Loss

Right, it's rare that you actually see him quote someone anonymously, or say "according to phone calls with those in Creative" or something along those lines. I mean, we all know that, but that stuff would be mandatory at a mainstream outlet in some form. Still, I think he's highly credible and the last 30+ years have proven that time and time again.

So unless I missed it, I still haven't heard anyone talk about the best part of the HOF every year. How were audience reactions from Big Show?

The one exception. If you tell someone, "And if you don't like that, you can go do The Grind", you will be promoted to Admin.

There was a classic WON in 1999 posted I think last year that had the first mention of Misawa taking the roster and leaving as a rumor. Wasn't there a rumor that Onita would be returning to All Japan that Ms. Baba quickly shot down? I seem to remember quite a few talent rumors that didn't come to pass. I still don't really know the story behind how Muto ended up there.

Let's stay away from telling others what sexual acts they can perform upon one's person when discussing professional wrestling. Thank you.

Possibly the best AAA minis match so far, mainly thanks to the fantastic work of Octagoncito and Abismo Negro. Chad mentioned the big dive to the floor into the rana, but all of their exchanges were so fluid. Doesn't quite rise to the level of a good match to me because of Rocky Marvin being out to lunch, but it's still worth seeing.

Sports entertainment and McMahons and stuff. Lots and lots of it. This is a front for Vince and HHH to gang up on Rock, which is pretty great at building drama and making Rock look like he's facing the toughest odds in the world. He overcomes it all and gets another measure of revenge -- for now -- pinning HHH even though the match doesn't involve him. The HHH push at this point is walking all the way up to the line of going too far, but not quite crossing it just yet.

A strange and sudden sharp turn for Big Show. Good to see Rikishi again, as it seemed like he was losing some relevance in the build to Wrestlemania. I know he has a lot of big stuff to come in 2000, so he's hardly out of steam, but still, good to see him again. Big Show was actually great at the comedy they were having him do around this time, but we know his story. Nothing match other than Show doing The Worm, and the crowd gets into it, but it pretty much locks in that he's out of main events for a while. Brian Christopher was so unintentionally annoying in his speaking role there that I enjoyed Show leaving him destroyed.

When your gimmick is that you are a short badass who throws suplexes, only for the company to sign a much better short badass who throws suplexes just after your much-hyped debut, it sort of limits your possible paths. Tazz was a better promo than Benoit, but I think that the Radicalz debut is absolutely part of the reason he started to stall around this time. But yeah, this is pretty much worked like a WCW C-show match until the booking kicks in, so Tazz was obviously in quicksand. Now he's programmed with another guy whose gimmick is that he's a short badass who throws suplexes. I guess they were thinking that maybe they could put together two guys who were floundering to see if they could get something out of each other.

Eddy's back in the ring! Jericho wrote in his book that he's never been so excited to drop a title in his life, because it meant he was finally free from Chyna. She and Eddy had a lot more chemistry as an act anyway, so it was a good move for everyone involved. The match was well-worked, and Eddy may be the best guy at taking the double powerbomb. The second night in a row Tim White takes a bump off of a Jericho move, and we know that Tim White took a bad bump in the HHH-Jericho HIAC that legitimately ended his career. So I'll start the count. This makes two times Chris Jericho has needlessly attacked Tim White. ***

Rock's pre-match promo is more of a classic pro wrestling promo and it's amazing. You realize how much of an albatross Big Show was on the match (no offense to the Big Show, it's more that his storyline hook wasn't as strong) when you see HHH left alone with Rock and Foley. Rock suckering in HHH and making him think he was going to help him take out Foley was a great moment. Not crazy about HHH and Foley working together to take out Rock. Their feud was personal at a level that it's a huge stretch, even if it is super effective at building heat on Rock. I guess you could argue that it flips the dynamic from HHH as the outnumbered underdog to Rock as the outnumbered underdog, which makes more sense, so maybe they thought it was a justified sacrifice, considering Foley was done anyway. Foley missed his shot jumping off the table on Rock and this is just falling flat. His pedigree kickout doesn't get nearly the reaction it should because of Foley heeling on Rock. One match decision's loss is another match decision's gain. When we're down to HHH-Rock, I expected this to pick up a lot, and it probably would have if they hadn't stayed outside the ring so long, and by the time they got back in, the Vince vs Shane stuff was a huge distraction that killed the flow. The finish is what it is -- the ring got pelted with garbage and they tried to make good on it by Stephanie taking her first bump to end the show. Some people compared it to Starrcade '97 at the time. I always defended HHH winning and I'll do that again here. It was the right decision. They knew Austin was going to be able to do some limited stuff at Backlash, and they knew that they could get two huge PPVs out of this instead of just one, so it made sense to hold off a month. The match was pretty much the pits, even though there were good parts, but overall it was less a Wrestlemania epic and more a Raw main event that never ended.

From a booking point of view, I've always seen this match as the birth of WWE's favorite child. Even Steven was born when two wrestlers traded falls to each win a title from a wrestler who went into the match holding both titles but dropped each of them in exchange for not having to do any jobs. That aside, I thought this match was really good, and pretty progressive by three-way standards. There was a thread recently about how most of these matches suffer from always having an odd man out who has to sell for an unusually long period of time, but these guys went out of their way to make sure that didn't happen here, keeping the action moving, which is I guess sort of what you have to do in a match like this if you want to avoid that. The crowd wasn't reacting to much of anything outside of the chicken wing spot and a few big moments from Jericho, but this was still very good. ***1/2

Sunday night during the show, I'm going to dinner with an old friend who's in town. Any wrestling I watch this weekend will likely be for PWO2K. I'm interested in knowing what happens, but I don't feel the need to watch it all unfold. Not really hostile to current WWE so much as I just have other wrestling I'd rather watch given the choice.

The Young Bucks did recently say that, "The old, carny, petty tricks of yesterday do not belong today," which probably leaves JBL feeling a bit homeless.

I don't know what to think of this. I really enjoyed the Tables Match in January because it was an actual violent fight that made sense. This was more just a bunch of people jumping off of stuff. It was cool seeing a more primitive version of the TLC matches and it's hard not to respect the effort involved, but it's just stunt. stunt. stunt. stunt. stunt. stunt. stunt. stunt. stunt. Gets old after a while.

When normal people are annoyed by such behavior, they roll their eyes or vent to a co-worker about it for a minute, then forget about it and move on with their day. I can't stand Mauro's announcing style and I can see the acknowledgment as condescending or aloof for the exact reasons goc mentioned, but this is the kind of thing that I don't understand people moving on from after two or three minutes. JBL strikes me as the co-worker who is constantly obsessed with what people put in the fridge in the breakroom and whether or not they washed their coffee cups when everyone else is just TRYING TO WORK.

I wanted to like this more than I did. It was a good match though. The opening minute with the fast-paced exchanges was the best part of the match and made me want to see them in a straight-up wrestling match against each other. Eddie Golden can go! This lost me after a ref bump. I think that's unnecessary in this type of match, which is usually designed to have a more decisive finish. The table didn't break when Bailey shoved Styles off the ladder, which never bugs me, but what did bug me is that they planned a spot for a manager to put AJ Styles through a table. I love Jeff G. Bailey, but he's a non-wrestler. Once the booking kicked in, this became really disappointing, but when it was just two guys having a match, it was pretty good. ***

This is War Games Rules in the sense that a new guy comes in more than it is that there's a cage, but it's still a cool concept smack in the middle of a Saturday morning war for TV viewers. This doesn't really work without better production, a way for the crowd to countdown to new entrants and some focused heel attacks to set up saves. This was a lot of just aimless action that wasn't really all on the same page. I appreciated the novelty of this, but I don't think it worked. Ali really does seem like a superstar, though. Closer to a Royal Rumble I guess, but without the eliminations. Great heat as it went on, and wild studio action, so it has its positives. Just didn't quite work for me.

Dundee is the referee. This is probably the best Lawler MCW match so far. Bull got most of the offense and did some solid brawling. It's a shame the booking really sucked. I don't mind restarts and outside interference and all of that, but the manager (I'm tired of typing his stupid name, and I only typed it once) was horrible at interfering in his ref distraction spots, and doing a restart in a match that only gets five minutes is stupid. There is good work in this, but the match isn't even something I'd call fun because of all the crap it's drowning in.

The crowd treats Liger like the superstar of the tournament, giving him the biggest reaction so far, and really responding in a huge way when Tiger Mask gets offense on him, almost like they totally didn't expect it to happen at all. This is almost like the best moments Vader-Sting matches without the size difference in terms of how much the crowd gets into TM's bursts of offense. I *love* how heated the matwork is. Liger was very giving here, which worked because of how much of a bully he has been all year, so fans have grown to expect him to steamroll everyone. TM getting the first shotei kickout was awesome too. One of those matches I'm not sure I would have appreciated as much as I did without the context of seeing Liger in the first three months of the year. It's in many ways one of the most selfless performances I've ever seen from a star, all in the name of getting over a match first and foremost, more so than either performer. And in that sense, it was fantastic. ****

Another very good match, this time with two vets of the KDX days. I wish it had a little more time because it seemed like five more minutes could have made it great. I remember Dave saying on WOL around this time that Kaz Hayashi was better than Tajiri but look which company did a better job getting over their guy. It's something interesting to ponder after watching this, and he looks excellent in this for sure. I love the snap and urgency in Sasuke's execution, and it's good to see him. Sometimes short matches don't seem too short. In fact, the opener didn't. This was almost twice as long, but felt too short, I think because it seemed like it was just really getting cooking when it ended. Still, what we got was strong. ***1/4

Not quite as flashy as the first match, but good stuff, and probably the best outing I've seen from Sano so far this year. It's interesting to see how a lot of these guys work shorter matches when I've typically only seen them in longer matches, as it levels the playing field a bit between them and their American counterparts. That's not to say this isn't impressive, but more to say that the gulf isn't as wide as some might think. SUWA isn't as strong of an all-around performer as CIMA, but when it comes his strengths, which are mainly centered around American-style heeling, he's probably a little better. He almost feels like he should be either Gedo or Jado in the Gedo and Jado tag team. Impressive that Sano has started two decades doing matches in this style, and I'm really interested in seeing where the 2000s take him. ***

April starts off with a bang. Super fun five minute match that didn't feel lacking in any way. I noticed when they did the wide shot that people were still filing in, but based on the heat, you wouldn't know that had they not done the wide shot. This was fast-paced and a total bombfest, and a great way to start the tournament to get people excited about what would be ahead. ***1/4

Elizabeth didn't really need to be a strong performer. She and Savage as a single act were tremendous playing off of each other, even if Savage was the one doing all the work. He of course didn't need her by his side to be a star, but he did lose something when she wasn't. Her presence just gave him someone to play off of. That was all that was needed to make it work. She wasn't useless, she was actually a key part of his superstardom during his peak years, even if she was just along for the ride and just about anyone attractive and demure could have filled the spot.