Jingus

Oh yeah, the good matches. Nothing beats the rush of getting so into a great match that I forget it's all a carefully staged work between my fellow employees. That didn't happen often, maybe once a month or less, but it was often worth the wait. Plus I just enjoyed the storytelling aspect of the job. I liked pointing out the psychology when it was there, and (more commonly) just making it up when it wasn't. Like, if the entire match is nothing but two fat guys clubbing each other over the back and not selling much, I'll say they're both targeting their opponent's spinal column and in a masochistic contest to see which one falls first. And I always got a perverse enjoyment over making smartass little side comments that flew over most people's heads but I thought were funny. The problem came when I had to call the crap matches, because on a no-budget indy show, that's usually half of them, if not more. And I don't mean crap like "that Morishima vs. Misawa match wasn't very good", I mean CRAP like "do these guy have a receipt from the school that trained them?". And that's when they weren't just straight-up backyarders.

Plus at least is makes sense with Orton's finisher, since the diamond cutter mostly impacts the neck, so it's like he's softening them up. Bad chinlockery is when some guy just gets blown up and runs out of ideas for what to do next, so he slaps on the dreaded rear matchkiller. And oh yeah, can we please have someone tell Tazz that it's not a goddamn rear naked choke like he keeps claiming?

Okay, that got a legitimate LOL outta me. Remind me again what Dave's exact argument for "MMA = rasslin" was?

I will agree with him on the point that the rear chinlock is, on average, the single most boring move in wrestling. Every time someone applied one in a match I was commentating, I groaned on the inside while I pulled out my patented "cutting off the carotid arteries, blood flow to the brain, tiring his opponent while regaining strength, slowing down the pace of the match" routine. Of course, while I didn't see Summerslam, I imagine that this was the only headlock-intensive match of the night, right? The main reason I got so disgusted with chinlocks and sleepers was that on the crappy indy scene they're usually applied in damn near every match, usually with the "arm drops twice then babyface wakes up and fights out with exactly three elbows to the stomach" sequence that just made me hate life while I was announcing.

Personally, I think it was the nefarious one. I think Hogan just either convinced or coerced or bribed Patrick into making the regular count instead of the planned fast one. Patrick is too good a referee to randomly forget the called finish in the biggest match he's ever officiated. And then afterwards everyone said it was just a mistake, in order to avoid the heat. A lot of "mistakes" like that seemed to happen in Hogan's favor all the time. Remember Halloween Havoc 98, when the Goldberg/DDP main event didn't air because they went past their satellite time? But the infamous Hogan/Warrior II sure as hell did at semi-main. This wasn't the first time Hogan hadn't been in the main event on PPV, he'd done two throwaway tag matches on the undercard earlier that year (and won both of them of course), but it was definitely the first time that Hogan in a high-profile singles match was placed lower than the main event on a pay per view. And oddly enough, this match went longer than any other Hogan match in contemporary memory and the last thing people saw wasn't the first main event between two guys who were not old WWF stars, but instead was Hogan getting that one elusive job back. It could've been a coincedence, but it was a hell of a coincedence.

But, once again, is the voting for best influence or most influence?

Yeah, I was wondering that too. Beyond being one of (if not the) top female stars for decades, I'd always heard she to some extent controlled the entire women's wrestling movement in America in sort of a shadow-promoter type fashion for a number of years.

I don't see why they have anyone who's still an active fulltime wrestler in the HOF in the first place. Don't most Halls of Fame for any given sport tend to only induct someone after they retire?

That was... pathetic. Both in the way she came off (reeeally wasted) and Vince for doing it in the first place. Apparently Chyna was on Nancy Grace, once again claimed that she's never done steroids, and that every single worker in the WWE now is on da juice.

Firstly, is he in only as a booker? Cuz if you include his stuff as a color commentator and Dangerous Alliance leader and the greatest amateur hypnotist of all time, his case is a bit stronger. Secondly, even if it's just for ECW, I'd say that gets him in on the "influence" part. You can certainly debate whether the influence was a good thing or not, and where Heyman originally stole his ideas from, and all that, but ECW still has a lingering effect to this day. Even though he ain't around anymore, one of Vince's TV shows is still named after Heyman's former company, and you can hardly go to any wrestling show anywhere without seeing someone get put through a plywood table. Plus there's the various amphetamine-paced brawling swervapalooza stuff that Russo swiped and turned into Attitude, and the various workers who were complete unknowns before their Philly runs before eventually getting hired to the big leagues, and the surprisingly high sales figures for the Rise and Fall dvd and the first One Night Stand, and how even schmucks like Justin Credible get an "Eee-Sea-Dub" chant at every indy shot they're ever paid fifty bucks for... It's not necessarily a positive influence on the wrestling biz today, but the influence is definitely there.

Yeah, they found her just fine for the Loose Cannon dvd.

Hell, I'm not sure now, since the discussion has gone off on so many tangents. But I do think that the simple fact that Orton has proven that he can't control himself in public makes him a bad choice businesswise to put the title on right now, since the media scrutiny of the WWE is at an all-time high. (In a similar vein, they should also count their lucky stars that the Nancy Graces of the world have never heard the name "Brian Ong".) And yes, I do still think that he is a worse choice than just Random Wrestler X. Hell, look at the guy he'd be getting the title from: beyond doing some shitty rapping and acting, Cena seems to spend most of his free time doing charity work, and has never been caught doing anything illegal. There have just been too many stories about Randy's behavior, over too long a period of time, for me to understand why they'd want to keep pushing this guy.

So you missed this part? And now I say that wrestling should be held to the same standards as any other corporation in America, and you disagree... why? Sure, there are other examples of people and companies doing bad shit, Enron and such. But just because someone else did something bad, it doesn't excuse you from committing your own wrongs. Wrestling's prevailing attitude has always been that if a giant media firestorm didn't occur over it, it never happened. Even serious problems like known drug use tend to be overlooked or denied until it becomes too big a problem to ignore. And it's scary to think that the WWE over the past several years is easily the most strict wrestling company in recent history, in terms of policing its employees. Just saying "wrestlers are bad people" ignores the details of the problems, the root causes of the symptoms, and the complexity of the situations. It's like how people explain Benoit's crimes by just saying "well, he was crazy, he was always crazy!", and while that might technically be right, it's a shallow method of explaining away a problem while still remaining in ignorance over the real deep motivations.

I think it'd be worth a shot to find out. If someone gets caught doing something blatantly illegal or grossly unethical, they should be fired, just like at any job at any other company in the world. They shouldn't smoke crack and get their job back, as it were. Why do they seemingly arbitrarily fire a few people for drug use, but not others? Why are Test and Angle shown the door while guys like Orton and RVD are kept on? I wish they would. The entire freewheeling attitude of the industry, and the way in which the veterans and higher-ups tend to indoctrinate the rookies into assuming that sort of lifestyle is normal and okay, should be what outsiders are looking at here.

How could that possibly be right? Every person who was ever involved in wrestling is evil? That's not statistically possible. How do we know that for sure? Isn't it entirely possible that he was an ordinary guy who turned bad? I personally think that's a much more frightening idea, that absolutely normal people can change into killers. Yeah, that was part of my point in my last post, the media care way more about over-the-top public stuff like Orton tends to committ rather than the behind-closed-doors insider horrors that guys like Bradshaw (and pre-murder Benoit) routinely get away with.

You guys keep making the "we knew about Orton but not about Benoit" point, and I'm not sure why. Yes, what Benoit did was worse than what Orton did. No, nobody outside of Benoit's circle of trust had any idea that anything was that seriously wrong. But, well, so what? If you're trying to make some sort of "ANY wrestler could do that" argument, I'll see your point and raise it with an "any PERSON could do that given the right circumstances". How does any of that excuse Orton from consistently acting like a dipshit, and excuse the company from pushing such an immature person with such little self-control instead of just firing them? Especially now, since they've been caught in a media storm and looking at a Congressional inquiry and everything, I don't understand why they'd want to have guys with bad records as their top-pushed stars. The watchdog atmosphere is so tight now that even things like Brian Adams dying wind up in the mainstream press, when that wouldn't have been so prior to Benoitgate. And of course Orton isn't the only one, or even the worst example, I'd go with someone like Bradshaw. But Orton got caught in a public manner more than Bradshaw did. And with the kind of media furor that's surrounded the Benoit deaths, truth obviously doesn't matter to people in high places; just perception.

There are not enough L's and O's in the world to place next to each other to express how I feel. Somewhere around here, I've got a few printouts of old Mitchell articles, including at least two from the early 90s where I specifically remember him knocking the Steiners' lousy workrate at the time. But at least he's consistently never liked the RnR, for some reason he always took shots at them for their age/gimmick, calling them "the world's oldest teenagers" and such.

Regardless of what's "worse", one's illegal and one isn't. As politicians have repeatedly proved, it's damn near accepted practice to lie to the American public at this point. Because the symptoms are much more obvious and blatant in the case of an Orton as compared to a Benoit. Randy's lawbreaking lapses just seem much worse than hearing that Benoit made his kids dress in suits, forced noobs to do squats, etcetera. The only serious sign we had with Benoit was Nancy's attempt at getting a divorce and restraining order back in '03, but 1.that was apparently really hushed up, I don't remember hearing about it back then and 2.she later changed her mind anyway, so to an outsider it would look more like a mental problem with her than him. And why do you disparage Lita in such a manner? Was it something you heard from a newsletter, leaked by Workers With An Agenda? You seem to be implying that every single backstage story that's ever been reported by anyone is not worth believing, since those darn workers had agendas. If so, then why bother ever reading a newsletter or visiting a website? Ah yes, snide little "you weren't really in the biz so you don't know more than me" insults, that never gets old. SOME wrestlers are like that, sure. Maybe even LOTS of them. But to say that all of them are like that is a blatant lie. To say that Orton is no worse than average is demonstrably wrong, because the average worker hasn't been known to have done this much bad stuff. And finally, once again, if you think the business is entirely populated with raving nympho alky lunatics, why the hell do you watch it?

It would've been helpful if the reporter would've listed the actual death figures for baseball and football here, in order to get an accurate comparison. And since Meltzer's list includes guys who never stepped foot in the WWE, you'd have to go past just the MLB and NFL and count players for minor-league teams too. (I'm not just being snitty, I really would like to know what those figures are.)

And where did I say wrestling and wrestlers don't have problems? Stop putting words in my mouth. It seems to be a favorite activity of yours. Which is worse than trashing a hotel room, how? Which is worse than Randy calling them cunts and shitting in their bags until they quit, how? Oh, Randy's got nothin' on that. But every time I've brought THAT one up on a message board, I get shouted down by people saying it doesn't matter, it wasn't his fault, whatever. Rotator cuff tear isn't commonly thought to be a steroid-caused injury. And Lashley doing drugs in private is worse than Randy doing drugs in public, how? Why not go with the obvious "Edge sleeping with other people's wives"? Of COURSE wrestling is filled with a bunch of nasty, maladjusted people. I just don't understand why Orton is thought to be no worse than average, when he's had many more known difficulties than the majority of others.

So, it's difficult for you to understand that a guy who's got a known history of having problems is more likely to cause future trouble than a guy who doesn't?

And all smart marks are virgins who live in their parents' basement, right. All Middle Easterners want to kill you for being an infidel. Why apply such massive, sweeping generalities to large groups of people? So, should we not give a benefit of the doubt to postal workers? Or congressmen? Or those quiet, unassuming nice people who it seems always turn out to be serial killers? I'm not saying that wrestlers are angels, obviously not. But to turn around what was said to me earlier, why do you still watch & pay attention to a business if it's entirely populated by maniacs? My basic point is, Orton has repeatedly shown that he seemingly can't control his actions. Many of the wrestlers have dirty backstage secrets, but many of Orton's manage to make their way to the public arena. And he KEEPS doing fucked-up shit, no matter how many times they make him go sit in the corner. I don't know why they keep pushing him back to the main event; when RVD got popped, they took both belts off him ASAP and he never got near the main event again.

Well then, if I missed your point, then why not explaining it instead of just posting a snarky jpeg?

There's a difference between a potential troublemaker and a proven one. But as the Bradshaw/Edge/Holly Rule seems to indicate, it's like the more li'l indiscretions you indulge in, the more the office likes you.

Booker and Steiner benefitted?! They didn't see a main event again for YEARS after getting stepped on by HHH. Benjamin didn't see any miraculous new opportunities after that. And I'd say Rock gave HHH the rub, not the other way around. I'm leery about conspiracy theories in general, but I wonder if HHH did that on purpose to make sure Steiner (who was traditionally known as a bleach-blonde badass heel with GIANT muscles) wasn't a threat to his spot. I mean, eight of the same suplexes in the same match?! Taking a juicehead like Steiner and making him go more than twenty minutes in his first big match in years? Ending it with a weaksauce DQ? This is the kind of thing that even your average TSM noob could tell you was a bad idea.