Jingus

The oft-unacknowledged truth is that wrestling has a hell of a lot of homosexuals in it. It's a bizarre double standard; the actual workers who are gay tend to be closet types so as to avoid taking shit from the rest, but on the other hand you often end up with a whole lot of gay indy promoters, money marks, photographers, and apparently now website writers. (Between Ryder and now Keller, that's an awfully big fraction of the most prominent "journalists" in this field.) Hell, in Nashville alone, there were at least four different promoters who were well known as being out of the closet, some of them with reputations of being just a wee bit two predatory towards all their young employees with shiny muscles in tights. Meanwhile, I can only think of two wrestlers who worked that area who were openly gay, and one of them kept quiet about it and only his friends really knew. Obviously in terms of simple demographic probability there had to be more guys who liked guys in those rings, but whoever they are they hid it well.

Link please? I looked, but couldn't find it. In fact, didn't seem to find any actual matches available to watch on that website's video section.

I somehow Forrest Gumped my way into essentially being in charge of that board. Dammit, I never asked for this job! Hey Loss... just saying, with the increasingly unpredictable way Mike has been acting recently, you might want to have a Plan B in the back of your mind just in case for whatever reason you needed a different server.

Funny how this story never once mentioned the word "Goldberg". I don't think it's fair to paint Watts as somehow being racist against black people, when he was the promoter who essentially broke the color barrier using black stars and booked the first black world champion.

Firstly, I think you're overstating the psychological overtones here. This isn't some group of Roman senators or Mafia family where personal image can get you killed. Secondly, why would Vince care? He's the boss. He's the biggest shareholder. Nobody can possibly challenge him within the company in any way. Whether this rumor is spread around or not, it doesn't alter his actual business dealings one tiny bit. Of course I have, everyone has. But okay, let's assume that Vince does indeed have some kind of massive mental investment in not looking like a bitch in this particular situation. Once again: Vince is in total control. He's a micromanager with an much-storied God complex who insists on personally making every little decision in his company, including intruding on the lives of his employees whom he demands absolute loyalty from. He's also known as being incredibly insistent on rewriting history in the way which shows him in the best light. Vince isn't ever a guy to just sit there and swallow something he doesn't like, he always fires back aggressively. I just don't buy him knowing that this rumor exists among his underlings and not angrily deciding to squash it. The most plausible explanation seems to be that nobody in the company has ever dared ask him about it, so either he doesn't know about it or just thinks it's yet another dumb rumor that nerds giggle about on the internet. It wouldn't be the first time that the employees have quietly kept certain things away from him.

I hated that promo too. I thought Shawn sounded ridiculous trying to do a Taker-style promo in a deep Batman voice, and the cheap phony graveyard with the styrofoam headstones reminded me of old Vampiro WCW skits.

It's been repeatedly stated that Vince himself definitely has some kind of staunch anti-Macho bias, that story's been reported several times by Meltzer et al. I just can't buy the "Vince won't bring Savage in because of a rumor which Vince knows isn't true" idea. So what if other people believe it? When the hell has Vincent Kennedy McMahon ever cared about that? This is a dude who publicly called out Congrees, for god's sake. If he wanted to bring Savage back, he certainly wouldn't let some rumor stop him, especially one he knows to be untrue. "Hey everyone, gather round. Stephanie: did Randy fuck you?" "No." "Okay, SlimJims for everyone!"

I've seen the weatherman tape. That dude was like an Andy Kaufmann-level working non-worker, his smack talking was awesome. The "wrestlers", though... oof. Was that even supposed to be a G2S? I literally couldn't tell exactly what they were going for, they should've done a standard body slam or something equally simple. The one who did the move looked like a couch potato, and the other one just looked like a couch. That guy was like the Stay-Puft Marshmellow Man's nerdy little brother, he never took his glasses off even when they were doing a spot, and generally looked like the least-intimidating guy on earth who weighs in excess of 400 lbs.

SLL, why is it every time I get into these arguments with you, they somehow wander off on a tangent to a tangent of the original point? Great, you proved that Vince might be a raging psychopath. As previously noted, there's not much in there which would convince a judge that he needs to be locked up. Seeing as I don't have a copy of the DSM-IV handy and it's been long years since my own psychology classes, I'm not even going to try to debate the specifics. And your tendency to come back with a 5:1 text ratio on everything I'm saying, yeesh, I haven't done loooong post dissections like that since I was a terribly idealistic young smark. And yes, your hyperbole does hurt your case, especially how you seem to imply that "did happen" and "might as well have happened" are equitable concepts. The only point I was really trying to make here is that it's pretty unlikely that Vince refuses to deal with Savage because he mistakenly thinks in his crazy haze that the Macho Man deflowered young Stephanie. It could be the case, sure, but there's little evidence supporting that theory. "Vince might be delusional enough to believe it, and anyway there's no other explanation" is not nearly enough justification to claim the theory is true.

You seriously believe than in a literal sense? Except possibly for the drug use (the only visibly obvious sign of which we've seen is his muscular body suggesting steroids), absolutely none of that would hold water in any sort of legal dealings actually relating to factual definitions of insanity. He had a shitty abusive childhood? Happens to the best of us. He bought his mama a tennis court? I'm not sure what that's even supposed to imply. He's absolutely cutthroat in his business dealings and unwilling to take blame in areas which could hurt him financially? In other words, he's the president of a typical corporation. People aren't declared incompetent or committed unless they are utterly incapable of operating in society. As noted, Vince runs a large profitable company. Sure he has plenty of people helping him, but we've had mountains of anecdotal evidence that Vince is such a micro-manager that he puts his own stamp on everything and personally reviews all but the tiniest details. If he were really a drooling nutjob like you're making him out to be, he couldn't have done all this. SLL, weren't you the one who once said that Vince is literally building up an army of drug-fueled psychopaths like a comic book villain? I know that you have made statements to the effect of "you must be legitimately insane in order to become a professional wrestler, period". I think you're taking this shit a wee bit too seriously. While of course it is bad to bury one's head in the sand and pretend that wrestling doesn't have many serious problems, I think it's also bad to exaggerrate them in such a purple-prose fashion. You almost sound like a political talk show host on the radio, Chicken Littling about how the opposing party is gonna destroy America if they win the next election. The hyperbole doesn't enhance your points.

Not saying it's impossible to believe. But we certainly don't have enough of a complete picture here to assume something like that is true. Firstly, why wouldn't Vince just ask Stephanie himself? There are all kinds of reasons why he might not, sure, but none of us have any idea if they would be anything close to the truth. Do any of you know exactly how close Vince is to Steph? Exactly what sort of things they talk about, what subjects might be taboo, in what circumstances she might lie to him? I sure as hell don't, and I doubt anyone here has ever even spoken to the McMahons. Even Meltzer hasn't said that Vince himself has either said or thought that Randy fucked Steph, so this is all speculation on the level of backstage fantasy booking. "Savage didn't fuck Stephanie, but for some reason Vince thinks Savage fucked Stephanie, because Vince is certifiably insane" is a theory which requires you to meet it much more than halfway. It might be the truth, but there's very little evidence suggesting that is the case. Just explaining everything with "Vince is crazy, so it doesn't have to make any sense whatsoever!" is a copout. EDIT: and yeah, how did that "Savage locked up Liz backstage" thing work anyway? Any time he was in the ring or shooting a promo or anything, she was always right there with him. When were they ever separated backstage? Maybe more importantly, how many arenas have some kind of prison cell type room in which the door can't be unlocked from the inside? Even if Liz was locked inside, why couldn't another wrestler unlock it from the outside? If it took a key, how the hell would Savage get a key to this mysterious locked room in every city they visited? Did he go around the country nailing a padlock on some random door backstage in every building? This is a story which everyone believes and has been repeated many times, but on closer examination the details seem too illogical to be credible.

...what? There isn't? I somehow doubt that Vince would in reality be cool with Mark Calloway sacrificing Stephanie on a cross for the purposes of a Satanic wedding, for example. I think Vince's crazyness is being overstated here. Some of you guys are literally acting like he's the type of babbling asylum inmate who wears a tinfoil hat and throws his own poop everywhere. He's still micromanaging a multi-million dollar international corporation, with an incredibly complicated web of deals with television networks and other partners, which has remained relatively profitable even in the current economic recession. For a geriatric steroid abuser and alleged coke addict who's been hit in the head really hard a lot of times, I'd say he's doing pretty damn well. It's a hyperbolic falsehood to accept any weird rumor about him and just go "well, Vince is crazy, so it's probably true that he contacted NASA to ask if they could freeze his sperm and transport it to other planets in the future in order to carry on the legacy of the genetic jackhammer". Pretty much all of his lies and delusions are things which relate directly to his business dealings, like the "I taught the fans to chant E-C-W" sort of thing.

I think part of it is how unusually strong the rest of this year's inductees are. Ricky Steamboat, Bill Watts, both Funk brothers, and Stone Cold. Kinda makes Koko look like small change getting rained on with his own 38.

Why are you guys assuming that it will be such a hack job? They've already done DVDs for every other major promotion whose footage they own, and the AWA, World Class, and ECW retrospectives were all more evenhanded than anyone really expected. They still had their share of biases and dirt swept under the rug, of course, but it's not like they were just one-sided hit pieces. The guys who make the DVDs do tend to be the most fair-minded employees in all of Stamford, people who actually pay attention to history. The only times they ever totally buried anyone were with Ultimate Warrior and Paul Roma, and really, can you blame 'em for those?

Anyone else remember all the online smark hatred for Debra back around Benoitgate? I couldn't begin to recall how many times someone claimed she "had an agenda" or was "putting herself over" when she appeared on those news shows. Yet nobody could ever quite explain what her agenda was. She wasn't trying for publicity, she was completely out of the wrestling business, she wasn't trying to sell a book or anything. She seemed to just want to tell the truth about things that happened, and it's pathetic how angry some people will get when you just tell the truth about things they'd rather ignore. The WWE does sometimes still take some odd little shots at Bruno. Like, a few months back on Raw, they had a video package about the big Shea Stadium show... and they pretended that Hogan/Andre was the main event match that drew the crowd. Never even mentioned Bruno/Larry. Which is rather like if twenty years from now they did a video package on Wrestlemania X-7 and talked about how Triple H vs. Undertaker had drawn this massive sold-out crowd.

I was surprised by Meltzer saying that, I always thought it was just one of those DVDVR Sleaze Thread rumors. Can someone remind me what the specific story is supposed to be? All I can remember is that it's something to do with Macho Man sticking his pee-pee in young Stephanie's hoo-haa, when she was 18 at the very oldest.

If Bret could appear on their television again, Bruno could too. Don't know exactly what it would take to get him there, but everyone has some kind of need or weakness you can use for leverage.

I've got some Irish heritage too, and would've never heard the story if I didn't used to be an obsessive reader when I was a kid, so I learned about St. Paddy in between Finn MacCool and Nessie. It's not a commonly known legend. But how's what he said supposed to be some kind of racist slur?

Yeah, the gift card is the part that got me too. And this is coming from someone whose family also suffered at the hands of a crazy guy who tried to hire a hitman and wound up in jail (long personal story, don't ask) but that thirteen dollars and six cents was the part that got me. How does that even work? Was it one of those debit card-like gift cards, where the dude had already used it there once before and thus produced the odd number?

Which makes those rare moments where they acknowledge such history to be little extra bonuses. Like, a few months back, both HHH and Kane were on the face side in some big multi-man tag match. Both of them ended up standing next to each other on the apron... and Trips, as casually as he could, stepped around the ringpost so as not to be right next to the guy who he'd feuded with a hundred times. That was kinda cute. But generally, while I do agree that wrestling ain't Shakespeare and shouldn't be held to quite such high standards as other forms of entertainment, they do tend to often do a much worse job than they could. As has been pointed out, there's a bunch of ways that they could've explained why Hunter and Stephanie have been secretly married all this time, but they did not. Far too often they're just plain lazy about this sort of thing; how many times have we seen someone turn face/heel with no explanation beyond just putting on their new stable's t-shirt? Hey, this reminds me of something. At some point a few years ago, didn't the WWE specifically hire some Hollywood writer to be in charge of minimizing continuity errors? And didn't they end up quickly firing him because he found too many fuckups when he went back over the storylines? My memory's hazy on this, if anyone else remembers the details please respond.

On the night of the Fingerpoke, nobody knew if Kevin Nash was actually willing to do the job or not. Unfortunately for him, he didn't realize that the Hulkster had studied Jeet Kun Do with Bruce Lee himself. Hogan delivered a thrust strike to Nash's solar plexus so hard that it knocked the giant off his feet. Nash played along afterwards, pretending that was the idea all along in order to keep his street cred in the locker room.

Maybe it's one of those old No Closed Fists type rules which was sometimes enforced sixty years ago, but is forgotten and meaningless today?

Yeah, "junkie" is supposed to specifically refer to a heroin addict, which is an entirely different animal from a pothead.

I can't blame him for the smiling thing. His character was that of a borderline-insane goofball, after all, and from his version of events it sounded like nobody gave them any real direction other than to just stand there as Vince walked past. And was that segment taped live? I doubt it, for something that complex. If Vince or anyone had a problem with him grinning, they should've just yelled CUT, told him to knock it off, and shot it again. You'd think that would be a hell of a lot easier than "nah, let's keep that take, and instead we'll bury both him and his totally innocent tag partner for the next year straight". Gotta love that WWE mindset about how settling internal scores is more important than putting out the best product. Do you know something the rest of us don't? Still wondering about this.

Thanks for the details here Johnny. Though I would still question why the facility still failed to contact the police even after the man's death. Is that common practice? Also, why the hell was a man who had as much money as Verne Gagne not only in a nursing home, but in one cheap enough that he had a roommate?