Mad Dog

Bundy and Studd and Tito and Morales got some play on Wrestling Challenge as tag teams.

I think it's stupid on Gabe's part. He's wasting a lot of money, that he doesn't have, to stop something that is having a minimal effect on his bottom line. Build a more loyal fanbase and it won't happen. Make people want to buy your product. Don't use piracy as an excuse and then waste a ton of money trying to fight it. I'm against pirating current wrestling stuff. You should pay and support your indy promotions as much as possible. But Gabe has gone about it in a counter-productive way and he's wasting money to fight a losing battle. He should leave that to the WWE or UFC which has the money to burn.

No, it worked in the 1980s NWA. Every title was important and there were always feuds over the belts that were good. I've explained in the past how in 1985, there was something memorable going on with with all of the belts minus the Mid-Atlantic and Six-Man belts. The NWA managed their titles a lot better than the WWE does now. It's about booking, not number of championships. The WWE couldn't manage three championship belts well right now.

Because people lay down more money for the PPVs than they do for wrestling.

I was curious how old Kane is due to this thread. 45 years old. I was a little surprised, I thought he was a little younger than that.

I remember being disappointed by the Boston Garden match.

I fucking hate this match with a passion. I watched it once and it felt like I sat through 4 hours of shit. I seem to remember that Michaels completely fell apart as a worker during the last 20-30 minutes of the match too.

I think it says something about Kane that he's been in several angles that would've killed other careers dead and survived. I think it also speaks volumes about him that he can be a forgotten mid-carder for years and they can just tease making him a threat again and the crowds are instantly behind him.

I watched that Vader vs. Kane match for the first time in over a decade. Holy crap, that crowd went insane when Vader went for the Vaderbomb. That match is kind of amazing considering Vader was so stop and go with his push. It speaks volumes to me that Kane had been around for maybe 5 months and he was so over that the crowd latched onto Vader so much.

Similar but I think he was more in the vein of Three Minute Warning. Ring of Honor tried it with some guy in their first year of the promotion and it failed miserably. I think they called him Slugger or something lame like that.

I think one thing that gets understated with Sting is 1997. How many guys could've pulled off appearing minimally, not speak and get over as huge as he did? That wasn't an easy role to pull off. I've posted the link here before but Sting hitting the ring and just destroying everything in sight at Uncensored 97 had the fans absolutely losing their shit. I think a lot of guys would've failed doing that.

That's not true at all. Look at the Meng match for the U.S. Title. That is just short of being a great match and is probably the best singles match in Meng's career. Sting made that match with how he approached it. Going back to the Vader matches. Vader is a great worker but those Sting matches are some of the best work in his career. I also bring those up because the internal logic of those matches are more sound and Sting is better at playing the outgunned babyface against the unstoppable monster. It's a better version of the formula Michaels uses because Sting has a better offense, uses a more logical babyface comeback and isn't afraid to get his ass beaten into the ground and then lose the match.

Pick any match vs. Vader. There better than Michaels.

Ricky Steamboat in the Flair feud of 1989. He just doesn't work. He does his "for my family" promos and he comes across as lame, not someone you want to root for. The matches were really great but I found that Steamboat kind of made the feud tedious to get through. I'm really just looking forward to the Funk things now. Steamboat just lacks the edge for the feud and seems out of place with the rest of the company.

Which I don't get. TNA has made her look like a star during both of her runs with the company. I don't see why the WWE has never been able to do anything worthwhile with her.

TNA seems to do longer title reigns these days. I think he'll probably last until Bound for Glory unless ratings were to totally tank.

Wow, TNA legit surprised me tonight. Austin Aries... the new TNA Champion. I guess I'm going to start watching again.

I kind of got thinking about this with some of the RoH chat in the other thread. This post is mostly about how a lot of indy promotions try to reinvent the wheel and how wrestling seems to work best when you stick to the basics. I didn't really what else to name the title of this thread so forgive me if the title kind of sucks. Anyways, here are a couple of areas where I feel people like to try and tweak wrestling and it makes everything fall apart. So let's take a look: 1. Face/Heel alignment. This seems to be a favorite place for indys to try and reinvent the wheel. You go to some show and you have a bunch of guys trying to be tweener douches or cool heels. You don't have any pure heels or faces on these shows. I hate this when a promotion does it. You NEED faces and heels to be strongly defined, otherwise you lose a certain dramatic tension over time. For me, I need someone to root for. I may like the heels but I need this structure to keep my interest. I look at the modern shows that I tend to stick with like NWA Anarchy, Chikara or NWA Hollywood and those promotions have a strong face/heel structure where guys don't turn sides very often. Promotions I don't like, RoH, have really muddy waters and you're never really sure what side of the fence a good number of the roster is on. 2. Play to the crowd stupid. There's a big segment of modern workers that come into the ring and just hit a bunch of moves and that's it. They never really create a big connection with the crowd past people that like touching themselves to the number of suplexes used in a match. Stopping to be a dick as a heel is always better than showing off your workrate skills. It doesn't take much, hell you could probably just push the referee and shit talk and that's enough. 3. Not every match has to be an epic. I admit in my younger days I fell into this mindset for a couple of years. Then Ring of Honor came along and showed me the error of my thinking. It gets tedious really quickly when every match is trying to up the ante on the last match. 24/7 came along a few years later and I really learned to appreciate how shows used to be structured. Every spot on the show served a purpose and it all built into the main event. Few people seem to use match placement as well as they used to. I had a few more and my mind totally blanked after this. Maybe I'll remember tomorrow.

Yeah, I think so too. I don't think it will hurt Aries in this instance though. I'm kind of surprised by how much of a star he looked like in that segment.

What amazes me is how stubborn they are about letting guys have gimmicks and be entertaining. Why isn't Jay Lethal doing Black Machismo? He's a million times more interesting when he's doing that gimmick. Instead he's just doing a dull, kind of lifeless gimmick. It's a little thing but RoH is doing a lot of those little things that hurt them. Bringing in Colt Cabana and just letting Lethal do his gimmick would make their roster a lot more interesting and that's just two tiny little changes.

I watched the Aries/Roode segment on the last Impact. Wow, Aries looked like a legit star and I think they might actually be on to something with him if they have the guts to put the belt on him tonight. It's amazing to me, TNA was dead to me and it seems like the show is suddenly really good all of a sudden as they're bringing in all this new talent.

Christopher Daniels broke the "Code of Honor" on the very first show. So it was really just a gimmick.

I vaguely remember that. Corino was a fucking terrible announcer.

That's true. But RoH was making it a focal point of the company. There's a difference between Jeff Jarrett doing the Double M-A gimmick or Taker busting out MMA moves in matches and doing an entire feud like it's an MMA match. When workers and fans are complaining about it, there's a problem. And I agree, they don't have the talent to draw nationally but they could still help themselves by not doing things that everyone clearly seems to hate.

I agree the written contracts are really hurting RoH and trying to be a national promotion. This is kind of what killed ECW at the end of the day. Trying to travel and be a national promotion. RoH seems like they would be much better off if they just scaled back and ran out of PA, NY, NJ, IL, IN and OH and drew upon the local talents that can drive to the shows. Drop all the written contracts and offer guys a payday that's a little better than what everyone else is offering. They seem to be convinced that they can beat TNA in an arms race with contracts and such and TNA is just bigger and has more resources. They're hopelessly outclassed there and TNA management (shocker) here seem much more competent.