Loss

I expect WWE to turn nasty, threatening lawsuits if indies try to market shows featuring the crowd doing the "Yes!" chant, trying to claim ownership of his likeness, and other things. WWE isn't going to just let him go and not fight it. If it's like it was when TNA did the ECW revival, indies that use him will probably have to post signs asking fans not to "yes" or chant "Daniel Bryan". Knowing it's BS but doing it just to drag things out, WWE could also try to claim that the beard itself is part of the Daniel Bryan character. Those types of fights are coming if he goes anywhere else.

Oh, please. The WWE HOF is a marketing gimmick and payoff for legend types, not a real Hall of Fame. There are real issues regarding race in pro wrestling, particularly WWE, that are worth discussion and criticism. Why waste time on this?

This is a great post! A single story that I think encapsulates the shift as well as any that Dave tells from time to time: he had dinner with Chris Benoit and Eddy Guerrero after a New Japan show once. This was in 1994, so they were respected as good workers, but it was before they really became hardcore darlings at the level they would become. Anyway, Dave thought they had a great match that night and told them they tore the house down. The reaction from both was, "You really think so?" and they both started ripping apart their own performances in the match. Dave's takeaway was that they were perfectionists who were hypercritical of their own work, but I think an alternative takeaway could be that workers who didn't receive much validation inside wrestling because of their size suddenly found someone who would provide them with plenty of validation, so they decided to work for him. That style found a bigger audience, even if it did run antithesis to a lot of things that were happening with top guys in the U.S. at the time. Those guys and others of their ilk like Jericho and Rey became stars and helped push a shift in the working style on top. None was ever truly the number one guy, but they did have a lasting impact on the main event style, which is why by 2003, guys like Kevin Nash couldn't get over at a main event level in WWE.

I don't think there's anything sinister here. I don't even think there's anything intentional. It's just that because Dave is the most on-the-record match critic in existence, his word carries a lot of weight, so whether anyone wants it to or not -- be it him or us -- it does matter how he watches because it influences how wrestlers wrestle and how fans fan.

In this case, jumpin' on really is a lot easier than jumpin' off.

Lesson learned from this: if you want to change the wrestling style, start a newsletter! On it.

I'm not quite sure what to make of it. At first, I defended 6* and thought Dave was just speaking figuratively, not breaking his entire rating system to suddenly declare the best wrestling happening right now to be incomparable to any wrestling he has ever seen in the history of the world. I haven't seen it. I'm sure it's great. I hope it's great. I want it to be great. Really, really great. I'm someone who thinks this whole "Meltzer loves action and nothing else about wrestling, really" is tribalist, reductive, and silly (not to mention inaccurate) when I see it, but I can't ignore that he's making a mockery of himself with this stuff too. I'll never question his motives or his integrity, but I do think without maybe even trying, he has created this entire prophecy in wrestling that now fulfills itself. So in essence, his argument is now that matches are great if the people in the building go crazy for them. Period. The end. But he's gotten so far inside the heads of wrestlers that they have reshaped fan expectations to match his own personal tastes. I'd love to go into far more detail on it than I have time to do at the moment, but I think that's what has happened. He -- Dave Meltzer -- wrote/rewrote the rulebook for what is and isn't a great match. Wrestling itself followed suit, because the WON is such an institution that we now have a generation of wrestlers who grew up as fans reading it. And there you go.

They usually put the guys over in real matches that they see as real stars, and use cash-ins for the guys they see as the top of the middle, with occasional exceptions. Punk and Bryan both became real stars later, Sheamus was back where he started a few months later, Ziggler was probably worse off than he was before, Del Rio never took off at the level he was pushed ... Edge worked because Edge was first. Rollins worked because he got the lion's share of TV time for 8 months and was presented as the top heel for that entire time before the cash-in. Orton was already established. Sandow??

I agree with this, and it's something I'm not crazy about either. If everyone likes it, it's good. Perception is reality. I guess it's easy to fall into that considering that's true in the industry he covers to a very large extent.

If the worst happens (which hopefully it doesn't), let's start a new thread.

And yeah, I'd put that more on Manny Fernandez. He talked for years about having served in 'Nam, despite being in high school when the war ended.

The problem is not Corbin, and I wouldn't argue that he isn't continuing to work hard and prove himself to be deserving of the spot they are putting him in. The issue is that, just like Strowman and Reigns and Cass, he got the opportunity in the first place without having proven anything while guys smaller than him had proven something and haven't gotten those same chances. It's nothing new, and it's the eternal frustration with WWE because there is nothing wrestlers can do to be taller. But I'd like to think no one is putting all of that on Corbin.

I would say wrestlers today are probably bigger students of wrestling historically and on a global level than at any time in history. That is definitely not a problem wrestlers have these days as a whole. The issue is that for the most part, it doesn't really extend to the decision makers, at least not in the largest company in the U.S.

I created a new, separate account for cheapshot to post GIFs in the Match Discussion Archive, and possibly elsewhere on the board from time to time. He'll never post written content under that username - only GIFs. We set it up that way because we know that images slow down the page view for some of you, so that gives you the option to block that user and still view the page without missing any written posts. So he'll have his regular posting account for written posts, and a separate account just for GIFs. If you follow him on Twitter, you know he makes quite a few.

WWE could kill shoot interviews with the snap of their fingers if they really wanted to by having wrestlers sign NDAs. I'm sure they have reasons for not doing that.