Jingus

IIRC, aren't both of Raven's parents wealthy lawyers? Could certainly make a difference here.

Heh. What did Scott have to say about his future commentary partner?

I wonder how they manage that? Pretty much every qualified and experienced media professional would already be part of their respective unions. It wouldn't be easy to find people who would be good enough to work a Wrestlemania but still not connected with any union. Especially all those infamous Hollywood writers we keep hearing about, they gotta be with the Writer's Guild. Come to think of it, WCW, ECW, and TNA all did the same thing, no credits. I wonder how wrestling gets away with this.

That's odd, since the television crew is the one part of the WWE in which I'm almost certain the employees would be part of a union. Media employees are nearly all unionized, and you'd think their organization would have some rules about the workers receiving a fair screen credit.

Depends. Wrestling on television has always had this bizarre double standard, where they can get away some objectionable things that most other shows can't (a Samoan jungle savage in 2008!), but they're also handcuffed in a lot more ways. For example: someone gets murdered in every single episode of Monk, in often much more disgusting circumstances than a simple car wreck, and that show is still rated PG. But you're absolutely right, if a wrestling show consistently did that kind of thing, they probably couldn't get away with the same rating. Although such a double standard is unfair (if a guy just verbally threatened in a promo to commit the kind of violent acts which are commonplace on something like The Shield or Law & Order SVU, that wouldn't go over so well) most of it is wrestling's own fault. They still cling to the bizarre old omerta standard of kayfabe, and pretend that its content is real a lot harder than any other fiction television show does. Little things like half the wrestlers still going by their real names, or the shows not having a credits sequence to list the cast and crew, those sort of thing give the impression that this stuff is supposed to be taken more seriously than it really should.

I've always wondered why they never combine some other gimmick with the blindfold in order to make it more fighting and less hide-and-seek. Like, just add a dog collar stipulation, something along those lines.

That sounds familiar. Is he a guy who looks like a cross between Stan Hansen and the big bald German guy who punched out Indy and then got chopped up by the plane propellor in Raiders of the Lost Ark? If so, I managed him a couple times, and I don't think it's the same guy as this dude.

That's something which has been bothering me. Listening just to crowd reaction, except for Matt Hardy, Colin Delaney is quite possibly the most over babyface on the roster. He often seems to get a better pop than his mentor figure Tommy Dreamer. But of course, this is the WWE, so for various reasons he just gets mercilessly squashed every time he gets in the ring.

Hell, a few of us at TSM have founded basically a bi-weekly Watch Shitty Late-Era WCW Shows And Bitch About It In The Chatroom club. Tomorrow we're doing Bash at the Beach 2000. I predict much cursing from myself. But we aren't watching it because it's good wrestling by any standard definition; it's simply for us weird MST3K types who likes to subject ourselves to crappy entertainment.

To be fair, he was also the only "WWF" wrestler booked as a heel Not at first he wasn't. He was just another WWF hometown hero fighting off the evil WCW foreign invaders, or at least the cruiserweight division of such. Yet he got thoroughly booed, and was the only guy at the time which the crowd turned on like that. As to the question of why he was so thoroughly reviled in the first place? It's an interesting debate. For one thing, he was one of the few guys who essentially hadn't changed a single thing about their gimmick since 1996. (I don't think the million crotch chops or the Bronco Buster helped him much longterm either.) Then you have to look at the booking. In late 99, his tag partner Kane was one of the more inexplicably popular babyfaces in the company. Then X-Pac turns on him, for no real reason. And steals his girlfriend. And somehow beats the psycho pyromaniacal giant in the vast majority of their feud matches. In fact, from his heel turn onward, few people ever beat X-Pac. Look down the results for the year 2000, and you'll see a hell of a lot of DQs, no contests, and X-Pac going over. He was strangely protected for being a midcard cruiserweight heel. And then there was his team with Road Dogg; as long as it wasn't a title match, it felt like they won every time. They even beat the Dudleys twice in a row in tables matches on PPV. Plus DX 2.5 tended to have really boring matches; Road Dogg was firmly entering his "I just don't give a fuck" period, and X-Pac had no chemistry with his partner whatsoever. I mean, so little chemistry that it really made you pine for the days when Billy Gunn would be wrestling in this spot instead, and, I mean, I can't believe I just SAID that but it was true at the time. And then there was X-Factor... don't think I need to say anything more there, just "X-Factor" should be enough. I think the crowd just got sick of seeing the same old thing from him, and got progressively sicker as the WWF didn't take the hint.

Just curious, whaddya mean by that? I don't know what exactly you were trying to communicate, but to me it came off like you didn't believe me and were challenging me to back up my statement. I said that JBL playing bumper-Cena made the "seventh or eighth" incident I could remember of attempted vehicular homicide in the WWE, and we came up with well over a dozen examples here, so it's not like I was indulging in wild hyperbole. Oh, and I remembered another one. When the Big Bossman ran over the Big Show with the Bluesmobile at Show's fake father's fake funeral, right before Show went coffin surfing. ...if there are any Vince Russo supporters still left, please direct your attention to the previous sentence for why I firmly believe we need to send a T-1000 back through time to kill Russo before he ever became involved with wrestling.

Triple H tried to run over Vince in their streetfight at Armageddon 99. Big Show flipped a car over, I think he was in theory at least aiming for someone. Kane tried to run over Raven with a golf cart at Wrestlemania X7. And wasn't there some segment with Mark Henry holding back a car as a feat of strength that someone tried to sabotage? And surely Austin at some point tried to run someone down with all his various wacky vehicles.

I've heard many times about all the mistakes which were supposedly in SL&H. I've got the apparently "corrected" paperback version, and noticed a few minor errors here and there, getting a couple of dates wrong, that sort of thing. But nothing really important. What all was so thoroughly fucked up in the hardback edition which gave the book its reputation for inaccuracy?

Ya know, this makes at least seven or eight incidences of attempted vehicular manslaughter on WWE programming over the past decade or so, and those are just the ones I can remember offhand.

Don't feel bad. I got a 36, and while I get it's supposed to be a pun, I'm still puzzled as to what exactly it's supposed to mean. "Famous-er"? That's not even a word. Not even slang, at least none that I've ever heard. (I've also been confused for the past three years about what the hell Cena meant when he called Jericho "Y-2-Cheap".) I only started watching wrestling about nine years ago, and it took me a while to catch on to the fact that Goldberg couldn't work his way out of a paper bag. The first match I saw with him was the miracle that DDP somehow magically conjured at Halloween Havoc '98, and most of the others I saw with him were just squashes, and it took me a little while to stop reacting like a mark to how the announcers hyped up certain guys. So it wasn't until he kicked Bret into early retirement that I noticed something was terribly wrong here. Kinda similar thing with Ultimate Warrior, too; for a while the only matches I saw with him were from Wrestlemanias, where he usually didn't do too bad, so it took a while for the truth to sink in.

Hey, you've never been in the ring dammit, so you don't know anything, bah gawd! Though seriously, pretty much every time I mention my experience it's attached to some anecdotal example relevant to the topic under discussion; I don't see anything wrong with using my time in the trenches to illustrate some talking points. Dude, there is no proof, not proof like a court of law would recognize such. People speculating over whether Benoit would have never killed if he hadn't been in the wrestling business and been so driven and taken all the steroids and taken all the bumps... it is exactly that, just speculation. (Hell, if he hadn't done all that stuff, Kevin Sullivan wouldn't have booked himself against Chris in that program and he and Nancy would've never spent that time together and the questions would all be moot anyway.) Once again, my question, which has thus far gone unanswered: if the wrestling business drove Benoit to act this way, why is he the only one who ever acted this way? Why didn't Dynamite Kid come home one night and strangle his wife? Or Pillman, or Eddie, or any of the others? Benoit was the only professional wrestler in history to commit this act. Clearly there was something about his situation which was different from every other wrestler around the world in recorded history. It's a lazy copout to just say "omg rasslin's fault!" when it's obviously something more complex. We can't exactly dig Benoit up and ask him why he did it. He left no note or explanation. As I mentioned earlier, family annihilation is a pretty specific crime which almost always happens because of internal domestic problems within the family itself. Outside pressures may play a background factor, sure, but it usually boils down to: this guy fucking despised his wife, so he finally killed her. Then he realized he wouldn't get away with it and his kids lives would be ruined, so he killed them too and then himself. That's a common pattern for these events, and it stays true regardless of what the killer did for a living. This is very true however. Partly because the outsiders are so often so despicably wrong on their details; guys, how many times has a non-fan ever told you "uh, you do know wrestling's fake, right?" like it was an entirely new concept which you'd never been exposed to before. One of the best examples: Ready to Rumble. This godawful piece of long stringy shit masquerading as a motion picture clearly had nothing but condescension and contempt for professional wrestling, its employees, and especially its fans. And having spent five years working low-budget Southern indy feds (whoops, there goes that experience-dropping again LOL) I could tell you a lot of stories about the frighteningly backwards people who sometimes comprise the audience of this show. But that's not where Ready to Rumble was coming from; the screenwriters here were quite clearly Hollywood writer types who probably had never watched wrestling a day in their lives before being hired to this project, and they filled up their movie with creaky old stereotypes. Wrestling fans are inbred rednecks who live in the deep woods, emotionally stunted manchildren who are still virgins at about thirty years old, so forth and so on. This false, plastic portrayal of the business and the people surrounding it had all the venomous hatred for wrestling that even the most jaded cynic would ever need, but it came from the wrong place, drew the wrong conclusions, and in the end somehow made wrestling look like more of a joke than it already is. And the wrestlers know they're jokes, and that's part of the reason for the defensiveness. Ever wonder why the more charitable wrestlers usually spend their time helping Make A Wish or visiting sick kids or doing just about anything involving children, instead of working a Jerry Lewis telethon or putting in hours on a rape hotline or doing something more adult? It's because most of those adult charities would tell the wrestlers to get lost. The kids are the only ones who don't judge, they just buy into the superhero formula and buy toy spinner belts. Wrestling is seen as being barely a step above pornography in polite society, and it's small wonder that after years of experiencing that sort of attitude that da boys would get overly protective and defensive about da biz. (There's also of course still the lingering influence of the kayfabe omerta days to cast an exclusionary vibe over everything, but that's a whole nother discussion.) Of course, the problem with such defensiveness is that it doesn't help wrestling's case one bit. For every smiling, friendly, articulate Cena or Foley who tries to provide a positive public face for the wrestling juggernaut, there's a hundred Billy Grahams who are more than willing to bury the whole thing nonstop, plus a thousand Brian Christophers who just look like complete idiots while making the most transparent excuses. Of course, the most common misconception is that somehow every wrestler in the business likes the way things are run, or they're all complicit in the vast conspiracy to corrupt each others' morals. Which is utterly untrue. I'm sure there are countless guys in the WWE who hate their jobs, hate their company, hate the creepy locked-room perviness that they only discovered after they'd already signed their contracts, and only do it for the money and exposure and because they don't have any other specialized job skills. The problem is: who wants to save wrestling? When most wrestlers get tired of all the bullshit, they usually just quit and get out, like I did. The government and general public pays very little attention to the few Mark Meros who try to be crusaders, and they ultimately accomplish little or nothing. Meanwhile, who stays in the business, who succeeds and prospers? Guys who like it that way. The Triple Hs and Hogans and Nashes and Austins and Undertakers who are more than willing to perpetuate the same old shit, as long as they're the ones on top doing the shitting and not the ones underneath eating it. The ones who want it to change rarely if ever get in any sort of position of power where they're able to enact any change. That's very true. Kinda like with Ann Coulter. I've read a little bit of her stuff, and found that in terms of base logic, I actually agree with some of her general positions on certain issues. However, she's SO ugly and hostile in how she states these positions, usually by calling her opponents a bunch of godless liberal swine who literally want to destroy America, that it makes me not want to agree with anything she ever says and stop reading the book entirely. Same thing with a lot of her opponents who criticize the Republicans; I sure as hell didn't vote for Bush, but when some hippie starts babbling about how we went to Iraq to steal all their oil and Hail To The Chimp and making inevitable Nazi comparisons, it makes me totally dismiss that person as a biased nutcase who is not worth listening to. An overly negative tone of writing can certainly turn someone away from your subject matter.

Which is close to how I view the topic. While certainly wrestling was a major factor in Benoit's life, I think we still have zero proof that the wrestling industry itself is actually to blame for this. Family annihilation is a very specific niche crime; it's not like other forms of domestic violence or other kinds of murder. If wrestling led Benoit to be a family annihilator, why is he the only one to ever be affected in such a way? Number of other pro wrestlers who have murdered their entire immediate family: zero. Of all the people out there who've slaughtered their families, and there have been many cases, Benoit was the only one whose day job happened to be professional wrestling. If this was truly the cause of this crime, you'd think it wouldn't be the only such incident in recorded history. Now, if you wanted to make an argument for the Jimmy Snuka killing? Sure. The early WWF locker room was known as being loaded with cocaine, which causes way more dangerous and violent behavior than steroids ever does. And especially since Vince essentially got Snuka off the hook by not breaking kayfabe and maintaining that he was some kind of uncivilized jungle savage and had McMahon do all the talking for him. That would be something much more easily blamed on wrestling.

He was, but there's a hell of a difference between USWA and WCW.

That's... nonsense. This is supposed to be a factual, nonfiction book. Hence, inaccuracies are bad. Telling stories which didn't happen that way or never happened at all don't illustrate a damn thing.

Um... weird. I know it's an easy go-to since Dave knew him so well, but it's kinda odd that he makes literally half the article about Pillman and then just cuts to black like the Sopranoes finale. The pressure of constantly writing on a deadline, I guess.

Heh. Never heard about that part. When fricking Mike Graham is shooting on you, that's like... I can't even come up with a metaphor sad enough. Good writeup with many valid points. Is that the whole thing, though? It just randomly cut out at the end there, felt like there's more.

Example #47389 of why I generally don't trust the majority of the news media in general: just about every time they do a story on a subject I know a whole lot about, they get a truly embarassing quantity of stuff absolutely wrong and apparently did zero research. Yeah, this guy whom nobody has ever heard of wrestled in all of the Big 3, sure. WWE contract employee Chris Jericho is gonna help their rinkydink startup hardcore fed, uh-huh. He actually makes a living on the outlaw indy circuit, right. All the veterans would rather be perfecting their art in national guard armories for peanuts instead of getting paid and being on national television, of course. The only part which seemed even vaguely plausible was him claiming to have trained with Chris Champion, since of course we all know Chris did time in Evansville (oh that pun was just awful), but it's awfully convenient that he happened to pick a guy who suffered a major stroke several years back and might not remember those days too well. My absolute favorite part, talking about his alleged first trainer: You can't BUY carny like that. EDIT: I looked at his Myspace page. Hah! Chris Champion is his #1 friend, followed by Dr. Death, Verne Gagne, and Honkeytonk Man. Uh-huh. The irony is I've personally worked shows with a dozen of his Top Friends guys, and could personally ask at least two of 'em if they've ever heard of this goof and what the deal is, if I was so bored that I really felt like spending that much time and effort on this waste of humanity.

It didn't even have anything to do with that. Did you see the footage? Del Ray was there to catch her, it was just pure "Sid jumps off the second turnbuckle" coincedence that Mickie came down in precisely the wrong way.

No idea why, but it doesn't really matter. The height was still the same as a dive from the top rope to the floor, which is something you'll probably see at just about any wrestling show you ever go to. Well, as long as they're not in a building with a low ceiling anyway.

She wasn't even doing anything that extreme. It was essentially just a dive from the top to the floor. Every lucha match usually has at least one of those, not to mention every American or Japanese cruiserweight flippyfloppy match, or half the matches on any random ROH card. That's the thing about so many of the worst injuries: they generally don't happen because of some giant highspot, it's usually on the ordinary stuff that people do every night. Orton and Melina breaking bones on simple bumps out of the ring, Cena ripping himself giving a hiptoss, Triple H and Nash and Vince all tearing quads by walking, that kind of stuff.