Loss

I don't really care for anyone who can't or doesn't sell. He's also pretty immobile and I just haven't really seen him in any matches I've enjoyed at all.

At least until about 1998, when they had overexposed him to a point where he was no longer effective, and he seemed really out of style when you had Steve Austin on the other channel. But yeah, Hogan's interviews in his feuds with Roddy Piper and Sting are really great.

Yep. Norton, Nash, Vincent, Bischoff, Liz, Bagwell and The Giant. All of them more talented than Hogan. Hall, Savage and Syxx were the only NWO guys that really could be argued as having more talent than Hogan. Savage and Syxx are obvious, Hall isn't. I do think it's great that you can't see that Hogan was playing a heel and you weren't supposed to like him, though.

There is no way anyone who actually watched Smackdown on a regular basis could have those opinions, unless they decided that's how they felt months or years ago and are unwilling to be proven wrong or have their minds changed. If you don't see the improvement in Orton, I don't know what to tell you. Working with good workers has really put him over the hump, and he doesn't come across nearly as awkward or green for me now as he did in his 2003-2004 push. Benoit and Undertaker have specifically had the best results with him, but he's also had good matches with Orlando Jordan (yes) and Super Crazy, which shows that he's improved a ton since 2004. Orton is not great, but he's good and seems to get better every week these days in pretty much every aspect of his game. Cruiserweights aren't booked that well, admittedly, but I don't know what your expectations of them are. Super Crazy specifically looks better to me now than he ever has. I sense a bias against the heavyweight style from your posts, which is fine, but that's the style Crazy is working now. It's not worse, or watered down, it's a different style. I much prefer him wrestling as an underdog babyface against a wide variety of wrestlers to him wrestling the exact same sequences and performing the exact same sloppy spots every week against Taijiri on ECW TV. Psicosis has always been a great, well-rounded worker -- never been as much of a high flyer as he has been an amazing bumper and really strong on the mat. No slouch as a high flyer for sure, but that was never really what made him great. Psicosis reminds me in many ways of a Mexican Bobby Eaton and always has, taking some truly stunning bumps on his head and neck that other guys won't take, and performing a top rope legdrop as a finisher. Psicosis has adapted just fine to the WWE style. It's an insult to him to compare him to any of the spotty guys in TNA, honestly. I'm glad the WWE cruiser style isn't the X-style. Granted, I have my problems with the WWE style too, just because of all the sameness, but at least the matches have a defined build from start to finish and feature something more varied than spot-spot-spot, which is all the X-style matches really are. Miles apart, so don't think I'm making the comparison from quality, but the WWE cruiserweights are *far* more resembling of the NJ juniors style than TNA X Division matches. How is Rey not as good as he was in WCW and ECW? What did he ever do in ECW that came anywhere close to what he's accomplished in WWE? In WCW, he has three matches that can reasonably be compared to his best in WWE (Havoc '97/WW3 '96/Starrcade '98) and the race is closer than you think. He's not as much of a high flyer as he was, but he's also wrestling as a main event heavyweight now (again, I sense bias against heavies), which is a completely different style with different goals. Best in the world is hardly hyperbole. Who is better? Who else has gotten good matches out of Mark Henry and Sylvian Grenier? Besides Eddy or Benoit, who else with JBL? Look at the feud with Eddy last year, which was excellent from start to finish (well, if you start after their WM XXI match). Look at all the tag matches with various partners against MNM. I fail to see how Rey is watered down in the least - if anything, he's become better because he wrestles as a total Ricky Morton-style underdog, as opposed to someone who was always great, but got over in the past not for being sympathetic, but for dazzling the crowd with some really brilliant aerial moves. You say no one can carry Mark Henry, which is really funny considering he's been carried by both Rey and Taker. Taker is not consistent, which frustrates me, because when he has his working boots on, he's really good. He's had them on more frequently lately, possibly because he knows everyone is working hard and he has to keep up. He's also been doing more main events. Lashley is nothing special, but Finlay would sure make you think so if you watch their feud. You can also see an improvement in Lashley from the time he has started working with Finlay. I watched a lot of SD today and it was pretty evident how much more confident he's gotten and how much better he understands his role. More heavyweight bias, though. There's a reason there have been so many strong demolishing babyfaces like that -- because they typically work. I don't know if you're expecting him to do a Space Flying Tiger Drop off of a balcony to impress you or if you expect everyone to be Chris Benoit or they suck or what. If you haven't caught Booker's renaissance lately, you haven't been paying attention. The guy was solid to good in WCW, and has had good moments in WWE, but has largely been on a hunt to find himself. He's found himself in his new role of cowardly heel who ducks matches and is totally revitalized. The Benoit/Booker series has worked in making Booker relevant again, as he and Sharmell are one of the best things to watch on Smackdown. Wasting that on Boogeyman is a problem, but if you're telling me Booker now and Booker six months ago are the same, then you're beyond hope.

I will say this, and it's not intended to be a WWE apology, but there is no reason that anyone who wants more wrestling and longer matches featuring quality workers shouldn't be able to find something in WWE for them. There's more that I don't like than I do like, but looking from my point of view: Rey Misterio is better than anyone in the world. MNM is the best tag team in wrestling. Finlay and Benoit are two of the top five or ten in the world. Randy Orton, Super Crazy, Gregory Helms and Psicosis are all better than anyone in TNA these days. I wouldn't go so far as to say they're better than anyone in TNA _in any environment_, but I'll take Randy Orton going against Super Crazy in a really strong 8-minute Smackdown match over any X-Division match I can think of. Then, you have guys that are getting the opportunity to work with better talent that have shown that they're either capable of being carried, capable of being good when motivated (and they have been much of the time lately), or they're vastly improved, guys like JBL, Lashley, Mark Henry, Undertaker, Booker T, etc. I've been watching a lot of CMLL this weekend and if 2006 is as good as 2005, there's no competition, as it's still the best wrestling anywhere by a long shot, but WWE should satisfy anyone's need for more wrestling with the names mentioned above. If it doesn't, I have to ask exactly what they're looking for. Problems for WWE come for me with booking and presentation far more than the wrestling. That, and people tend to judge their opinion of the entire company on whatever HHH or Michaels or the McMahons are doing on RAW since that's the higher-profile show. Smackdown has the misfortune (read: benefit) of being thrown together hastily and being light on complicated angles that end up basic, logical and easy to follow more often than not. It's far more toned down typically than RAW, and it comes across much better as a result. The weakness of Smackdown is that so much of it is inconsequential in the long run, and they've also run most of the Eddy Guerrero exploitation there as well, which has understandably turned a lot of people off. There's also the issue of a lot of embarassment, more so on RAW, but also on Smackdown, with stuff like the Boogeyman. WWE still typically runs, as Goodhelmet pointed out, matches that run anywhere between 5 and 30 minutes on free TV on a fairly regular basis. Crash TV is mostly dead (although many other Russo ideas aren't). Undercard could be given more time and direction, but it's the main event that sells the show. With that, we can just hope for a main event scene that's somewhat defined and good, since it's going to be eating up at least 50% of the TV. Main event on the Smackdown side features three above-average guys, one of which is the best on the roster, one of which a lot of people think is the best on the roster, and the other who's better right now than I've seen him at any point. So quality wrestling isn't really a problem when you have Rey, Finlay and Benoit given plenty of time to deliver most of the time, with a fairly strong or carryable group of talent to work with. Problem is that there's so much stupid stuff that distracts from the wrestling. With SNME last night, I can't judge the show because I have no idea what even happened on it, since I can't find a good recap. It's not off to a good start. As a criticism, I'll say making Austin and the McMahons central characters on the show seems like a bad idea, because it just reinforces the idea that nothing has changed. As a defense, I'll say expecting some good matches on last night's show isn't unreasonable, but that should have been a side effect of what was offered, not the purpose of the newfound exposure. As for sports entertainment, I'm not sure I understand really what the difference is. Wrestling with no interviews, no angles, no storylines would be pretty boring. WWE's problem isn't that they have the extracurricular stuff, it's that they book it like it's an attraction in and of itself instead of using it to highlight the roster and build to future matches. The biggest criticism of WWE I could ever make is that they try way too hard to be cute.

He started no-showing events and no one knew where he was back in '87. Cornette wanted to put Tom Pritchard in his spot, but Dusty thought Stan Lane would work better, and it turns out he was right. Surface later that year in Continental and later in the AWA with Randy Rose as a partner and Paul E. as a manager. Returned to the AWA, and the plan was for Randy Rose to take the fall in Chicago at Chi-Town Rumble in a match where the loser of the fall would leave the NWA. Condrey no-showed the event, and Jack Victory was put in his place at the very last minute.

Jerry Estrada v Javier Cruz - 10/22/89 - Hair vs Hair Quite the emotional rollercoaster here; in fact, the race between this and Jumbo/Tenryu for 1989 MOTY is extremely close, and after I rewatch this, I wouldn't be surprised if I put this higher. Beautiful, beautiful match, and probably the most adaptable match I've seen so far in the lucha libre, meaning it would work in absolutely any environment. This may even be better than Santo/Casas from '87 or Atlantis/Villano III from '00 honestly. I remember Ohtani's Jacket telling me that stories in lucha aren't really told through selling, so that's not what I should be looking for when watching it, but the selling here is absolutely brilliant from both guys -- selling of strikes and highspots, and of fatigue to get the match over as well. Some spots would probably look blown to someone looking for something crisp or clean, but this transcends the mechanics of the match and goes somewhere better, as the clumsiness and occasional slipping appeared to me to be totally intentional. FIVE STARS, and one of the very best matches in wrestling history. I plan on doing a full review of it at some point.

Didn't see the show, but it would have been bad business to trot out any matches longer than 6-8 minutes (aside from maybe a main event) when 2 hours on NBC is a chance to shoot major angles and get the storylines over heading into a lackluster Mania. I may not like it, I don't know, but I have no intentions of criticizing them for not having any good matches on the show in this case. My hope is that in the long run, the spots on SNME will lead to them really toning down the huge number of title changes and angles that currently take place on Raw and Smackdown every single week.

Funny thing Meltzer pointed out today in Moore's WWE.com interview is when he was asked what he's done with his time since being released. "I've been keeping busy on the independent circuit, and I went over to Japan for a while, which was great for me. I also did some work down south. Plus, I opened a small wrestling school, and I have four students that I've been training down here over the last few months."

It's an accomplishment for Heyman, but it doesn't mean I have to think those guys have any talent whatsoever. I just get irritated with people jizzing up over everyone who was in ECW when a huge number of them didn't know how to work and were exposed as soon as they tried to leave ECW. It's a credit to Heyman, but for me it's just another reason why they were a promotion doing something different, without actually being very good. Wouldn't argue with anything you said here at all.

Because it's dismissive and takes the fact that ECW was an entertaining product to its fans at the time and tries to make that insignificant because people aren't entertained now. Great, if you feel that way. I'm not particularly entertained by it anymore either. But I'm not going to downplay the impact they had at the time either, by saying nothing holds up and leaving my post at that, which is what Slasher did. The point is that you can't criticize booking decisions if you only intend to look at wrestling from the viewpoint of a fan, especially when you start argue that not only do you enjoy him, but that he's the only draw on SD. At that point, you've crossed the line. If you, a tape trader and former Observer subscriber, aren't interested in the grander picture, I have to ask you what's your point? Well, lets all sit around the camp fire and listen to what you have to say since it is clearly the only RIGHT opinion. In this case, yes, that's right. (A little bird told me once I need to be more assertive in my posts.) The lack of perspective is in the whole the-only-thing-that-matters-is-whether-or-not-I'm-personally-entertained-every-moment-I'm-watching-this-crap point of view that seems to be prevalent in this thread. It's tunnel vision, and it's basically saying, hey, let's totally ignore the scope of what ECW was doing and instead make it all about me and my enjoyment and fuck everything else. Everyone is entitled to an opinion and a viewpoint, but the post that set me off was not yours for saying you didn't like it, or savagerulz's, who acknowledged the strengths and weaknesses, but as Slasher writing off any good 1996 ECW may have had at the time, just because the wrestlers were limited. Paul Heyman getting a lot out of a little does count for something, whether you want to admit that or not. Thanks for making my point for me. That's the equivalent of the whole argument. Of course not, even if 1988 NWA probably wouldn't work today as a promotion. But see what I mean by tunnel vision? This was about the overall package, not just wrestling matches. I'm sorry that you tried to make the ECW argument all about that. 1996 ECW would fall behind the other eras for me without a second thought. Not calling it great, in fact earlier in the thread, I said very clearly that it wasn't. But I also said that's it's an accomplishment to get stuff over and make it seem great even when it's not. So if someone posed the question of why they enjoyed the golden days of ECW more than modern WWE, even though ECW had a much less talented roster than modern WWE, the old stuff would have value. So it's not sitting there wasting space. That. That was my whole point. That it has value. Saying that it's just sitting there collecting dust implies that it doesn't. So, what it comes down to, in the end, is that whether *you* enjoyed it or not, it was still a great era for the fans of the company at the time. Had you said that without the whole "collecting dust" line, I probably wouldn't have flipped out. For chrissakes, would you feel better if I didn't post? Give me the word and I am gone. Thanks for not answering my question. No, I wouldn't feel better if you didn't post. This isn't personal, so calm down. My point was that if you have no desire to discuss the era-at-large, which is what this topic is about, then don't discuss it. Simple as that. This has nothing to do with the argument at all. At all. Not. At. All. It does not stand the test of time. I have not argued that once. What I have argued is implying that it's useless now just because you aren't entertained by it. There are more important things than the opinion of one person watching years later on tape. If you can't see that, then yes, there is no perspective involved. I have no idea what point you're trying to make here.

I didn't want anything except honest answers. I got them, and I challenged them. That's what the board is for. I'll remember that next time you say you want them to put the belt on Rey. That's looking at things through the eyes of a promoter *and* a fan. I thought we all wanted to get educated and learn to look at the big picture. Zero perspective is right. It's like watching 70s AJPW and complaining about a lack of Canadian Destroyers. This topic was about eras, not matches. If you have no interest in discussing the product as a whole, why post?

Because you can acknowledge that something worked in its time period and seemed good at the time without saying all it's doing is collecting space. One thing Meltzer once said that I agree with strongly is that there is something to be learned from any wrestling company ever that had any measure of success. So, someone could watch some cards from 1996 ECW and probably figure out what worked and why, and go from there and maybe figure out what would work and what wouldn't in today's environment. So it has value, even if it was kind of the wrestling equivalent of a pulp fiction novel. ECW is best talked about as a whole than talking about the individual matches. The best match I've ever seen from ECW was probably Taijiri/Psicosis from 2000, a match that I'd call ***1/2 on a good day. But the way ECW shows flowed from one match to the next, it was such an adrenaline rush from start to finish that it was easy to forget that what you were watching wasn't really all that great. So, ECW has value, maybe not from the perspective of finding great matches that still look great 10 years later, but in terms of seeing how to structure a card and get stiffs over, and make people seem better than they are. Compare that to 2005 WWE, where because of limitations and bad booking, a lot of guys seem worse than they really are.

Depends on how you watch wrestling, I guess. If you watch it with zero perspective and context, yes, that's true. No one is saying ECW is great in 2006, but ECW was never attempting to be great in 2006. Any match from any time period can be compared to any other. I believe that very strongly. But that doesn't mean that historical context and the time frame the match happened in is completely unimportant. Lots of great music sounds dated today, does that mean it's worthless?

Which only matters to the audience it was never intended to please, meaning the people watching it years later. I agree that it doesn't age well, but why does that matter? It was successful at the time.

I think that's an accomplishment more than a problem. The fact that Heyman made a average-below average roster look like a million bucks speaks volumes for his booking. He has tendencies that annoy me, but that's definitely his biggest strength ... hiding weaknesses and getting limited guys over.

1988 NWA Amazing how a promotion with a rapidly deleting talent roster, front office chaos, with horrible morale and near bankruptcy can still produce what's mostly a good product. Midnight Express/Fantastics feud may have been the best tag feud of the 80s, and then you have Barry Windham's run with the Horsemen, Luger challenging Flair (which was the only thing that drew that year - aside from the brief Horsemen/MX program), Sting emerging as a star, the really great Arn and Tully tag team reaching its zenith and the Cornette/Paul E. feud of late '88. The Windham turn is my very favorite angle of all time. 1994 AJPW I've seen all the big matches, but I'd like to see a lot of the TV to tie it all together. Tons of great standalone matches, though, and the booking was really good the majority of the time, although Kawada should have won on 6/3. 1992 WWF The year the bubble popped and the product had to change. As I said before, unfair to blame the top stars in the company, because no one could have possibly drawn with all the bad publicity and Hulk Hogan leaving in a scandal. It was time to make changes anyway, and this was a very important year in the annals of WWE history. Lots of identity crises and still some silliness in the booking, but much better overall than the previous three years for the promotion. 1996 ECW Still unique, but the wheels were already in motion for the eventual downfall by this time, with WCW stealing their ideas to import the best wrestlers in the world for the undercard and the WWF pretending to be their friend, but really just setting them up to steal their booking ideas and create the Attitude era.

Thanks. He's gone again.

Yeah, some people have said that's when the AJ undercards really went to hell, because they were never on TV anyway, and it was harder than ever to get anyone new over, not only because the standard for work on top was unbelievably high, but because no one got any TV time.

I think Austin v Goldberg was the last one.

It's easy to forget now, just because we've seen them against each other so many times, just how *much* of a dream match Flair against Hogan was. I don't know that anything else, including Austin/Hogan or Rock/Hogan, had casual fans talking about the potential of the match as much.

I also think there was some major displacement going on there. Surely, no one with a brain would think good wrestling caused a decline. The problems were with WWF's public image and the loss of some key players, not necessarily the fault of Ric Flair or Bret Hart or Shawn Michaels or Randy Savage or anyone else headlining that year.