Jingus

So... Mushnick believes that Benoit was of completely sound mind and must've been telling the truth about the dogs in his text message... in the middle of his homicidal rampage? If Benoit had texted someone at that point and said the sky was blue, they should've looked out the window to confirm it first. And besides, the company only had a two-hour window, even by Irv's most generous calculations. Who the hell could they have gotten on that short notice to go to the house, clean stuff up, avoid the dogs, and leave zero evidence of their presence? Did they have Atlanta's equivalent of Marcellus Wallace and The Wolf on payroll?

And there's your answer. Was anyone else as short as Lawler successful in that company at that time? Tully was about the same height, but he's the only one I can come up with who worked on top. Even Ricky & Robert were a couple inches taller than the King. Even though JCP didn't place the same emphasis on height that Vince did, it still played a factor in who they hired and pushed.

Thanks for typing out that whole Mania rundown. It's funny watching Dave back then tearing into the WWF when he sees a weakness. True dat, you. I've never quite understood why blading has always been such a controversy, when it's a relatively harmless practice. In the Big List Of Ways That Wrestling Can Cripple Or Kill You, mildly cutting your forehead with a small razor has gotta be down near the bottom. I guess it's just easier for Geraldo type journalists to squeal about people cutting themselves than it is to take a serious in-depth look on how years of bumping impacts the spine and internal organs. On the other hand... Hey, wait a minute, scabies are parasites which are big enough to see with the naked eye, and burrow into human skin. You don't get them through blood, like Dave seemed to imply here. They're an STD, not a blood-born disease. Heh.

I have never, ever comprehended the "MMA = prowres" argument. Professional wrestling is, by definition, not a competitive sport. MMA, by defition, is. That's it. Period. If PRIDE or Pancrase worked some fights, that doesn't make them into puro companies, it just means that they fixed stuff; they still pretended that it was all real. Having the occasional work doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of the fights are shoots, and that the whole program is presented as a legitimate contest. By that logic, Don King is the greatest wrestling promoter in the world. Not just a snarky comment, seriously, a lot of fixing goes on in boxing, why shouldn't it be counted in under the same rules? More ridiculously, should we also count baseball as pro wrestling because that one time the World Series was fixed, and they heavily promote their program based on personal rivalries between the teams? Wrestling is fake, and no matter how physical and dangerous it gets, it's not a sport. I don't count Jackass or kung-fu movies as sports either, and they involve about the same amount of full contact and serious injury. And regardless of how many times some guy laid down for Takada in PRIDE, that's still an anomaly in a company which is fundamentally designed to promote legitimate competitive athletic contests.

Point taken, but Bubba was also willing to fall off ladders and go through flaming tables. The Dream didn't mind bleeding, but he never did the sort of big bumping which today's era demands. Of course, he might've been willing to if he'd come along thirty years later and knew that he'd need to do more than talk jive and throw elbows to earn him a spot. So it comes down to, would he have beeb willing to do what it takes today? That's a hypothetical question with no answer. But if you stuck 1981 Dusty in a time machine and dumped him on Vince's doorstep today without Dusty changing anything about how he worked or looked, I doubt he'd even get a first chance, much less any others. That's the irony I was thinking about the other night when they debuted Ted Dibiase Jr. He sure as hell doesn't have the kind of physique his father had when he debuted. If he did have the Million Dollar Man 1987 body, no way he'd have been signed. The WWE obsession with shiny steroid muscle has gotten to the point where they value that over all other factors, except maybe height.

I haven't seen any of Dusty's earlier stuff, what was he like pre-80s? Because by the time he won the world title, no, Vince would never hire a guy that fat and push him as any kind of serious threat. Well, then again, Rikishi... but I'd still think that his weight would be a major obstacle which his career probably couldn't overcome today. Plus, for this hypothetical exercise, are you saying that he'd still wrestle exactly the same? Dusty didn't exactly conform to the rope-running expectations of WWE Style.

Well that explains a lot. I've never heard half this stuff before, good dope.

My issue is, doesn't that description fit countless other wrestlers? What made Benoit different? The only unusual points with him seem to be the strange nature of his career (little workrate guy who became world champion) and the coincedence of several of his close friends dying over a relatively short period of time. Aside from that, what you wrote there perfectly describes God knows how many wrestlers who grew up being weirdo wrestling superfans.

This. I don't get the "he was ALWAYS a complete psychopath!" viewpoint. Is there supposed to be a big On/Off switch in our DNA which regulates whether someone is born a bad seed? Are all murderers crazy from the day they were born? If Benoit was always a lunatic, why did he wait so long to kill someone? Saying "he was always crazy" imho is a vast oversimplification of the complex nature of the situation of a man taking the lives of the people he had apparently loved at one time. Sometimes it seems like people don't wish to entertain the option that a person can snap and go crazy. And no, don't say I'm trying to do some kind of "he was sane until the day he killed them" kind of bullshit apology which some sad fanboys have thrown around. The simple fact is that for the majority of his adult life, Chris didn't act any differently from a thousand other wrestlers. Why did he annihilate his family when none of them ever did? If the combination of concussions and steroids and pain pills and Japanese training all make you homicidal, why didn't Mike Awesome kill his wife before he hanged himself? All the "wrestling made him crazy" and "he was born crazy" shit doesn't even begin to answer the question of why this one guy did something that none of the other violent psychos in the same industry have ever done. Why did he break whereas others did not?

Hogan also claimed that Andre was 700 pounds at Wrestlemania 3. That's not just talking in some interview, that's actually written in his autobiography. He's just a liar, period.

Hey, that's MR. Former ring announcer/television commentator/referee/heel manager/on rare occasions wrestler (shitty)/cameraman/website writer/general hanger-on, to you. Anyway of what I ever did is considered being "in the biz", I'm not anymore. I quit for a variety of reasons, including burnout and general weariness with the permanently juvenile idiocy which seemingly couldn't be eradicated or avoided. Well, that and the fact that I moved cross-country to a place where I didn't know anyone and there are no nearby shows, but I'll claim the burnout thing as the primary factor simply for the nice warm feeling of moral superiority. It's just that I think it's important to be accurate about this kind of stuff stuff. "Might as well happened" is an entirely different thing from "did happen", but some act like they're identical. It's like, if tomorrow a rumor gets out about Tom Cruise flipping out and doing something crazy, I'll think it's probably true, but it's logically fallacious to instantly assume that the story is 100% accurate if you've only heard a secondhand rumor, no matter how true it "sounds".

Like I said, the more respectable shows like ROH generally wouldn't allow it (though you gotta wonder at stuff like the match where the girl wrestled the guy with an erection). But on the outlaw indy circuit, it's still the frigging Wild West at some shows. Hell, one of the last shows I worked involved Jamie Dundee beating a guy unconcious in the parking lot because the guy was out there chatting with the fans instead of selling the stretcher-job beatdown that Jamie and others had given him in the ring. No police were called, and although Jamie never returned there (yet), the no-seller was back a month later. I've literally got dozens of stories about wrestlers doing stupid violent shit like that on these little shows that nobody's heard of. When you put pro wrestlers together in an environment where they're not getting paid shit and they can do this stuff with no consequences, they are more than happy to step up to the plate and swing for the fences.

If you overuse the risky stuff, the fans get used to it. How many years has it been since the last Dudleys match where the crowd wasn't demanding tables? And I've seen countless internet reports about shows where some hardcore guy like Necro Butcher wrestled but didn't get carved open, and the person writing the report seemed disappointed at the lack of blood. Same thing if they saw a Jack Evans match which didn't feature enough spectacular flips or dramatic bumps for their taste. Of course, the nice thing about wrestling's short memory is that you can recondition the fanbase's expectations over time, as the WWE has done with its gradual slowing-down of their style over the past few years. It's a lot easier for a guy like Jeff Hardy to get a Holy Shit chant now than it was a few years back when people were burned out on the late 90s/early 00s sped-up stylings.

It would teach you nothing. I was just agreeing with ohtani's jacket's point that if you can't take a punch you shouldn't be in wrestling, which is generally true. Then sek69 claimed that nobody shoots on anyone ever, and it steamrolled from there. A great theory, except the promoters are often sleazier than the wrestlers and let people get away with all kinds of shit. All too often they just don't care. ...what? That's the least sequiterish non-sequiter I've seen in a while. Sometimes the All Sleaze Must Be True viewpoint is kind of annoying, since the people espousing it take a tone which is not terribly different from a revivalist. It's almost a sermon about how we're all blind fools and we need to wake up and see the real world like it is. Or, another analogy: sort of like those annoying types of aggressive vegetarians who go around telling people about what happens to animals in a slaughterhouse, in graphic detail. Um, yeah, I generally knew all that stuff already. I can't stop or prevent any of this bad stuff myself, so it gets annoying having someone yell "REPENT!" in my ear about it. Hell, I believe that most of the stories are at least part true, some of that from having experienced a whole lotta sleaze during my own indy "career". But it seems like if I'm skeptical about any single one of them I get a True Sleazer screaming at me about wrestling is the single worst business on the entire planet, apparently worse than street prostitution or gang membership or telemarketing, so every bad story about it must instantly be assumed true. Some of them go so far in the We Must Not Be Naive direction that it runs into being a different sort of gullible where they're willing to believe anything. And if you think that little of pro wrestling, it makes me wonder why you're still wasting time talking about it on the internet. Go read a book. One besides Ring of Hell. Also, the True Sleazers usually also to subscribe to the All Wrestlers Are Congenital Liars And You Can't Believe Them If They Tell You Water Is Wet viewpoint... but the vast majority of these stories they believe came from wrestlers... "At what point do Must and Cannot intersect on the graph?!"

Which is what I was alluding to in the rest of the post. Nobody's saying they didn't take it way, way overboard. What. Yeah it does happen. Not on most of the more reputable shows, but disagreements and fights happen all the time on the smaller indies. When you get a bunch of maladjusted macho egotistical types who think they're tough guys together in one room, it's almost inevitable that you're eventually gonna have problems and someone is eventually gonna try to stretch someone else. I've personally seen liberties taken in the ring by guys who were seriously trying to hurt their opponents more times than I care to remember. It doesn't happen on every show or anything like that, but it happens often enough that wrestlers at least need to know some basic self-defense if such a situation arises.

It depends on if you believe the theory that Time-Warner wouldn't have canned it if it had still been turning in good ratings and not lost buckets of money. Nash's booking tenure and championship reigns coincided with drops in ratings, and buyrates.

For all his whiny hand-wringing microanalysis, Bruce Mitchell had that one pegged a dozen years ago. He was talking about some Tommy Dreamer match, and how the fans didn't seemed to care when their hero lost and only cheered harder when he got his ass brutally kicked. "If the workers are willing to put their bodies through that for us, then it means that they really love and respect us and it's kind of like we're in the business!" I am so stealing this argument next time I run into some indy snob who complains about Selling Out.

I don't know how Eddy meant it. But I could see it if you're talking about Nash's role in the eventual downfall of the company. Aside from maybe Hogan, I can't think of any other single wrestler who did more to drive the company into the ground in the dying years. Depriving an entire company of wrestlers from making a good living could be seen as evil.

Which is an utterly insane and completely selfish mindset. I've never understood the idea of Sold Out. If you like these people, you want them to succeed, right? And you do realize that most niche indy art cannot succeed in the mainstream? So in order to get paid, they're almost by definition going to have to alter what they do in some way? I've always hated the creepy obsessive types who would rather have their favorite artists starving or working a day job just as long as they keep making their art in the specific way that they like. Lili Taylor was way better in indy films than she was in The Haunting, but the fact that she did that piece of crap and probably bought a house from it doesn't erase all the earlier stuff she'd already done. It's the same in wrestling with the ECW/ROH mentality, they'd rather have their favorite workers killing themselves in little shitty armories and not being able to pay their bills.

To an extent, yeah. Wrestling involves a fairly staggering amount of longterm pain. If you can't handle a punch in the face, you can't handle being a wrestler. Training needs to be a little bit rough in order to weed out the wannabes who would otherwise be wasting everyone's time. I've been to several training classes where some starry-eyed kid who had zero talent or chance to ever make it got run off by just taking a few bumps or getting chopped a couple times, and then being all "fuck that, this is supposed to be fake!". An argument could also be made that you need at least a little shoot training in case you have an opponent try to take advantage of you, or are working in some really old-school place like Puerto Rico where fans still take this shit seriously and sometimes go after the workers. Of course it should go without saying that the Dojo took it way too far. A thousand squats every day?! Holy permanent tendon mutilation, Batman. Even in Ken Shamrock's egomaniacal autobiography, he only claimed to be able to crank out five hundred during his training in Japan. Waking them up in the middle of the night, making them do chores, humiliating them for minor infractions; they were training these guys like they were trying to make Green Berets, not fake wrestlers.

I don't think Goldberg/Page and Hogan/Warrior had much in common, besides being ridiculously better than they had any right to be. (That is, the FIRST Hogan/Warrior, not the one that happened on the same show as Goldberg/DDP.) H/W was a match which was specifically designed to make Warrior look like Hogan's equal in terms of being an unstoppable superhero. They spent most of the match in a back and forth struggle where neither guy had the upper hand for long; I know part of the endless test-of-strength spots was just to fill time and work the crowd, but it also had the effect of making the two of them look about the same in terms of kayfabe strength and ability. The finish sort of kept Hogan strong even while it put Warrior over; it had that feel of "if Warrior hadn't avoided the legdrop, he would've lost". So Hogan fans could believe it was just a fluke loss to a guy who got lucky, while Warrior fans could be happy that their guy won clean. Meanwhile, G/P was much more of a mismatch. Page was a guy who flirted with the main event, but lost half the time and had never won the championship or had a truly decisive and dominant win over a top guy. Meanwhile, Goldberg was mowing down everyone in his path; to him, the only difference betwen Jerry Flynn and Hulk Hogan was that Hogan took a little longer to beat. They did admittedly do a brilliant job at portraying Page as knowing that this was his one big shot, and that he was giving absolutely everything he had in the greatest effort of his life. As previously mentioned, he did have the Diamond Cutter, which iirc nobody had ever kicked out of. Sort of like old babyface Jake Roberts, a lot of DDP's matches turned into him getting the shit beaten out of him for 80% of the match until he suddenly hit his finisher for the win. In its build, this match was no exception. Goldberg controlled the majority of the match, and really only looked to be in jeopardy twice; and both those times (ramming the ringpost and the diamond cutter) he came back and recovered soon enough anyway. Page looked strong because he'd given The Man a harder fight than anyone else and made him look vulnerable even if it was only for a brief moment, but Goldberg was still clearly the nigh-invulnerable top guy in on the totem pole and Page went back to the midcard afterwards. Oh yeah, that's another match which really deserves to be brought up in this kind of discussion, a true classic which is often unfairly forgotten amidst the other flashier and better-known Austin/Hart matches.

This board and TSM share the same server, don't they? Usually whenever one is down, the other one is too. At least it's an easy way to tell that it's just a server issue, and not something more sinister, like that the board has been killed by a virus or someone didn't pay the bills or something else like that.

In theory, babyfaces shouldn't wrestle dirty. In practice, the audience doesn't give a crap what their heroes do as long as they're popular enough. Hogan used choking, eyerakes, biting, and other heel tactics all the time back during Hulkamania; crowd still cheered. Steve Austin acts like a sociopath, jumps people from behind, merclilessly beats defenseless people, Stunners helpless women; crowd still cheered. Any time any babyface hits a referee or theoretically neutral person; crowd still cheers. (Having spent some time as a referee too, some crowds get downright vicious with the weird hatred towards the official; if the heel cheated to win, the crowd usually yelled more at the ref than at the heel!) Essentially, if the audience thinks you're cool enough, you can get away with anything. Meanwhile, if Randy Orton showed a videotape of himself saving children from a burning orphanage, the best reaction he could hope for is a confused silence. As for the "heels have got to cheat, babyfaces have to wrestle clean, it's the only way to get heat" argument, refer to Mick Foley's chapter about his time in Memphis in his first autobiography. He does a better and more thorough demolition of that theory than I could.

That's one thing nobody ever seems to remember. Too many smarks and other ignorant folks tend to view steroids as being a black-and-white issue, either you're on them and massively muscular or you're not and you're tiny. There are all kinds of different hormones, different dosage sizes, etcetera. And with the WWE's bizarrely lenient system for determining what an official positive test is, it leaves a lot of wiggle room. Like, Batista easily could just be doing a smaller dosage or different combination of steroids than he used to, retain most of his body mass, but still test clean.

I do agree with Pegasus on one thing: I like to see the formula tweaked or subverted every once in a while. Of course formula is effective, but if every match rigidly followed it without deviation, even the dimmest fans would eventually find it predictable and boring. The babyface overcoming the odds, making the hot tag, and so on can only remain effective if you're not 100% sure that they'll be able to do it. Sometimes I like seeing the formula turned on its head and denied just for the surprise of it; why would you want things to go the exact same way every single time? Yes, in theory the heel should usually have to cheat in order to defeat a babyface of equal or greater stature, but if a heel can't ever possibly beat that guy without cheating, the crowd doesn't take him seriously as a legit physical threat to their hero. (Jim Cornette talked about that when he was managing the Midnights against the Road Warriors, describing how the crowd didn't get quite as mad at the heels as usual because they knew that the LOD were basically invincible and wouldn't be losing.) I think bucking the conventions should only be done on rare occasions because if you did it often it would quickly lose its shock value, but I don't see how it could be a good idea to mindlessly repeat the standard formula on every occasion. That's sort of what I was talking about in my post above about my indy show experience; too often in wrestling, guys don't even attempt to think of doing anything different and just blindly rely on the formula to get the crowd into things. I cannot begin to even guess at how many matches I've seen which literally looked like the exact same thing played over and over again, usually to audiences which slowly dwindled over the months and years. There are plenty of older wrestlers and promoters in Tennessee who insist that old-school Southern style rassling is the only thing that the local crowds really want to see. Meanwhile, their old-school indy shows are usually drawing less than a hundred people.