOD company. Don't even get me started on TNA. Some of this is, however, not technically their fault. After all, what other television show puts out as much sheer volume as the WWE? They've got six hours of new TV to produce every single week, plus PPVs, house shows, internet stuff, the foreign tours, outside media appearances, and other various and sundry ancillary products. That's a shitload of stuff, every single week, just a ghastly grind. How many other fictional entertainment media are required to crank out their shows that fast? Even simplistic stuff like half-hour sitcoms still take weeks to write, shoot, and edit. The only example I can think of that is even close to the ghastly speed of the wrestling model are... soap operas. Which tend to look a lot like wrestling does from a storyline perspective and share many of the same problems. I think that with the insane grind of doing all this show every week, it's rather inevitable that the product itself is going to suffer. Of course, that still doesn't explain away wrestling's tendency to constantly shoot for the lowest common denominator with shit like the aforementioned Santina/Vickie hogwaller match. I guess that's a self-perpetuating sort of thing; wrestling is dirty and stupid, so it attracts people who like dirty and stupid entertainment, they become the core audience (not to mention the next generation of wrestlers), so wrestling stays dirty and stupid forever. And oh yeah, on the friends thing: I literally only have a couple of longterm friends who I didn't meet through wrestling. Being In Da Biz for years really skews my social circle. So I actually don't have a hell of a lot of experience with trying to explain my inexplicable love for watching sweaty musclemen in tights grabbing each other, to non-fans.

I've co-hosted a bunch of episodes of internet radio shows over the years, mostly covering the local indy scene. If you didn't hear some of this stuff, you wouldn't believe it. The greatest times are always whenever someone starts angrily airing personal dirty laundry on the air; one memorable time was when one ex-employee of a particular company started bitching about that fed's "senior referee" and how he got his spot because he provided both free car repairs and gay sex to the promoter. Of course, the guy who was doing the talking was also a money mark and a fucking moron and one of the worst goddamn "wrestlers" I've ever seen in my life... yeah, the Tennessee indy community is full to the brim with pieces of shit, and it often made for exciting radio.

Guys who really like lucha, I guess. Can't mean the guys who write on that actual site, considering there's only six of them, not exactly a consolidated voter base.

He's not the only guy whose offense looked like crap, true, but he was a standout. Even as far back as the early 80s, he looked like a slower Killer Kowalski in terms of how terrible his strikes were. I mean, literally looked like they couldn't possibly be doing any damage or causing any pain, yet his opponents were usually bumping around for this stuff as if they were getting clobbered with bricks. It's an off-putting visual, to see this guy pretending to beat people up when he so clearly isn't really capable of doing it; kinda like latter-day Hogan in some ways. If you don't understand the guy's legacy and the backstory and the style of storytellig and why the fans react to it, it's easy to see how someone might react in disbelief. Like, say someone's only exposure to Baba is some random matches here and there off some old RFVideo Best Of Whoever comp tapes. Which describes several of my wrestler friends in the business, who had the time and inclination to watch some foreign wrestling but not a whole lot of it. Can you fault them for saying "yuck, never wanna see that guy work again"? It took me several years of watching, and going back and seeing his earlier stuff from the 60s and 70s, before I was able to really "get" Baba. For those who never did that, it would be like tuning into WCW during the late 90s and wondering why the fuck this useless old Hogan guy was all over the shows.

There's a lot of people out there who will giggle at the thought of Baba being a great wrestler, including a lot of workers. His strikes looked so slow, ginger, and phony much of the time that it's hard to suspend disbelief and pretend that those shots are actually supposed to hurt. He looked like an out-of-shape old man even as far back as his NWA title reigns, and even by that point his movements were often sluggish and awkward. No matter how tall he was, it's not easy to buy him as a physical threat to guys like Brody or Hansen. I don't actually agree with that viewpoint. I love Baba, it's rare that you ever see psychology that airtight. But I can easily understand how other people might not be able to look past just how physically weak and decrepit he looked for much of his career.

I don't think it's fair to say "he was just boring, period, accept that fact" because a lot of people did indeed like that earlier style of commentary where the announcers tried to be relatively detached from the action. Lots of pre-80s announcers worked in that style. Lance Russell did sort of the same thing, not completely identical since he did show more sarcastic emotion, but it was in the same ballpark. I actually talked about this with Scott Hudson one time, and he had an interesting take on Solie. He said that inside the biz, Solie was known for being much better at laying down commentary tracks over pretaped matches than he was at announcing live at ringside. Supposedly, he liked being able to see the whole thing ahead of time and know what points he wanted to make, and preferred not to work on the fly where he didn't know what was coming. Whoa whoa whoa, let's not go overboard here.

In terms of being forced out of the arena on Monday, yeah mostly. But in rejecting their offer for compromise and fucking over the paying fans of Colorado Springs? Moving the scheduled Smackdown show is every bit as bad as what's being done to them in Denver.

Some apologists on other boards are claiming that Vince is moving the Smackdown show because it's too much of a hassle to transfer the set from Los Angeles to Colorado overnight. Anyone care to bust this myth, say with some dates of Raw and Smackdown shows on back-to-back days in different parts of the country?

Just because he didn't originally plan to be a wrestler and didn't like hanging around the building after his match (a rule I've never entirely understood) doesn't mean that he can't be a big fan of wrestling.

Huh. Weird. Cuz I'm pretty sure he mentioned it in Hooker, a book in which he freely admits that the entire wrestling industry over the whole 20th century was a work. Odd that he'd try to keep kayfabe on that one particular point, doesn't seem like it would be that important.

IIRC, when Thesz was world champ, one of his prerequisites for bookings was that he wouldn't work on any show with midgets or women wrestling, essentially for that reason.

Wrestling's weird blurring of the lines between fantasy and reality has to have something to do with it. I don't think anyone was attacking the guy who played Emperor Palpatine on the street for being such an asshole in Return of the Jedi, even though at that time people were still trying to stab wrestlers in Louisiana on a regular basis. Of course lack of sobriety, or intelligence, or sanity, or some combination thereof are the catalyzing factors in causing some idiot to think he can beat up a giant muscular dude 50 pounds heavier than himself. But like I said earlier, in damn near every example you can name of wrestlers being attacked, it was almost always a fan going after a heel. We can argue over what that proves, sure, but obviously it indicates that these particular fans viewed wrestling differently than other fictional entertainment media.

For me, the bashers are creepier. I mean, I certainly have no problem hating on some Michelle McCool vs Maria crap because neither one of them could wrestle their way out of a paper bag. But those guys who just flat-out hate all women's wrestling because it's women wrestling always left me perplexed. At least I can understand where the fetish types are coming from: it's cute chicks engaging in an activity that this particular viewer already loves. Women from Danica Patrick to Morgan Webb have built entire careers off that sort of thing, so it's hardly exclusive to wrestling. But I cannot comprehend the sort of misogynistic mindset that some people have when they just flat-out dismiss ALL female grappling as crap because they don't have penises. And which commonly available television channels are those promotions on? Most wrestling fans don't want to go out of their way to track down superior product, they just want to see something come on TV. For anyone who just has a standard basic cable package, it's WWE and TNA and nothing else. Yeah, but had any absolutely untrained fitness model who looked like that ever come into the business and managed to improve into a seriously good wrestler? Yeah, Hokuto/Kandori smokes anything Trish ever did, but I can't think of any other Barbie-looking blondes who reached the level that Trish did, especially since she started out with zero ring experience as just a piece of eye candy. EDIT: the new WON recap a couple folders down gave me a new idea. Myth: Gordon Solie was the best old-school commentator from Back In The Day and was universally respected by his peers as the Dean of Wrestling. (For those with experience, don't just say "Lance Russell was better", expound a bit.)

During the Diva Thread at DVDVR, there did seem to be a whole bunch of people who said that people like Kelly Kelly were decent workers, or that it didn't matter cuz they're hot chicks and thus don't need to be any good at wrestling.

Just about every fan/wrestler altercation I ever saw at a show involved a mark attacking a heel. So are most if not all of the examples I can think of with a fan hitting the ring in the WWE or other big-league shows. Draw whatever conclusions you will.

Wow, thanx Bix, that's a fuckin' awesome site right there.

What did Time have to say back then? Oh, the championship matches were fixed almost right from the start of the 20th century, Thesz goes into detail about the Ed "Strangler" Lewis days and how things worked back then. I just couldn't remember what he said about the general public and how they viewed it. Certainly by the time of Gorgeous George and guys jumping off the top rope, those should've been pretty obvious signs to most folks.

Can anyone remember exactly what Thesz said about this in Hooker? I recall that he said "as early as the 19__'s", sometime decades ago there was already widespread suspicion of wrestling being fixed, but don't remember the details.

That's true too, but in those cases usually the local guy got his ass kicked and never came back. The majority of the attacks seemed to typically be from regular fans who attended the shows consistently, who one day just snapped and decided to jump on their least favorite heel.

By the time the 80s rolled around, no, not so many stories like that in most places. Mid-South was considered an aberration because of the sheer amount of fan violence, which didn't occur in most territories. And do remember that the main one telling those stories is Jim Cornette; because of his smark-friendly nature combined with his reputation for old-school encyclopaedic knowledge of all things wrestling, anything he says tends to be later repeated as gospel by legions of internet marks. Anyone else noticed that James E's various tales and opinions tend to be repeated an awful lot like that? Maybe it's just because he's done more shoot interviews and radio/podcast interviews than anyone else and has more of his sayings out there in the public consciousness than most guys, I dunno. But fan violence still did happen on occasion, I'm sure some boozed-up morons thought it was a good idea to try and jump the Horsemen at some point. As long as guns weren't involved, it's possible that Flair & co. didn't think any of the stories were even worth repeating. The behaviour continued, it just got less prevalent over time as more people realized the work and audiences got (somewhat) more sophisticated. It never completely disappeared. Don't forget that even here and now in the 21st century, it seems like every year we get some doofus trying to hit the ring on Raw. And like I said, even I have been attacked once. Admittedly, it was not a fearsome instigator: it was a elderly lady named Marge who was something of a local legend. Still, considering that it was only my second week as a manager, I was utterly unprepared to suddenly find a fan swinging a chain at my face with legitimate malice and injurious intent. Hell, I hadn't even done anything yet! I was running out to the ring, not heading back from the ring after having committed whatever depraved act that my chickenshit heel manager was doing that week. I'm glad it was an old lady; anyone more healthy probably would've knocked me the fuck out before I knew what happened. As it was, I barely got my hand up in time to block the chain being whipped at my eyes, and the impact raised a blood blister on my knuckle which stayed there for a full month. I grabbed the chain, wincing at the pain in my hand, and briefly considered my options: hit back? No, it was a fragile old woman, the kind you could possibly kill just by knocking over. So I merely unleashed a rather vile stream of profanity in her general direction which I've never ever called another woman before or since. Of course she didn't get banned, or even thrown out for the night; the penny-pinching indy promoters literally think that it's more important to get that particular six bucks every week than it is to help ensure their employees' safety. I won't even go into the one time I got conned into particpating a "a lucky fan whips the heel" raffle ticket sale. Also, I've been security or bystander to several other fan/wrestler confrontations, some a hell of a lot more serious than some demented old bitch with a dog collar chain. The attacks do still happen, believe me. There are some legitimately retarded and/or insane people providing the asses for those seats. Here's a separate question: why do non-fans still think that all wrestling fans still believe it's real? I know every single one of you has at some point had a conversation with some smug fucker who, upon learning that you watch wrestling, snickered some variation on "Don't you know that crap's all fake?!" I mean, fuck, even goddamn Ready to Rumble admitted that it was a work with predetermined finishes and called spots. Why does this "stupid wrestling fans think it's real" meme still exist in popular society?

Also, while maybe only 1% of the population believed wrestling was real... you can bet that every single person who made up that 1% showed up to the matches, while the vast majority of the other 99% did not. There really are people who think wrestling is real competition. Seriously. Not many, but they're out there. I've met them. Even been attacked myself once. What can I say? Some people are just fucking stupid and/or crazy.

It's straight-up lying to claim that bookstores didn't carry Wrestling Babylon. I've seen it on the shelves at Barnes & Noble and Books-a-Million. Hell, I've seen it on display more places than some much more "legitimate" books, like Regal's autobiography. Why would he whine about such a blatant falsehood?

I've heard plenty of stories about various Rock promos being written by Russo and Gewirtz and the like, so it's not even close to accurate to claim that he wrote all "his own material". From what I heard, wrestling is definitely more respected in those other mentioned countries than it is here. But it's not like it's some kind of solemn tradition of national sport or anything like that. It just looks that way to some of us because of how badly American society looks down on wrestling and treats it as a joke, beneath contempt. With the worst part being that it's not even an accurate joke, since most non-fans still for some reason believe that we think it's all a real sport with legitimate competition. How the hell does that particular stereotype still exist, two decades after Vince went public with the work, and long years after Foley and others sold a whole shitload of books totally exposing the inner workings?