Mad Dog

I totally agree with you that it's dull as fuck. But they still didn't prep Keith Lee for being on the main roster.

Jonathan was slowing down a bit by 74 but that guy did some crazy stuff for his size and for the time. We're talking kip ups, doing flips in the ropes to escape holds and dropkicks. He's one of my favorite big men and other than The Destroyer was one of my favorite discoveries on All Japan Classics.

I mean, a lot of companies have their own style they prefer. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect your "development" company to be getting guys reps with matches laid out like your parent company would want. If you're training some girls to work for Stardom, you aren't going to train them to be deathmatch workers.

I don't even see an Andre match on there for Don. It looks like he worked Pedro, then Stongbow and then Bruno during his run in 74 which is kind of funny because he went to Western States and immediately did a couple of matches with Andre.

The Keith Lee stuff is a perfect example. He got to the main roster and couldn't work the main event style very well. What the fuck had he been doing in NXT for a year+ if he wasn't even getting prepared for the match style of the main roster?

Any time I try to watch NXT, I am almost always greeted by Leon Ruff and just turn it off.

Edit: Double post.

I think Vince Jr. did a pretty good job of protecting the Undertaker until around 1999 or so. He kept that mystique for a long time. They even did a good job with Kane for a solid year before moving him down the card. I even think they did a sort of decent job with Great Kahli for awhile as well.

He is a former long term coach of the Oklahoma football team so it was a jab at JR directly. He also coached the Dallas Cowboys.

Ron Wright's promos early on are absolutely brilliant. There's one where he put up like a PO Box and said he needed some extra money because he wouldn't afford his heart pills anymore.

A lot. I love the TV but his booking is the absolute shits at time. Ron Wright, DWB, Fuller, Smothers, Armstrong and Dutch do a lot of heavy lifting and really cover for his fuck ups.

That was generally accepted behavior and fans would pop for that back in the day but I think it showed the changing landscape and him already failing to cope by the mid 90s.

Yeah. I think it was a smart starting point for SMW. It gave him a following out of the gate and he had the right talents to get it off the ground. I think where he really went wrong is he needed to evolve and really lost touch with his fanbase. I think the fans turning on the Rock N Rolls for shaving Candido's head after losing the stip match shows where he had lost the plot.

He and Hogan had that match in 2005 or 2006 in the Mid-South Coliseum that drew like 3000 people for that Cory Maclin Memphis promotion.

I think from just a PR and charity work stand point he adds value to a company. In story. I think it would be cool if they brought him in as a personal trainer for Powerhouse Hobbs.

I like the Excalibur and Taz pairing but I think it kind of hurts Taz's character a bit. You can just tell he's having a ball and likes working with Excalibur. It makes for great commentary and gets you through the grind of some of the matches. But Taz the character shouldn't have fun.

Yeah. There's something about the child like enthusiasm and innocence of David Crockett commentary that I feel like infects the whole JCP product in a good way.

The Tonys are really great on the "paid ads" they did on Impact. Schiavone got some really good digs in during those.

Now with Lawler, there are two Lawlers. There's Memphis Lawler who I think is actually awesome on commentary and really tosses good jabs in there and isn't obnoxious in a bad way. Then there's pervy old man WWE Lawler screaming about tits all day. Though I will say. I loved that JR and Lawler were a team. They might make fun of each other and argue on air but if a wrestler fucked with one of them Lawler was going to beat your ass or JR was going to break a jar of candy over your head. Likewise I love that angle in Georgia where Piper went after Muraco for fucking with Solie.

I always loved how he would joke about how terrible he was during Goldberg matches. "Oh yeah, I had a 149 in a row, of course there was a 0 before that." I also thought the smug victory tour he took right after Hogan turned heel. On my WCW rewatches there are also times he really smartly weaves his history in with guys. Like he would talk about how he used to manage the Faces of Fear and how he ended up just dropping them because they were too hard to deal with. Or we just watched Bash at the Beach 1997 and he actually called back to the Survivor Series 92 match with Hennig/Savage vs. Flair/Razor during the DDP/Hennig vs Hall/Savage match. Or I used to love how he would hype up James Vandenberg. He was bad a lot in WCW but he has these moments where he would really lay down some context and backstory to things.

In his defense. I think it was a smart play in early 90s to go that route with the audience he was catering to. I think a cutting edge counter culture product like ECW could only start in a couple of cities. And even then, ECW is just Memphis wrestling cranked up to 11.

I think my problem with Cornette as a head booker is he doesn't have his own voice. I like OVW and SMW a lot. SMW is one of my favorite promotions. But he often comes across like a cover band trying to belt out all those Memphis and Mid-South hits he loved so much.

My friend lives in Lexington, KY and he says OVW has never been on TV there.

That's where the orgies happen... Oh fuck I'm banned...

I think Six Flags is when they started to do better on pulling consistent houses and not being entirely dependent on WWE guys. Lack of clean finishes is kind of a Cornette trope. I love SMW but the finishes can really kill it at times for me.