Loss

Tim made a post a while back about how Akiyama on 12/06/96 is a reference to Kawada's performance in this match. Wonder if I could prompt him to post it again ...

Shawn's only potential money match at this point is with The Rock, and Rock wants nothing to do with him, which is humorous to me.

Hogan can be cancerous at times, but I was referring more to the points he was making about wrestling and Shawn Michaels, not his own current value.

Oh, and these two things go hand in hand. A good product will draw money.

Shawn Michaels does nothing to entertain me. No one knows how to compel me to buy a show anymore. It's why I haven't bought one in years. Hogan is 100% right here.

Oh My God, I actually agree with every single word of an article about HULK HOGAN?

While it seems strange based on what they're famous for, Rey Misterio Jr, famous high-flyer, is a better mat worker than Dean Malenko. And PSICOSIS may be better than both.

If that's the case, I think technical wrestling tends to suck. I prefer Destroyer and Regal.

Least they could do is say REGAL. That's someone they've all likely seen who blows away Malenko on the mat. Then again, I think their definition of a "technical" wrestler needs some explanation. I've always hated that term anyway.

Dean Malenko? Bizarre.

I'll start by playing Vince's advocate Genius: marketed wrestling toward children with action figures and wrestling merchandise. Genius: invented the concept of wrestling on pay-per-view

Jericho did get more exposure and become a bigger name in WWE, but that was him getting over on his own. He never had the promotional hype machine like he should have had behind him. Regardless of what you think of him as a talent, he was the guy to follow Austin and Rock and carry the torch, but he didn't get the opportunity.

No need to flame him, sek. Anyway, Jericho was the next Rock and they turned him into the next Lex Luger. That's not really making the most out of his talents.

1988 ALL JAPAN REAL WORLD TAG LEAGUE FINALS Stan Hansen & Terry Gordy v Genichiro Tenryu & Toshiaki Kawada Anyone have any thoughts on this match they'd like to share? I personally thought it was a great match with a lot of exciting work and an unbelievably hot crowd, but there were some legal man issues that kept it from being an all-time classic for me and made it hard to stay involved in the match. That's really the only flaw I have with this match at all, and it's amazing how the 1988 style in Japan is probably more modern than the 2005 WWE style. Probably the second best RWTL final of the 80s, behind the '81 one featuring Hansen's All Japan debut.

I'm going to respond to your post in full more once I'm not at work, savagerulz, but the one main point I want to make is that Hulk Hogan, Randy Savage, Roddy Piper and Junkyard Dog were all headliners Vince didn't make that he used to launch his expansion. You mentioned Savage specifically and Randy Savage is NOT a Vince McMahon creation. Not even close.

Regarding Rudo's point, they seem to want it both ways. They want guys to get over not on moves, but on an emotional connection with the audience through selling, body language, facial expressions, etc. I could accept that methodology if I thought they truly believed it, but every time they don't know what to do with the more talented aerial wrestlers, they get thrown in ladder matches, and then get scolded by Creative and Vince for going all out. They need to be consistent with their view. I'll respond to Coffey's points later.

The sad thing is that Lex Luger in 1997 was probably more over than every single person in US wrestling today.

Russo is definitely one who formed the "writers write to get writers over as being important to the show, not to get the most out of the talent" mantra. People talk about the good Russo was able to do in the short-term, but he's probably the worst thing that has happened to pro wrestling in the past 10 years.

Behind who? I'd put him behind Austin, Hogan, Hart, Michaels and Sting, and maybe even Hall and Nash, but there were a lot of over guys at that time and he was in great company.

Luger actually was extremely over in short spurts, but was never able to sustain heat for any length of time.

The steroid trial.

I blame that on HHH. That's when I think he lost the ability to look at his talent objectively, when his top star became his son-in-law.

It is true that Vince McMahon has had more bad years as a promoter than he has good ones. By a pretty considerable margin. And no, you couldn't say that about every promoter ever.

http://www.wwe.com/content/media/images/30...rammingGrid.pdf Looks to be a pretty good lineup.

The sad thing is that guys like Benoit, Jericho, etc are really the last generation of guys who paid dues in Japan, Mexico and North American territories before getting a shot on a big stage. They learned a lot about working a crowd and parlayed things that they learned everywhere into the style that they used as stars. That type of guy, the world-travelled wrestler, is a pretty dead concept now, and there just aren't really many places anymore for wrestlers to work and learn their craft, nor are there any wrestlers who have really mastered more than one style that are big enough in size for WWE to push. The days of great wrestling have been teasing being over for years now, but it looks like they're finally coming to a close. It's spotfests that get called MOTYCs now, and WWE is now losing Benoit, Guerrero and Jericho, all in the span of about four months. Yes, there are (very few) talented guys left, but most of them don't have anyone to work with at their level. And we can't look at the other side of the coin and say that a new crop of stars will come along that's really charismatic and knows how to work outside the ring either, since their promos are all so heavily scripted by TV writers and they're not encouraged to wing it and speak from the heart. Basically, fuck the huge number of top guys we had in wrestling just 5-6 years ago for not convincingly putting anyone over as they entered the twilight of their careers, for not mentoring the guys working their way up the ladder, and for killing wrestling companies. There were almost too many headliners between WWF and WCW in 1999-2000. How did we get where we are now, and so quickly at that?