Loss

I have spent the last year watching and talking about Joshi quite a bit. People may not watch it, but it's their loss. They probably wouldn't rank as well, but there are key people in Joshi that if they were missing from a standard ballot, I'd have a hard time taking it seriously. Anyone who has a style preference so strong that they can't enjoy at least some stuff in every single style has no business making a top 100, or at least has no business expecting others to find value in their top 100.

If I'm working with an electric oven instead of a far superior gas one, and I'm confined to using a pre-made Duncan Hines cake mix, but still forget to add the egg, the cake is going to fall apart. It's proof positive that I'm a lousy baker too. However, if I follow the instructions on the box, the end result may be a decent cake, but it doesn't mean that people should praise me for it. Remembering to add vegetable oil isn't a sign of greatness. But it does mean that I can follow directions. Not really remarkable, but some people may have been living on legumes and cardboard for so long that when someone presents them with a fundamentally solid box cake, they go crazy over it, despite it not really being anything special. And maybe the pressure from the kitchen manager isn't to bake a delicious, mouth-watering cake, but rather just to make sure I finish it on time so the next person in line can bake their cake. He doesn't care that I spent years in small bakeries honing my craft and that food critics have highly rated my stuff. I am working with Duncan Hines now, and I need to understand my limitations. Or maybe I work within a system where I have all of these amazing pastry skills, but I'm a sous chef for a cake baker, and I'm not allowed to make pastries because it would upstage the executive chef, who will have all the time and resources he needs to truly produce something great. In the end, I made great money and more people ate my cakes because of the increased exposure, but I never got to use my dazzling pastry skills, and all those years of working in small bakeries went to waste when I finally got a shot with Duncan Hines. Yes, it's because I worked in an environment where I couldn't and I made the best of it. Maybe I'm far more talented than the executive chef. But that's reality. One of the consequences of that is that while it may be a travesty, I'll never be remembered as one of the greatest bakers who ever lived. Nor should I be, even though my skills and potential were there. The reason? Because right or wrong, I never made a great cake on my own.

I still think booking is a big issue, and I tend to think if the booking was better, a lot of the other problems would take care of themselves. PPV is down because match results don't feel important.

Michael Cole is Vince McTherapy.

This age group hasn't really been a problem for WWE for a long time. Their decline in popularity has been in large part because fans over 30 years old have dropped off in big numbers, and they haven't really done anything to lure them back.

If the main selling point for WWE is match quality, there is no reason to see it in real time. The best way to incentivize real time viewing is to improve the booking.

House show attendance. Diversified revenue streams are the worst thing that has ever happened to pro wrestling (from a fan's point of view). It's likely we could track wrestling's slow decline to coming up with ways to make money without having to draw a house.

I interpreted the point of this to be career-long things, not capitalizing on injuries.

That's pretty much it -- Flair's back. Anything else would be reading too much into things, although I'm sure people could point things out they picked up over time.

Long blond hair and bleeding, and because WWE has marketed HHH as the second coming of Flair. That's really it. Plus, when they were paired on camera, HHH started trying to dress like him.

I get outrageous reactions every time I say this, but I still think HHH's 2002-2003 heel run is a big reason for WWE's decline. RVD, Kane, Michaels I, Steiner, Booker, Nash, Goldberg -- each of those feuds was uniquely bad and business did decline quite a bit during this time. Seven failed main event programs in a row tend to do that. It's possibly the worst main event run a top heel has ever had in a major promotion.

"You just can't market a fuckin fart" is my new favorite quote.

The Boss Man matches are really good, especially the one at Royal Rumble '91. The Eddy match from Nitro in June of '96 is a really fun spotfest. I don't think he's better than HHH, but he's more fun to watch, and probably would have been better with equal opportunity.

My breaking point was the reaction from everyone in wrestling to the Benoit tragedy, which was pretty disgusting and made me hate wrestling for a few years, because I couldn't watch anything without noticing how many people were dead/in prison/wrecked their lives when watching old stuff, and WWE not changing a thing about how they hire, fire and push people made it hard to enjoy new stuff. He who increases knowledge increases sorrow, I suppose. It's not that I would have expected anything different, but not using that tragedy as a chance to apologize for the past, re-examine all of wrestling's norms and attempt to clean things up got to me, because I couldn't help but wonder why I was watching this shit. Before that, I had watched wrestling since at least 1983, becoming a pretty religious wrestling watcher in 1988 when I got old enough to use my allowance to buy magazines and never really stopping from there. Beyond that, I have my personal ideas of what wrestling should be, but I don't really insist on them in order to enjoy something. But angles (not "storylines", but championship chases and heel beatdowns to build up big matches -- that sort of thing) dropping off in quality have made it difficult to stay invested. I think one of my favorite things to do is watch a guy rise through the ranks to the top, and repeatedly seeing that start to happen only for it to be a false alarm made me stop caring eventually. It goes against every sensibility I have as a wrestling fan to have Punk and Bryan having world champ vs world champ matches on a weekly basis in throwaway TV segments with no one noticing, when that's the type of thing that could have filled a dome and broke PPV records in a different era. The champions should be several steps above everyone else, and I think kids growing up and not getting a chance to have arguments for years about who would win between Punk and Bryan are missing out. Anyone who followed wrestling in the 80s knows how big the Hogan/Flair comparisons were. Dream matches don't really exist these days and that's a shame. Good wrestling is about the whole, not the sum of its parts. I've never really looked at wrestling in a compartmentalized way. Promos and other outside-the-ring stuff are there to build heat and enhance the in-ring, so without any of that, sure it's possible to have a great match, but it's much harder to make anyone care about it.

That's not to say -- at all -- that things were magical in a previous era. But I think everyone would argue that they did a much better job of emphasizing match results and making wrestlers seem like stars in pretty much every previous era. Every era is a reaction to the one before it. In the late 90s, the in-ring started getting de-emphasized and match quality took a global downturn, which is what gave us hyper-purist feds like ROH. Now, once again, we're ready for a shift. Hopefully, eventually we'll get to that great place where winning and losing matters, angles have long-term build and continuity, the wrestlers are produced like stars and do great promos AND the match quality is strong.

Wrestling angles and promos are crap now. That's not a generational thing. That's a wrestling-sucks-now thing. Maybe the in-ring is still good, but if the wrestlers aren't protected, the championships they're fighting for mean nothing, winning/losing doesn't matter and there's nothing at stake, why should I care if a match is good or not? A steady stream of fun five-minute TV matches and three-star PPV matches is not enough incentive to keep following things so closely. I realize not everyone sees it the same way, but that's my struggle.

Moved all the ROH iPPV talk to its own thread.

Oh yeah, most of the big indies are absolutely no place to bring children, and I'm surprised no indies have picked up on that maybe contributing to them not drawing at times.

My favorite forgotten WWF entrance music. I was disappointed when they changed it, as I thought it was great: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P75FwpvRDUw

Last I checked, the Rikishi match still looks really good. The Taka match is more booking tricks than HHH performance, but he does time his nearfalls well to get a strong crowd reaction and it's still fun.

There are occasional strong HHH performances. I really like him in the Rikishi and Taka matches in 2000, the Ironman with Rock is really good, and he and Jericho had terrific chemistry on their initial run with some really fun matches. But something that falsely colors that time period is that HHH's ascension happened during a time the WWF was generally well-booked, and at least early on in his run, the WWF mindset was to put people in TV main events that showed even a slight hint that they might be over. Because of this, while there was still a hierarchy, fans weren't nearly as cynical as they would become, so main eventer vs popular midcarder matches usually got over. False finishes, such as those in the Taka match, got big pops because he wasn't yet pushed as so ridiculously dominant that no one thought that he could be beat. By 2002 or so, he'd try to work the same underdog match with a guy like Spike Dudley, and the reaction wouldn't be there anymore because everyone knew no upset was taking place. Your great workers can still make people think someone way lower on the totem pole may pull off an upset by heating up a dead or skeptical crowd, but when you stripped away the hot promotional run and good booking, HHH's flaws were way more exposed, and to me, that's the biggest example of that, although there are plenty more. It's not so much that he regressed after the quad injury as it is that the WWF regressed tremendously during his injury in 2001, and when he came back, he wasn't as propped up by such a strong machine around him. That's not unique to HHH, as there are plenty of guys that were hot from 1998-2000 that couldn't get over after the boom was over at all. It's just that because of HHH's push, you expect better. There is a segment of the fanbase that really likes HHH, and I don't mean to imply that they don't exist. But I also don't want to make a false equivalency where there is none.

Sure ... but most of those people aren't likely to think of wrestling critically anyway.

I don't think I'd put Bravo above HHH myself, although I could be convinced. But it is a pretty drastic difference. He had a different body type and was a lot more athletic. I haven't even seen him in Montreal, but I have seen some late 70s Mid Atlantic and it genuinely surprised me. So believe me, I do understand the skepticism. Everyone else I'm pretty comfortable saying is better except Zenk, who doesn't have as many good matches.