Jingus

Why wouldn't Curt be a contender? Excellent wrestler in his prime, second-generation wrestler, former World champion (yeah, the AWA belt didn't count for much by then, but he still held it), held various secondary titles, main evented in both WWF and WCW, and the only guy to be a member of both the Horsemen and the NWO. Plus, Rap Is Crap.

How bout that massive "You can't wrestle!" chant during the Main Event Staring Contest last night? Which was ironic because I, as big a Cena hater as you'll find and not a big fan of Orton either, thought they did that whole final segment very well. And that's in Nashville, where if someone is a babyface, they'll pretty much get cheered, period. (Except for Jeff Jarrett in his feuds with Ron Killings and Raven in early TNA, that doesn't count.)

No. Concussions =/= carcinogens. I thought Kawada was the one who hated him some gaijin? Mitsuhara sure books enough of 'em in his company. But anyway, yeah, dumb decision on Gabe's part to book Misawa just against his fellow NOAH guys in matches anyone can get from any tape dealer. Makes me think that Joebashi was kind of a fluke. Another "yea" here for the Triple H Is Back To His Old Crap belief. I jumped off the HHHate bandwagon a couple years ago, but bullshit like what happened tonight is enough to make me want to climb back on.

Okay, didn't know about the others besides Ochai and Takayama. But still, if they're undergoing THAT much physical brutality, I don't see what's keeping them from taking mountains of oxycontin or various other pain meds that their gaijn cousins enjoy so much. I didn't say there was, but you sounded like you were saying that the touring schedule is the only reason why Japanese guys weren't dropping dead of ODs on a consistent basis like the American workers do.

Time off can certainly help, a lot, but I don't think it would be enough to single-handedly solve the entire drug problem in wrestling. There's got to be more to it.

It being in Memphis wouldn't have much effect, because all the people who used to regularly pack the Midsouth Colisseum pretty much all stopped watching wrestling a long time ago. Except for anomalies like the Hogan show, Memphis wrestling is on life support.

It's only illegal when it can directly hurt the stockbrokers, i.e. Enron. Except that doesn't take into account the different levels of ticket prices, comped freebies, and many other variables. Like they said, the dollar amount is the only thing that anyone cares about being accurate.

What, you mean like Hashimoto? He's the exception rather than the rule, though. I've always wondered just how the stiffer puro guys do that ghastly style and don't end up hooked on pain pills and such like the Americans do. At least, not to the level that they have problems with guys dropping dead from ODs. Hell, I think more American wrestlers have died that way in Japan than Japanese workers have altogether. Is it just a massive difference in the two cultures where drugs use is more seldom or more disciplined, or what?

A couple inches of height and about forty pounds of muscle. This kinda reminds me about a story from back in fall of '96, when the office had plans for a dozen different Mark Henry merch items, but told Stone Cold that they weren't giving him a t-shirt because they didn't think they'd sell any.

Couldn't have been much trouble, considering they went on to main event against each other all the way til Wrestlemania. Foley said in his 2nd book that Rock was only supposed to hit him five times, but got "lost in the moment" or whatever and turned it up to 11 instead. I doubt they would've premeditated putting on a match that goddamned brutal with his kids in the crowd and Barry Blaustein's cameras filming the whole thing.

All the anti-Flair arguments (or, at least all of 'em that don't come from people who just plain hate Flair and always have) seem to be a variant on "it's not realistic for an old man to still be wrestling". My counter: it's the frigging WWE, since when has realism ever been a factor? This is the same company that announced last night that Vince has a little bastard leprechaun son that he never knew about. Having a 16-time world champ who's widely argued to be the greatest of all time win a few matches looks downright reasonable in comparison. Flair is still over, and can still be a draw, as the sales figures of his DVD showed. Seriously, as long as they didn't do something stupid to fuck it up (and once again, it IS the WWE...), what could it possibly hurt? And yeah, it's all a hypothetical fantasy booking scenario now, but I don't see why letting someone retire with a shred of dignity for once would be such a bad thing. Oh, and check THIS out for a larf: Ric Flair Finance.

Yeah WWE, make a highlight package of ANOTHER WRESTLER WHO HUNG HIMSELF THIS YEAR getting his brains scrambled real good, brilliant.

"Fucked" may be a bit strong. The human brain is such a staggeringly complex organ that it's impossible to say the exact effect that two concussions would have on it. There's plenty of other variables involved.

The sad part is, she's pretty damned good at manipulating the fans and the situation to fit her cause. Her demands are mostly impossible for any of the newsletters. They aren't going to print a retraction of something they think is true, and they probably can't afford Victoria's appearance fee (and even if she took a polygraph and passed perfectly, it would only prove that she believes that she is clean, she can't speak for what any other Diva might be doing behind closed doors). And "name your sources"? That inspires in me such feelings as LOL, OMG, & WTF because it's such a ridiculously childish thing to say, journalism is founded on the principle of unnamed sources, plus it comes off as a subtle threat to anyone who might be one of those sources. Finally, little girls "look up" to Victoria? They look up to a woman with breast implants who spent the majority of her career portraying a psychotic heel, and when she was a babyface wore stripper pants and did that jiggling ass dance? Really?

Yeah, they were. They tried to get McMahon on charges that technically he really wasn't guilty of, and badly blew some of the facts, getting dates wrong and such for alleged steroid deals.

...huh? He was supposed to be the heel in those matches. It just happened to be at the peak of the Boo Cena trend.

Khali drew money? Weren't the PPV buyrates down? Also, I think it was more an issue of damn near every main eventer on the SD roster either getting drafted to Raw or put on the shelf that led to his title reign, not his minifeud with Cena where he jobbed repeatedly. As for Umaga, that one's tougher to say. I do think the Rumble match helped establish him as a legit top talent. But I'd say their feud boosted Cena more than him. Cena had been in limbo ever since he finished up with Edge the previous year and hadn't had a compelling opponent for months, and then got to beat the undefeated monster twice in a row. Yeah, Umaga did go on to do the Trump match, but it's not like Cena carried him to that spot, Yumanga had been given the monster push from hell to the point that they let him pin HHH and Shawn Michaels.

As much as I dislike the ratty little fucker, I gotta admit that match and especially the finish were very well done, and the crowd reaction was fairly amazing. Wait, how did that work? Edge came out stronger, sure, his feuds with Cena are what established him as a top guy. But imho Umaga didn't gain anything. Yes, Cena's wins over him consisted of a fluke rollup and strangling him with a rope (in hindsight, probably not a finish we'll see again real soon), but it still ended his undefeated streak. And Khali? His lame submission loss in their first match happened so suddenly and unexpectedly that I thought I was having Montreal flashbacks. And then Cena threw him off a skyscraper and pinned him in the rematch. Completely killed Khali's invincible aura. And I don't even like Khali, but his losses like that were pretty odd.

I would be shocked if you could find a single wrestler on the WWE payroll who hasn't suffered at least two concussions. Hell, I've gotten a concussion in the ring, and my "wrestling career" consisted of about a dozen matches. If the congressional committee pays serious attention to the matter of brain damage and enforces some sort of strict regulation on that front, bye-bye wrestling as we know it. And I can back up the story about Smothers being brain-fried too. Aside from hearing countless stories about his infamous temper (New Jack: "Tracy Smothers is one crazy motherfucker"), I've worked with the guy and been ring announcer for his matches on twenty or thirty occasions, and every time he greeted me with "Hi, I'm Tracy, what's your name? Nice to meet you, Jingus."

Problem is, lots of state commissions have tried to regulate wrestling to some extent, and for various reasons it's never really worked. Some like Oregon impose tough standards, and were thus avoided as venues. (I think there might still be a regulation on the books in Louisiana that bans the piledriver.) Also, a lot of individual bias and corruption tends to creep in. I've heard more horror stories than I can count about the Kentucky commission's endless favoritism and cronyism in being draconian with the enforcement on some indy shows, including a goofy rule that forbids fighting outside the ring, while letting others completely slide. Also, remember some of the stories out of Philly over the last few years about how the commission was a real dick about stopping matches if bleeding occured? Yet somehow local boy Shane Douglas talked them into accepting a no-rope barbed wire match for the main at Hardcore Homecoming. Beyond just that: what if some feminist at some point notices just how high the percentage of women with breast implants is in this company?

Well, we could find out real easy by piss testing Steven Tyler. But seriously, Cena's a weird case. He supposedly goes around bragging to the other boys that he never uses steroids. Which means either 1.he's got one of the freakier DNA strands I've ever seen, or 2.he's an even bigger liar than most of these guys, since falsely claiming that you don't use drugs to the office or the media is considered "working the gimmick", but doing so to your friends is apparently bad form.

Aw c'mon, if Piper ever taught us anything it's that the correct quote is "If you're gonna die, do it in the ring, it's good for business." 50K per year for a member of the regular TV roster? Damn. Guess it must really suck working on the show where if you're not in the championship feud you're guaranteed to never get on PPV, plus low ratings probably have some sort of corollary in low merch sales. "If you perform in front of a million people on live television every week but still get paid less than a union truck driver, gimme a hell yeah!"

Wow, that's kinda disappointing. Why are there so many overlaps with other WWE discs? These were all already on the 619 dvd, and anyone who's a big enough Mysterio fan to buy the new disc already owns that one. I'm sure the ECW matches are otherwise available too. I only counted six matches that haven't already been released on commercial video in some form. Why does the WWE do that? Instead of digging up obscure forgotten gems, they tend to put mostly the same collection of big matches on their DVDs over and over again. It's not like their tape library is too small for them to produce some unseen material that nobody except the couple dozen people who watched Thunder that one night have seen.

He was definitely the first man to do something, for once. Unfortunately that something was "get fired for roiding".

I don't know about played out, but it sure as hell is predictable. The ancient hot tag formula has been presented SO[ many times, it's one of those things I'm amazed still gets a pop from the crowd. I've seen Hogan matches that were less formulaic than many braindead "beat on the weaker babyface, then bumpbumpbump when his partner finally comes in" tag affairs.