Timbo Slice

What the fuck does that passage even mean?

Here's what I wrote on my blog, The Best of ECW: The ECW rematch of the duo’s 1995 series, which at this point seems like it had been done in like 70 countries or something crazy like that. Always like that this started out with Gertner doing the ring introductions in Spanish. And he did it well, too! So consider this your normal lucha dos a tres caidas match, so the tecnico is going to go nuts and win the first fall, as Mysterio does a plancha off the apron, another over the top rope and then finishes the fall with a standing rana. Psicosis starts the second fall with his awesome missed corner dropkick spot and then Rey starts with the ranaing and all that. Psicosis makes his comeback and starts slamming Rey all over the turnbuckles. Great powerbomb for a near fall. Rey avoids a corner charge so that Psicosis can show people why he does the post bump better than anyone else. Rey then gets his incredible handspring spinning rana and tries a springboard moonsault, but Psicosis catches him and destroys him with a martinete for the win. Always liked that wrinkle. Third fall begins with Psicosis hitting a powerbomb through the table and an absolutely nutty tope into the front row. Psicosis then continues the nuttiness by missing a corner splash and bumping off the post to the floor, where Rey follows with a springboard somersault silla. Then, they realize they’re in ECW and start kicking each other on the floor, throwing chairs with Rey doing most of the damage by wrapping the chair around Psicosis’ head and ramming him into the post. Rey is an absolute highspot machine in this match, hitting a beautiful triangle somersault plancha to the outside, too. Psicosis then gets SUPER nutty, hitting a friggin KAORU diving senton on Rey through a table and a chair on the floor. After another powerbomb, Psicosis finishes with his fantastic corkscrew senton with a chair laid across Rey. Immensely better than the first match, which was really about them just introducing the crowd to their style. This match saw them take everything up 10 notches and put their own twist on the ECW style. Fantastic stuff for the time, and for a pure spotfest, there are few matches that touch it. Still holds up extremely well today.

I see what you mean now, Loss. Steenalized is on the right track. More like the minor leagues than anything. Shouldn't have anything to do with the developmental business model.

April Fools?

Well, by ruling, if the unionization works, players become "employees" of the school whereas wrestlers are considered independent contractors. WWE has been able to get around this for years, but much like the NCAA, they've become the only game in town. So at some point, if a change was going to happen, it would have to be a collective effort by all the wrestlers who work there to do so. The NCAA has definitely said that this will go the Supreme Court, and in all honesty, they don't have much of a case. I'm not sure it would really impact the WWE all that much considering the majority of people who go to the WWE at 18 instead of college for athletics want WWE to work out more than anything else. That, plus they probably aren't getting offers from big-time NCAA schools. The only possibility that could arise is if the official dropping of the term "Amateur" becomes a part of this deal. If WWE wanted someone to come work out at the Developmental Center when they weren't preparing for the college sport of their choosing, that's something that actually could happen, but it would be very unlikely to actually happen.

This was a great match, kills the Triple Crown match 10 months later. This was the first time I had seen Mutoh's new wrestling style and I dug it, especially with Kawada really putting over everything so well. The Wizard to finish was awesome thanks to how Kawada took it. Going forward, Mutoh really had to dig-in deep to make his matches compelling, and it normally didn't happen if he wasn't in there with a great seller.

I think one of the big reasons people thought the 6/7 match was better was because Ace came out of nowhere with the performance of his life. Kawada/Taue vs. Misawa/Whoever had been seen plenty of times and while there was the shock of Akiyama getting the pin for the belts, Ace was a force of nature in that match trying to step it up with Williams. I know I was definitely impressed with him in the match, but I'm with you in thinking the 5/23 match was better.

As it is with most math errors, the calculation was correct but the numbers were wrong. I'm the one going back to school for math and here I am messing up a simple multiplication problem.

Definitely. Right when Bryan started getting into the shitty stuff with Orton, there was one time where I think he got put through a table and Brie came out to stop the beat down. They then acknowledged that they were engaged.

Fucking zeroes, man.

Yeah, the more I think about what I said...I'm gonna chalk that one up to an unbelievable amount of optimism on my part? I got nothing.

All that's well and good, but with people souring on cable in the first place and them having good money come in from RAW and SmackDown!, I always saw the OOT as hedging the bet, so to speak. They should get a decent number with the renewal, and if the subscriptions grow after WM or what have you, they'd recoup that money pretty easily. That $96M in a year can come with 8 million subscribers to the network, which while not set in stone is definitely in range.

I only caught a few minutes but he was mainly talking about the show and the comics. No wrestling talk.

I'm a huge fan of CW Anderson's work so I'm interested in seeing his big matches again once I get there, but I always dug his gimmick as the long lost Anderson brother.

One good thing about The Shield having kind of a blah match at WrestleMania is that it seems like they're gonna keep them together for a while now that they know Bryan is firmly entrenched as their #2, which means that while Reigns got himself the big push at Royal Rumble, they can keep them together for a while longer to feud with the Wyatts if they wanted to.

Benoit/Sullivan was pretty damn crazy.

The main bridges were the indies that felt the need to offer a different style to combat the big dogs, so you had ECW go with lucha, the japanese styles, death matches, etc. APW out on the west coast with the New Japan Juniors style, and then ROH upping the stiffness and turning into a true "Japanese-style" promotion. Then WCW took ECW's ideas on the work, WWF took ECW's style on the attitude side of things and about a decade later, with ROH being the indy hub for so many, that style integrated into the WWE almost by default. It's just a reactionary business. People see what works and want to see where it goes.

It's a fine card, but I think what El-P might be talking about is how nothing about this year is unpredictable in any way at all. The only thing that's unpredictable is whether or not WWE is as big a group of idiots as we all think they are (which is totally founded), but the problem there is that if they really are that moronic, they don't deserve success in the first place. That being said, if they can't figure out that a WrestleMania Moment with 75,000 people doing the "YES!" chant is worthwhile, fuck 'em.

Not as good as the match from last year but it was fun.

Everything about this was Classic HHH (And not in the best way). A promo that goes too long without a retort from the other guy, an elaborate ruse that is unnecessary, and then a beatdown at the end that went way, way, way too long. Stephanie tapping into 2000 Bitch Stephanie was probably the best part of the whole thing, and then of course, when her big moment comes, Bryan yells at her for not slapping him hard enough. Absolutely hilarious. Supposedly, Bryan did a stretcher job for this thing afterwards, which is about par for the course.

Well, Meltz did say that Orton was the only guy today who could be a top guy in JCP.

I only think WWE can justify raising its price if they feel the market for cable subscriptions subsides. Right now, a lot of people are becoming disenchanted with cable as a whole and don't mind going to OTT services like the WWE can offer, but only if the price is worth getting out of the cable subscription. I don't expect them to raise the price for quite a long time.

Graves just doesn't interest me. I understand what he's trying to do, but it just doesn't seem natural. People talk about him as someone who could be like Punk down the road, but he doesn't have nearly as much charisma as Punk and while people will shit on Punk's work, I haven't seen much from Graves that tells me he's going to be some super worker down the road, either. Meanwhile, Zayn seems like he's just running in place, knowing he can go out there and have a good match with a lot of people, but after what he did with Cesaro, this seemed like a step down for him, with the match not really holding much interest with me.

When I went back to look at HHH matches, I had a similar opinion. I felt like he was cherry-picking his favorite 80s stuff and trying to make it his own, but ended up failing because it wasn't nearly as compelling. The idea behind those epics is that we're supposed to care that he's the guy having them, but he never gives you a reason to get behind him. If anything, it's his opponent you feel more for, either because you don't like him and you'd rather see HHH win out of spite or you love him and therefore make Triple H that much more of a heel. He's bland as all hell.

So from the WON this morning, it looks like they're talking to Spike TV about a return, which means Viacom backed up that big ol' truck of money, it seems.