Loss

They should go all out with the sleazeball thing. They already have a start there. Bring in Juventud Guerrera, Lex Luger, Scott Hall and Jake Roberts, and get Roland Alexander, David McLane, Rob Feinstein and Rob Black to co-promote it. Make Tammy Sytch and Missy Hyatt the females and have Tom Zenk and Maxx Payne doing commentary.

I'd rather people listen to my words than my tone. Other people (everyone knows who they are) have been around in the past that have had great knowledge of wrestling and had a lot of informative stuff to share, but no one could get past the condescending tone. I get in that trap sometimes, but I try to stay away from it, because I don't want to get to a point where I can't even discuss this stuff online anymore because no one wants to talk to me. And there is a precedent for that happening to at least one person.

They did, I think. The NWA (and PWI magazine) is where I learned how to be a wrestling fan. Every fan is "trained", so to speak, on how to understand wrestling by the promotion and at that time the Apter mags when they're starting out. And while I agree with Meltzer that lots of JCP stuff has been overly romanticized, the best stuff still looks great today.

I think the content was worse, but the presentation was better. Perhaps I didn't make that clear. The matches may not have been as good as a lot of the matches now, but they seemed more important and weren't nearly as repetitive because the talent wasn't getting burned out as fast with monthly PPVs and four hours of primetime TV every week.

If I was more blunt, you would all hate me. Trust me.

This is a riot. Vampiro, Sean Waltman, New Jack and Teddy Hart in the same locker room? That's crazy! All they need is Juventud.

I think most of the hotshotting and overbooking happens on RAW because it's live and is a more pressure-packed situation, leaving Smackdown to be a much more simple, relaxed show with far less angles and far less thought put into it. That results in a better show, ironically enough, because the McMahons aren't kicking announcers in the balls or having weekly therapy sessions. Smackdown is much less erratic. There's still standard, stupid stuff, but much less of it. The announce team is also far superior to that on RAW and while there is some stale talent on top on Smackdown, no one in wrestling is as stale as the majority of the RAW main eventers.

I didn't have a problem with it either until he started doing it to heels they were trying to put in fairly high-profile positions, namely Chris Jericho, Christian and Randy Orton. With Jericho especially, they built like they were going to have a major match at some point and I think they got people sort of wanting to see it, realized that's what fans were starting to expect and immediately stopped because they knew they couldn't deliver.

Shawn did put Austin over convincingly in that match, but 8 years later, who's retired and who's still a top star in the company? Weird how that works.

Mark Henry v Rey Misterio Jr - WWE Smackdown 01/20/06 This should not happen. This match should not be as FUCKING GREAT as it is. Rey is the very best wrestler in the world today. Just an unbelievable performance on his part, using a set of three 619s to Henry's back, stomach and face to completely take him off of his feet. He made Henry run, he clipped his knee ... every trick in the book was pulled off here and it worked so well. Crowd was seriously into this as well. I've never seen a Mark Henry match with this much heat. Not quite MOTYC-level, but I guarantee this will be better than some matches that get more credit later in the year. ***1/2 Finlay/Hardy was also a really fun match. Hardy is awesome when he's wrestling super-stiff like that. I wonder how he'd do with a makeover into a legit tough guy. I'm hoping Finlay/Hardy is an extended feud, because I enjoyed that match as a teaser of what they can do.

I wasn't really looking for in-depth analysis from Bryan as much as I was looking for a good message board. And no, it's not anyone else's fault (I was kidding about that). I just didn't expect someone who writes a newsletter to be so stubborn that he couldn't even stand to hear someone possibly criticize one of his favorites. The post that bravesfan mentioned annoyed me because they twisted my words and said things I never said, but that happens sometimes I guess.

Adrian Adonis was a GREATGREATGREATGREATGREAT wrestler.

It's Bruce? Oh, well that explains why he sucked. I'd never seen Owen do so little.

I'm sure it did shape his mindset. Obviously, there were a lot of reasons for that decline, but I think the big 80s stars taking so much without giving anything back played a major part. And after a decade of educating their fans that bigger is better, their top stars weren't as big anymore. By the time they caught up to the times, Hart and Michaels did help them through a tough time and each man did play somewhat of a part in the resurgence in 1997.

I understand what you're saying though, Dylan. Expanding on that, would you prefer 90s WWF with Bret, Austin and Shawn reinventing the company style to both the 80s or the current era?

Rudo, I've read this quote at least a hundred times and can't get enough of it, because it's SO accurate when it comes to the newsletter crowd. Dylan, you summed everything up so well here. Great post. My thing, and I think this is the way you and me and *most* of the people you named see things, is not necessarily in the argument of who's right and who's wrong, but rather focusing on who has something interesting to say about wrestling and who doesn't. Wildpegasus is one of my favorite posters here, and in the same way that Alvarez loves Angle and Michaels, he loves Benoit quite a bit. But the difference between the two is that WP is not going to write off someone because their thoughts are different from his, and he's also interested in discussing everything. I get a lot of enjoyment out of talking about wrestling online, as long as I'm talking to people who are open to suggestions and are willing to both speak out and be spoken to when it comes to wrestling. I can respect the opinion of someone who thinks Michaels and Angle are the two greatest wrestlers who ever lived -- or at the very least enjoy conversing with said person -- as long as they aren't shunning every other viewpoint available without even listening to it. The names you mentioned are all people I feel like have taught me so much about wrestling. I still think I learn something new about wrestling every time I read a well thought-out post, which I think is awesome, because someone coming along with a fresh perspective can help you rethink things. And that's the fun in wrestling -- so much of it out there, so much great, even more bad, and as your tastes change, you can rewatch everything as if its brand new again.

As soon as I get off my duff and do a few things Danny Dubbya has asked me to do for a little while now. I'll make it happen ASAP. I still want to do the trial thing, just to make sure we have a full staff of writers willing to write consistently. I'll be posting about this very soon with lots of information once I have more details.

11/11/88 - Owen Hart, Chris Benoit & Biff Wellington v Johnny Smith & Cuban Commandoes Watch this find to find out where Chris Benoit learned to sell. He's at a Ricky Morton level of ability to take a beating here. My only problem with this match is that there's not even a tease of hope for Benoit until he reverses Smith's tombstone, but in a way, that's also good because that gets an ENORMOUS pop when it happens. The heels are first class all the way, especially Johnny Smith, who has more flair and personality than many top stars today. And maybe it's just me, but it seems like Owen Hart isn't nearly as over as his teammates. He doesn't do much in this match, but when he does go in to break up a count, it's met with zero reaction. Wellington gets an awesome reaction for everything he does. Since Owen would be WWF bound in about a month, I'm guessing that this was done to slowly phase Owen out and put more spotlight on Benoit and Wellington, leaving him in kind of a Jericho-in-the-Elimination-Chamber role where he's mainly there just to provide action. He doesn't do much of that either, though, really. It's Biff that's the savior for his team and seems to be booked to be strong, although this did a lot to get over the Benoit/Smith feud as well, with Smith seeming to have Benoit's number, but getting overconfident and it costing him, even if it does seem like he's better than Benoit. I'll have to watch more surrounding footage to understand the storyline completely, but what I got from this match is that Smith is probably better than Benoit, but Smith is also his own worst enemy, and Benoit is slowly coming into his own and is good enough to take advantage of an opening. Smith, in the meantime, gets even more enraged about it every time out, which causes him to do even more heelish things, when if he'd just calm down, he could easily beat Benoit. Knowing the world beater Benoit has been for most of his career, this is a fun role to see him in, but honestly, if I had seen this in 1988 knowing the way wrestling was then, I would have expected Benoit to have a career on the level of a Barry Horowitz just because he seemed bland and was better at taking a beating than giving one. I guess the lesson there is that you never know what type of journey a wrestler is going to take, and Benoit fought the odds and won over even the most harshest of his critics in the end, so I suppose he did his job quite well. More fun and unexpected than unabashedly great, but a match I imagine will probably have terrific replay value. ***1/2

Please, please, please watch Yoshida/Fukawa, Loss. The crowd's rocking like it's 1999 towards the end there. Definitely watching soon. It seems like the more wrestling I watch, the more I have left to watch. I'd love to get to a point where I've seen everything I want to see from the past so I can just watch new stuff as it comes out. Maybe by the end of '06, but I doubt it.

Sure. May want to copy/paste it in Chronicles as well. In fact, we'll pin it for a week.

Committed. Not to a mental institution, but to this project.

This will be happening soon.

If that was true, then Akira Taue vs Takeshi Rikio from NOAH 11/5 would be 2005 MOTY. It's a pretty bad match, but the pop for Taue winning the GHC Title is unreal. YEah, and by the same reasoning, Benoit-Malenko from Hog Wild must have absolutely sucked because the crowd did not give a shit about that match. Not that I'm disagreeing with you, but those biker shows happened in front of non-wrestling fans who didn't even buy tickets. Benoit and Malenko have had other matches that have been just as good in front of ticket-paying fans that have gotten way more heat. That's almost like criticizing Motorhead for not getting a great reaction from the crowd at Wrestlemania X-7. I was trying to think of a better example, but I'm struggling to think of a good match with no heat. I can only think of some of Mariko Yoshida's early ARSION stuff, but I don't know if that's an accurate comparison or not.