Jingus

Weird how they rush through 2000-2004. Only eleven segments and zero matches from that timeframe. I can understand skipping stuff like Invasion and the Quadruple H era, but there were still decent little hidden gems in the middle of all that crap.

Margaret Hamilton, eh? You know, Kevin Nash was trained by Jody Hamilton. Therefore, wrestling is MMA. You're missing the big picture here. Jody Hamilton's old tag partner was Tom Renesto. Slightly change the last name, and you get Ernest, which is a clear reference to Jim Varney's Ernest P. Worrell movies. For one thing, Ernest was clearly talking to an off-screen "Vern" Gagne the whole time, and Gagne was well known for emphasising the more realistic, dare I say, MMA-like aspect of pro wrestling. But that's not even the important part. You see, two of the Ernest movies were taped in the area where my mother grew up, and in fact her old house is in the background of a few shots of Ernest Scared Stupid (which mentions Wrestlemania BY NAME, ONE DEGREE OF SEPARATION). Meanwhile, Tom Renesto's younger son Tim Renesto eventually happened to work for the same indy company which I did the ring announcing for. One time, early in my career, after I refused to falsely announce that he had won the match which he had in fact just lost, Tim suddenly took me down with a double-leg, got the mount, and started Throwing Hands from above. It was my first in-ring beatdown, and was not called in advance, so clearly you can put all that together and it proves that Bush was behind 9/11, the number 23 is the secret constant ruling our universe, Great Khali is a skilled wrestler, the Illuminati are taking over the world, Michael Bay is the greatest director alive, and MMA = Wrestling.

That picture by itself is fucking awesome. Admit it SLL, you chose the enitre Frank L. Baum theme just to have a legit reason to use it.

If he does steroids for anything purpose other than healing injuries, just by looking at him I'd say he needs to get his money back.

How do you just move out of state when your home, your shoot job, your promotion's building, your fanbase, and all of your employees are there? Granted, in the international wrestling scene this is barely a blip on the radar, and wrestling obviously needs more regulation or oversight than it's had in most places, but I don't see the problem with them banding together to form Carny Voltron in order to prevent these dumb rules from putting them out of business. There are a few other cities that the WWE runs in GA. Not many, none of them huge population centers, but clearly there are over ten thousand people apiece in Macon, Savannah, and other places who're willing to buy tickets to the shows. It's not like this is Montana or some other depopulated wasteland where nobody ever goes.

According to the report, the one guy Farr seemed to have some kind of personal grudge, judging from how he kept trying to cut off the speakers and claim they'd talked for their alloted five minutes when they hadn't. A new wrinkle: Georgia promoters band together in order to form the MPAA a promoters' committee which apparently wants to try and regulate wrestling before the government can. The dude manning the ring-toss booth at the county fair would look at these guys and go "DAMN, that's carny".

That's one of those things which is sorta difficult to explain to people who don't know wrestling. "Well, they said they were okay to finish the match, and why wouldn't we trust the judgement of a man who'd just let himself be thrown off a giant steel cage twice? You have to man up and be tough enough to always PHINISH TEH MACH~!" Also difficult to explain is how if matches simply stopped when a guy got hurt it could legit harm their cash flow, since the fans are preconditioned to expect a wrestler who has his arm cut off to tape it back on and go the distance, and tend to be less than pleased when a match goes home early for injury reasons (see: the worked-but-coulda-been-shoot finish for Sabu/Rey at ONS2).

So Inoki has morphed over the years into a combination of Vinnie Mac, Jesse Ventura, and the Ultimate Warrior? Maybe throw a little Tazz in there for the faux shootfighting angle. Wacky.

The commission had its meeting, various wrestlers spoke, and nothing was really decided. They delayed doing anything until February. The full details are here.

Or they knew about it and just lied to the media. If they get called on it later, they can always go "whoops, breakdown in communication between our medical staff and our spin doctors, sorry, we were very careful to give Benoit all the medical treatment he required, and what the hell is Fragile X, never heard of it."

It's also worth noting that Ichter was apparently the attorney in the WCW racial discrimination lawsuit. When you've stood in the middle of a court of law and claimed that Sonny Onoo and Hardbody Harrison were super-talented employees who were unfairly held down because of skin color, it's not a credibility booster. I can't wait for him vs. McDevitt in the courtroom, just to hear all the bizarre arguments from both sides.

If you've ever heard any interview where he justifies World Champion David Arquette, you know this to be true. I'm surprised at just how thoroughly pre-scripted every single segment is. When you're writing when the different wrestlers should go on offense and giving Jim Cornette lines to memorize, you suck at life and deserve your sub-Thunder ratings.

One sentiment I have seen expressed more than once is that MMA guys are supposedly all failed boxer-wannabes who jumped into an Octagon to hide from real fighters since they couldn't cut it as boxers. Which is of course nonsense. That's like saying that a marathon runner was scared into his profession because he was weak at the 100-meter dash, or that all film directors are really failed still photographers.

Yeah, he's a nervous nellie all hopped up on sweet, sweeeet moral indignation. Bitching about signs in the crowd with death-related catchphrases is one hell of a stretch. I don't understand the people like this guy who act like the entire wrestling world changed forever after Benoitgate. I mean, come on, you didn't know that this was possible? You thought that wrestlers were magically exempt from being able to murder people? Never heard the old Jimmy Snuka stories? Your knowledge of Bruiser Brody's career stop at 1987? Benoit killing his wife and kid is probably the most disgusting single action taken by a pro wrestler, but it's not so far outside of established precedence that such a thing was unthinkable. To have believed otherwise is just damned naive.

Here's a response from Bill Behrens, along with a letter he wrote to the GA commission. Bill overstates the choreographed and non-combative nature of wrestling quite a bit, but I can't really blame him under the circumstances. He also goes into specific detail about an aborted attempt to regulate wrestling in Georgia a few years ago, which I only vaguely remember, and how the laws passed then affect the current situation. He makes a decent case that the Commission shouldn't have jurisdiction to make some of the rules it's trying to.

Simply put, wrestlers don't consider steroids to be a "real" drug. Because if they did, that would mean that damn near 100% of the full-time workers would be considered longterm drug users. The guys who take steroids but don't drink or do recreational drugs tend to look down on those who do. EDIT: and oh yeah, "vitamin S", now THAT's funny. Consider it stolen the next time I'm talking about the juice on any other board.

Probably because HHH got his physique from saying prayers and taking vitamins.

I remember looking forward to the Bret/Bulldog/Piper/Virgil vs. Flair/Dibiase/Rougeau/Warlord from '91. Sure, both sides had one guy who was waaay crappier than the others, but the remaining good workers should've been able to turn it into something really fucking cool. Unfortunately, that was during the "Ric Flair accidentally wins all his matches via pure fluke" period, so we got the fucking lame mass-countout finish with everyone but Flair brawling outside to a 10-count. My overall favorite would probably be Andre/Gang/Bundy/Rude/Reed in '87, just for the sheer badassedness of the heel side there. Sure, most of 'em were actually past their prime, but from a kayfabe standpoint, would you want to fight five guys who looked like that? They helped forever establish Bigelow as a top star that night, just by looking strong before losing to them.

That's actually the one thing that's confused me the most in my new joshi habit: the seemingly random run-ins and brawling between seconds outside the ring. Sometimes the official is just standing around thumb-up-ass stylez like Jim Molineux during a Dudleyville street fight, and other times they're all Hebner screaming "knawk if awf!" in their bitching at the cheating heels in their attempt to keep order. The two Dump/Chigusa hair matches were especially perplexing. They've both got the same dude reffing, but in the first match he seems to be doing some kind of biased heel schtick, while in the second one Dump goes out of her way to randomly beat the shit out of him for no clear reason.

I've got that one on tape. Just looking at it, it does seem like Shawn was very ginger about his back. The biggest thing he did was an elbow drop coming down about three feet off a small ladder, the rest of it was either him whipping Diamond's ass, or taking punishment in a non-bumping manner like getting handcuffed to the ropes and then kendo-sticked about the head. He sure as hell wasn't taking the kind of risks he did in his Summerslam return match. I'd guess it was after that when he realized that he could come back and work if he really wanted to, but he waited until the most opportune moment. So after his TWA fed died, the training school dried up, half the WWE main eventers left the company for various reasons, his best friend/protege HHH is firmly in charge of the Raw brand, and his heat for showing up stoned had finally faded away, then he shocks the world by revealing that the rumors of his crippled-ness were somewhat exaggerated. Half carny con, half good timing.

And that the legitimate medical use for one of the steroids he was taking was an estrogen inhibitor FOR BREAST CANCER PATIENTS.

Probably a lot of that was resentment lingering from his King of the Ring win. That was one horrible show, with godawful booking that eliminated all the big stars in the first round and created a lot of dull matches that nobody wanted to see. It especially didn't help that the show was in front of a downright hostile crowd in Philly; the Hat Guy and his buddies were not impressed with the new King Mabel. And then V went on to quite possibly steal the Worst Summerslam Main Event Ever title from the previous year's Undertaker/Underfaker fiasco in a spectacularly bad match with Diesel. Combining all that with how Vince was still pushing giant fat guys well into the modern workrate era and the hideous "gangsta wearing a purple garbage bag" gimmick, it's not hard to see why the smarts would've hated him.

Consolation prize for his one millionth thumbtack wound? But seriously, that is odd, he's an awfully scatterbrained guy. An actual conversation one time at TNA: "Hi Abyss, how you doing." "Hi man, what's your name? Jingus? Nice to meet you, Jingus." "Um... you don't remember me?" "(blank stare)" "I was your manager in your match at that benefit show." "(blank stare)" "It was last week." "(blank stare)" "And we sat next to each other and bullshitted for like an hour in the locker room in Cornelia that one time." "...sorry, brother, no. Nice to meet you." I've "met" the dude at least a dozen times, and he never recalled having seen me ever before in his life. It wasn't him just messing with me either, it was pretty clear by the glazed look in his eye that his memory had just pulled a Memento. And it's not like I have one of those forgettable faces, considering I unfortunately look like a younger clone of Tony Schiavone, so lord only knows what the state of his brain is. In fact, come to think of it, Tracy Smothers was always the same way. Maybe it's a concussion thing.

It's a superficial detail, but I wonder if the short hair is confusing some of the marks. If you don't watch VH1, it's entirely possible that you haven't seen his current 'do until now, and I could see how some of the rubes might be put off by that. He sort of looks like a cross between Denis Leary and any Final Fantasy lead hero. Plus, his return was the worst kept secret in wrestling, and it stretched out way past the point where most people figured it out. Crowds were chanting "Y2J" months ago, but by the time he shows up, they didn't care as much. As for his new finisher, well, he kinda needed a new one, and not just for the "comes back with new MOVES" gimmick. The glorified Boston crab was okay, but the WWE traditionally frowns on submissions and prefers an impact finish. The Lionsault was fine when he hit it, but he went through phases where it seemed like he couldn't help botching it every week. The only other finish he used was the Stroke, and let's not even dignify that one with any more discussion. His new move is simple, can be hit on anyone, could be both hit out of nowhere or telegraphed ahead of time, and looks like it would hurt as long as the other guy takes it right.

Sir King Big Mabel Viscera: as previously mentioned, astonishingly agile for a guy his size. I can't think of any other super-heavyweights right now who can move like that. Hell, the only ones who even come close were Vader, Paul Wight, and Yokozuna when they were all young, relatively skinny, and in their primes, and I still think none of them were as fast as Viscera is when he really feels like moving. Also, considering how long he's been wrestling, it's odd that he seems to be in better shape now than he was during his big push ten years ago. He does good work with a variety of opponents, but he does seem to be one of those big hosses who brainlocks when facing another big hoss, thus the stinky matches with Kane recently. Also, let's not forget his bizarrely entertaining run as the World's Largest Love Machine. The only major negative I can think of is that I've heard from a few workers that he can be painfully stiff at times, and working him isn't always a pleasant experience. Kennedy: I just never watched Smackdown much over the past few years, largely because the indy show I worked was on Friday nights, so I just got in the habit of reading the spoilers and not seeing the shows; I say that to explain that I simply haven't seen a lot of Kennedy's earlier run with the company. From what I remember at the time, he seemed like a perfectly competent wrestler. I too was confused why the 'net was so markishly in love with his mic work, but I didn't hate it either, he seemed competent. I'd have to go back and watch it again to be sure, but I remember his match at the Rumble this year being a case of him putting an at-his-worst Batista on his back and carrying him to a passable match. But ever since he came back from the injury, he's looked awfully inconsistent, just excruciatingly bad some nights, and plain mediocre on others. I agree with Tim that Kennedy has this weird tendency where he somehow has crappier matches with better opponents, I have no idea how that happens, but it seems to be the case. AJ Styles: one of the most amazing all-around athletes ever. I know at least a couple of people who generally hate wrestling, but have seen Styles and were utterly blown away by him. I've watched him wrestle live since around 2001, and it's been fun to watch him progress. Back then, he was much more a Southern-style worker who incorporated more or less highspots into the match depending on who his opponent was. If it's Jason Cross, warn air traffic control; if it's Rick Michaels, they'll do a bunch of old-fashioned Georgia stuff; if it's Prince Justice (Abyss), get out your HBK/Big Hoss tapes from '96 and play along at home. When he went to TNA and got into the X Division, he started doing the massive highspot dive-fests, trying to do J-Crown Finals stuff every night. He busted out more MOVES~!, but he really got used to the cruiserweight groove, and sometimes seemed lost when he was stuck in the heavyweight matches with guys like Raven. On the indies he often seemed to do more strong-stylish stuff, with lots of stiff kicks and forearms, with the occasional flying move thrown in to remind you who you're watching. I didn't keep up with TNA much after they moved to Orlando, but I've seen some of his recent stuff tagging with Tomko and it's almost like he went back to his roots. In fact, even though they're totally different stylistically, he kinda reminds me of how Rob Van Dam changed when he finally made the transition to working WWE-style around 2002, doing less of the eye-popping spotty stuff he was known for and working a somewhat more traditional American style.