Mad Dog

I'd give the Sheik 1965 to 1974 as far as being a major hated heel. People that watched Detroit when he was the top guy speak of him in a kind of awe that you see reserved for the very top guy. I've seen the footage of him on the Wrestling Gold sets, Meltzer gives a good recap of his career, and I've dug up some other matches. He pretty much wrestled the same match and looked about the same age for the 15 year period of matches that I've found. People fucking hated and feared him. Especially in Toronto. Meltzer said on the Wrestling Gold set that Toronto had a high Hindu population and they fucked hated him with a passion.

I mentioned it on the first page.

How about Trips banging Chyna?

Benoit and Jericho vs. Austin and HHH.

I just watched that era of television last year. Sarge was plastered all over television. A couple of promos every week and consistent matches. It really felt like he was being forced down your throat. And he got his Iron Shiek boots personally from Saddam.

Ticket prices are why pro sports attendance is going down. Same with movies. My wife and I don't go to movies because it costs $20 just to get the tickets. We don't go to most pro sporting events because it costs at least $70 to get in the door. We go to baseball because it costs $20 to go. And we live in Columbus, things are moderately priced here and in Cleveland/Cincinnati compared to other markets. I also looked at NCAA Tournament tickets. $150 for cheapo tickets and they wonder why attendance can be an issue.

Agreed. Has a pregnancy storyline ever actually resulted in a baby? The Stacey Keibler one sort of produced a baby.

I think they're going to end up waiting too long to give Steen the title and kill some of his momentum. Night 2 was originally supposed to be Richards vs. Steen vs. Elgin for the title. So the hope was Steen was going to get the win and maybe start a feud with Elgin. But that got scraped in favor of Edwards/Steen and Richards/Elgin.

I don't think you can argue that at all. Just look at Goldberg, they could've made some money off of Goldberg starting at the Elimination Chamber. Instead Triple H beat him at the most critical point to him being a draw. Goldberg then won the belt but couldn't get out from Triple H when Goldberg/Kane could've done some big business. And look at Lesnar. Lesnar gets pushed huge for 5 months, goes over Rock clean and then the next night he flees in terror when HHH and Taker start brawling. HHH then gets his own belt. In fact, I think HHH was one of the only guys that didn't put over Lesnar at all. HHH also pissed the Rock off. There was that whole thing where the Rock put over the Hurricane and HHH made sure to completely squash him like the very next episode of Raw. And HHH had done that with Jericho and Lesnar as well. And if you want to go back to where the WWE really started to decline. He was part of fucking Angle over in 2000 at the end of the love triangle.

What do you guys think about the neverending series of HHH/HBK matches that went on from 2002-2004? I found the whole series of matches to be pretty underwhelming when they happened despite the hype. I know for a fact that their HIAC match at Bad Blood in 2004 made a lot of the local fans stop going to shows altogether.

I literally can't tell who is who in that poster. I can only tell who Richards is because he has the belt.

I think if I hadn't been subjected to the previous year and a half of what New Japan was doing it wouldn't have been such a big deal. It just kind of turned into this embodiment of everything that I hated about the product at the time. Really, the Fujita reigns bother me more now and I'm less bitter about Sapp now. But at the time, I was really disgusted with it.

A lot of breaking points for me. 1. WCW closing it's doors. I watched a good deal of WWF in the Monday Night Wars era but WCW was my passion. The WWF was wrestling and the Austin run was good so I tuned in and liked it. But WCW... I loved WCW. WCW could absolutely suck on a weekly basis and I would still watch because I remembered the good times and I knew if I would just hold on long enough that it would get better again. 2. Katie Vick. The HHH nose honk from laughing at himself for "I screwed her brains out" skit was a moment where part of my fandom died a hard death. 3. Bob Sapp winning the IWGP Title. Oh man, I was fucking pissed when I signed on to my computer that day and saw that he won the belt. New Japan had been making horrible decisions to that point but that's where you just knew the company was really fucked up. And past that we were subjected to Lesnar and two Fujita reigns before Tanahashi made the belt seem to have value again. 4. Vince Russo returns to TNA. 2006 was a pretty good wrestling year for me. I was enjoying the TNA product quite a bit. Bound for Glory was a satisfying event and then Vince Russo came back. The product went off a cliff immediately. 5. The Benoit murders and the fan reaction. To be specific, the idiots that were accusing Nancy of killing Daniel really disgusted me. My fandom promptly died there.

My personal philosophy for most matches is you can do everything you need to do in 24 minutes. If you're going past 24 minutes, there needs to be a good reason for it.

O'Reilly seems to be a Richards wannabe. He does a million moves and can't make a single one of those moves mean anything within the context of a match.

RoH main events are always going to be too long.

Her niece is 10 and not really a wrestling fan. I could take her to a Chikara show and she would have a good time as a non-fan because of the characters and the humor. I really couldn't take her to anything else wrestling related.

Oh, she would send most of them home crying if they fucked with her. I just don't find either atmosphere to be welcoming to outsiders. At ECW, I really don't want to make her stand in a crowd with a bunch of guys yelling anti-women shit and watch a product that encouraged it. With RoH, I just hate their fanbase and wouldn't take anyone to an RoH show that wasn't familiar with the product or it's fanbase. It's more, I see her going to those shows and coming away with a negative experience whereas WWE she knows what's she's getting into and Chikara makes her laugh.

The one ECW show I went to was in 2000 in Columbus, OH. The recap for the event says there were 980 fans in attendance and I can safely say there wasn't a single vagina in the crowd. My wife is cool with wrestling. She's gone with me to shows. I wouldn't take her to RoH due to the fans and I probably wouldn't take her to ECW if it was still around.

I've never really enjoyed any matches with the Harris Brothers. But they've always struck me as competent workers that know their strengths and weaknesses in the ring. If I were running a promotion and needed a mid-card tag team act, I would probably hire them with little hesitation.

Randy Orton

I truly believe that you could've plugged almost anyone into that slot against the Rock at Summerslam 98 and they would've gotten that kind of pop. The fans were absolutely rabid to see him lose at the time and they would've latched onto almost anyone that they thought could get the job done.

It's the usual BS you get about how HHH was this huge NWA fan and blahblahblah... I thought the article was shit. HHH pre-quad was a guy that had a primarily knee based offense. Was a weak talker and you could argue that he was the 4th or 5th most over person in DX at any given time. And his big bouts of overness were because of Foley/Austin/Rock. I know Scott Keith is derided by a lot of people but his breakdown in early 1999 of why HHH was a bad choice for WWE Champion really is a good argument against him as a good worker. A really telling thing about HHH is on the History of the WWE Championship DVD set. They do a video history of all the title changes. All of the changes got big reactions from the crowd until you get to the first 2-3 HHH title wins. Those were met with huge indifference. He really owes Foley a lot for making people give a shit about him.

Those people are wrong. I could convince people that the Earth is flat too. Just because a bunch of people believe something to be true does not make it so. Also those people believe that because they've been fed 12 years of propaganda that HHH is a "great".

I kind of feel like Enos, Bloom and Bravo are on the same level as HHH and that everyone else is better. I tend to see HHH as a guy that has no real idea of his strengths or weaknesses. He's not as funny as he thinks he is, he isn't as good in the ring as he thinks he is and he's not as interesting as he thinks he is. So what you're left with is a guy that works matches that are too long for his talent level and he gets too much screen time for his overness/capability of getting over. I've said it about HHH and I've said this about Orton. If you took the sheer amount of effort it took to get them as over as they are and divided it into 4 individual pushes that you could probably have gotten 4 people as over as they are. I think HHH is a career mid-carder who fucked his way to the top. I see little merit to him as an actual worker.