Mad Dog

He was okay in the Bound for Glory angle. He really needed to go away after that. I hate to admit this but I have a soft spot for Erik Watts. He's not a good wrestler but I always got a kick out of him. Same with David Flair, I thought his psycho persona and tag team with Crowbar was a little underrated at the time.

John can probably help out with this but I remember Helms doing a clean job to Triple H just a few weeks later. I believe it was the very next week.

Yeah, that was one of the scummier things they pulled.

Wasn't there some WWE program around her death that essentially accused Luger of killing her?

I tend to look at TNA this way. 2002-2003 was about finding the right pieces for the roster and finding their voice as a promotion. 2004 was about shifting to a tv model. 2005-2006 is where the company found it's voice and was headed in the right direction and had their shit together. Then somewhere in 2006 someone freaked out and brought Russo back. The company fell apart quickly after that. I have all of the 2006 television leading up to Russo's return. It was a quality run of television. There was bad stuff but there's always going to be that. But they really found a voice for the company and they were different from the WWE at the time. And one thing about 2005, that was unfortunately the year they blew it with Monty Brown.

I disagree with that. Guerrero was pretty fucked up at points of his WCW run due to the party atmosphere and Benoit went crazy from brain damage. I think there might be a slight argument for Guerrero but I think Benoit destroyed his brain doing the diving head butt. Benoit was going to do that no matter who he was under contract to.

It was ridiculous but HHH had to work 20+ minutes on PPV in that era no matter what. So there you go, Steiner coming off a foot injury and his first match in a long time and HHH wants to work a long match. Steiner sucked in that match but HHH should take 90% of the blame for it. If you're calling the match, you need to know what your opponent can and can't do. But that whole feud was about HHH burying Steiner because he was a selfish prick.

The Scott Steiner run still astounds me in some ways. Their refusal to protect him at all really is stupid in hindsight. It still confuses me how HHH got out of any blame for how awful those HHH/Steiner matches were when he was the one calling the action. I watched his debut and the crowd lost their shit for him too. But that's how that era worked, bury anyone that was from WCW if they were too over. For as stupid as TNA is, they somehow figured out how to protect Steiner in his matches and use him effectively.

To further the DDP thing. He got that stupid motivational speaker thing over when they were trying to bury him and then had guys start squashing him every week as a result.

There was also a concentrated effort to fuck over a lot of the ECW/WCW crew in the E at the time though. DDP, O'Haire, etc. all ran into the Undertaker backstage. Booker T got over and then they made a point of not pushing him. I still don't know what happened to Mike Sanders either.

I disagree with this. They have booked 2 angles successfully from start to finish and they were both in 2006 right before Russo came in. Sting vs. Jeff Jarrett and LAX vs. Styles/Daniels were both good angles. If you go back, they had a solid year of booking in that first year of Spike TV. The Sting angle worked, LAX was gaining some steam and people were interested in the Angle/Joe rivalry. The company was headed in a pretty solid direction and then someone, somewhere hit a panic button and brought Russo back. Bound For Glory 2006 ended up being the pinnacle for the company booking wise.

I disagree on Kidman. If you watch the last year of WCW, he was really adjusting to a more low risk style of offense. No more shooting star press as a regular move and it felt like he had lost a step. The switch to WWE seemed to fall right into his physical decline starting to take effect.

Sean O'Haire, He was pegged as the next big thing in WCW. When Bischoff was coming back, reports were that he was really high on O'Haire and that he was going to give him a huge push as a result. Fast forward a few months. Undertaker goes out of his way to bury him for some lockerroom BS. He got jobbed out hard and was essentially off tv 6 weeks into the Invasion angle.

Wow... Mighty Igor was still wrestling in 1983?

I find the Showboat to be just kind of boring with good matches mixed in here and there. TCS era is so bad at points that it's entertaining. There's usually something on every episode that you can latch onto and enjoy for the pure badness of it. I thought Lee Marshall was okay. He wasn't good but he didn't seem to torpedo the product like Larry Nelson did. I can't even begin to count how many interviews that Nelson would just bring to a crashing halt with his badness.

I think they were screwed no matter what. Take the Midnight Rockers as an example. That was an instant where Verne did the right thing and it was still ruined because you had 60 year old announcers trying to sell the coolness of the team. Really, they needed younger blood in the front office. You needed someone in 1988 that understood the appeal of the Rock N Roll Express and how to build off their recent Crockett run. Watching the tv, it was as much a formatting issue as it was a booking issue. The shows were just dull. Bad production values, extended boring squash matches and just outdated compared to the contemporary programs at the time. Honestly, the Team Challenge Series was the most interesting thing that had happened to the product in 4 years because the product at least modernized a little.

Inoki has been recognized on and off. It really depends on their mood on a given day really.

Here's the Ring Ka King Scott Steiner promo again... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89FHgivPGd0

They do song and dance numbers as part of the show too. If you go back a few pages, I posted a teaser with Scott Steiner and the crowd fleeing in terror from him.

Kazuchika Okada won the IWGP Title from Tanahashi earlier today. That seems really random and out of left field. I don't feel like they had even really attempted to push Okada as a top level guy. The new ownership group really isn't winning me over with their decisions so far.

I thought I was forgetting one.

NWA World Title has Baba, Fujinami, Chono, Muto, Hashimoto and Ogawa. AWA had Jumbo. WWE had Inoki

I'm really hoping they learned something from Ring Ka King and maybe put that kind of effort into making their product good like that.

I actually think that number has gotten worse since the 80s and 90s. Back to Watts, he talked about this in the same interview. He thought it was business exposing to have so many successful black athletes in other sports and almost zero in wrestling. It's why he made such an effort to bring in as many black talents as he could and push them. I was thinking of the promotions that I actively watch and NWA Anarchy has probably been the most racially diverse promotion I've watched the last several years.

I don't know of guys you could've put belts on over the years. I do think it's ridiculous that there are world titles with 40-50 year lineages and they have one or two guys on the list.