Loss

Vince won't even let his employees answer questions about Trump when the media asks. He won't even answer questions himself. I don't think we have anything to worry about on this one.

This match left me a little depressed and confused. Not quite sure what to make of this. I really wanted to like it, because Flair looked really good in the Hogan match and Funk has worked hard in this WCW run and even though he hasn't hit every match out of the park, he's made the most of what he's been given. These two also had a classic rivalry ten years earlier and were both known as great brawlers in their 50s, so the stip should have suited them well. Technically, the work was pretty good. They did a lot of selling to get over the brutality and they hit each other with pretty stiff shots, which I'll get into in just a moment, because that's important. In terms of moving around the ring, neither guy showed his age at all. Neither looked quite like he did in 1989, sure, but neither guy looked embarrassing either. The problem with this was that the crowd just did not give a shit at all. Terry Funk wasn't over one bit on this WCW run no matter how much they tried. The crowd was a little more into Flair, but even he was less over than he normally is with WCW audiences. When they turned up the stiffness with the hard strikes and chops, they seemed to wake the crowd up, but they could never sustain it. I'm not sure why they worked the match the way they did, considering the build. Flair was clearly the heel in the buildup, but this match was pretty ambiguous with Flair not doing anything particularly heelish, and even at some points fighting valiantly from underneath after getting piledrived on the floor and Funk doing a mic spot threatening to break Flair's neck again by piledriving him through the table. The crowd did pop for the table spots, but even then, not that much, even though they added some nice veteran touches to the garbage stuff by selling the hell out of it. There was some stuff to like here, but I think Flair needed to work with a younger guy who was a good worker and Funk was positioned too high on the card and fans just didn't accept him. I do think with the stars properly aligned, these two had a great match in them if they'd exaggerated the face-heel divide more and if Funk (and even Flair) were more over with the San Francisco crowd, but it didn't make its way to the surface here.

There is a sameness to these matches in the same way there's a sameness to the Guido-Tajiri-Crazy stuff, where you get used to their signature stuff, but there are enough wrinkles and variations to keep it interesting. That said, I do agree this was the weakest match from these guys thus far. Everything from Minoru Tanaka since the Tokyo Dome match has disappointed me. He still seems to wrestle in a vacuum a little bit compared to guys around him, but I'm finally coming around on Kendo Kashin. Maybe it was the Shattered Dreams that finally made the difference for me, maybe it's that with experience he's genuinely improving. But he no longer looks out of his league in these matches. Even if he's not an elite worker, he can blend in with elite workers. I was even perfectly fine with him submitting Otani for the finish. But there was really no overriding narrative here to push this match along and so it was just a bunch of tags in and out, a bunch of exchanges and then a finish. The exchanges were really good technically, but there wasn't much heat because there wasn't really much going on.

And don't forget Big Show's audience reactions at the Hall of Fame.

Not really 2000, but the decade as a whole has promos getting largely scripted and people being mostly disappointed with the booking. People shifted their paradigm more toward matches because it seemed like especially in America great promos and great angles were an extreme rarity. They happened for sure but they were not as important anymore. I think all the guys who were climbing the ladder in 2000-2001 who looked like they would be future main event players that weren't, followed by no satisfying payoff to HHH-Stephanie-Angle, followed by a horribly mismanaged invasion, followed by a disappointing NWO revival, followed by a Bischoff run that had its moments but wasn't everything that it could be, followed by a disappointing Goldberg run, followed by departures of Austin and Rock on less than ideal terms, followed by a HHH run on top that seemed like it would never end combined to destroy a lot of people's faith in this stuff. Add in that promos really became heavily scripted during this time and that the indies were really workrate companies for the most part (for the most part) and there you go.

Sleeze is really having trouble letting go of the Rumble thing.

This was a really fun sprint, and it was nice to see Kanemoto get to dish out some punishment after how Liger has been treating him all year, even if he did lose the match. This never really let up and the match was full of awesome aggression from both guys. I'd classify this as a really strong Nitro match full of great action. Nice mix of brawling and flying. ***1/2

This had a tough act to follow but even without that, it was really a just there tag. The Kawada-Taue story has been told effectively at this point and I'm not really much of a fan of Johnny Smith. Not much heat either, and this is probably the first time reality has set in that Stan Hansen has gotten older. Impressive it took this long.

Dr. Death is having a hell of a 2000 thus far. I loved his snug matwork with Akiyama to start things off, and he doesn't look out of place in the slightest with everyone else in the match. I've enjoyed a lot of the atypical All Japan stuff thus far in 2000 (which has been most of what we watched) but this more closely resembled the classic AJPW epics and it was also pretty great. Lots of drama in the finishing run with lots of really smart, patient build before it. I love Vader and Doc isolating and practically destroying Kobashi with alternating elbow drops and splashes before Vader hits the mother of all chokeslams to win the tag titles for his team. Akiyama continues to look like maybe the best guy in the world and is starting to be positioned that way as well. He would have easily been the guy taking the fall a year earlier in a match like this, but more than that, he gets in lots of great offense on Vader. I've been critical of how Kobashi works with Vader, but here, he followed Akiyama's lead and the results were really good. The high quality Steve Williams run in 2000 was not at all something I was expecting to see and while it has come mostly in tags, it has been an awesome curveball. Maybe this is the last great King's Road tag. We'll see. ****1/2

I really want mp3s of both pieces of entrance music. Awesome stuff. Pro wrestling gets avant garde. Somebody call Maury, because I think we know who the father of The Final Deletion is. What I find amusing about this is that the kendo stick strikes and the referee counts make this paced almost like a UWFI match since Tobita has to return to his feet by the 10-count in order to keep the match going. I wouldn't quite call this comedy, even though it's funny at times and the audience laughs quite a bit. I think it's more performance art. Something to behold for sure. Looking forward to more of this as a change in pace.

There was a lot to like here. There was some clipping so it was hard to get a feel for the match overall, but we got a good look at some of the Osaka Pro guys. Maybe unsurprisingly, the biggest standouts were Togo and Delphin, although I also really liked Black Buffalo. I sort of liked the briefcase spot at the end myself, just because it was so unexpected when it hit whoever was coming into the ring at the time. This was a bit more uneven than a Michinoku Pro or Toryumon match worked in the same style, but I do still think there's plenty to appreciate.

It's amazing I've seen iterations of this match so many times and I still don't think it's gotten stale. This was a bit more abbreviated than their usual fare since it was taped for TV and it was worked to be a bit more crowd-pleasing, eliminating Guido early and focusing more on the more established Tajiri-Crazy matchup. Fun match.

I think it's just The List. They could go either way, but I think that's the bulk of it. I do think Owens can be a strong babyface eventually. Maybe even now if they want him to be.

Can Strowman get credit for retiring Mark Henry to create a real Wrestlemania moment? They had great chemistry at the Rumble., and it gets something out of Henry on the way out.

Reigns looks to be turning heel. Strowman is a heel. Samoa Joe is a heel. I don't know who is turning babyface between Jericho and Owens, but Jericho is who I'm guessing. With Reigns likely turning and Rollins on the shelf, that makes Sami Zayn the de facto number one babyface. He's headlining the next round of house shows and was put over strong on RAW. I don't expect that to stick for obvious reasons, but I think maneuvering him into a match with HHH would be a good idea, if only because they need a lot of over babyfaces on RAW after Wrestlemania. I guess they'll have Balor if he returns. They'll have Zayn. Maybe they can split New Day and do something with Big E. Big Cass? Is he ready? And then if you move all those guys up, you also need opponents for your second tier heels like Rusev. There's a talent shortage on the babyface side in a big way.

Another match where the camera work makes it really hard to say anything that I think would really be fair. What we see of this does look really good, and Barry Horowitz is the master at flipping a crowd that wants to cheer him.

The two post-Santo heel turn trios matches are up there for me, both the one where he actually turned and the one the subsequent week. I'm pretty sure those would be my picks. 11/22/96 and 11/29/96 are the dates.

This is the kind of match where you really appreciate the meticulous-if-annoying blocking of WWF production because they cut away from the match to show Rob Conway, who is running his mouth without even looking at the action in the ring and seem to miss some key stuff in the match, and the announcers seem conflicted on what to call and are splitting their attention. Yeah, I'll just come out and say it: OVW sucks. The biggest problem with Cornette's announcing is that he's always turned up to 11, so when something deserving of an 11 happens, it doesn't get over like it should because he never comes down. We'll keep following OVW because it's important and probably has some good moments with some good talent, but not a fan. Conway seems to alternate between babyface and heel week to week. I am not sure how we're supposed to take him.

I like watching these guys throw punches and kicks, but the interference was too much and the match probably worked as a means to an end to get heat on the KAW crew, but not really as a match on its own. This really came across like the worst of NWO stuff. Not a fan.

I don't think anyone in this match was bad but Scoot Andrews was just such a star compared to everyone else. I loved his pre-match promo about how goal was to win and then go home with all the white women in attendance. The other three look good, but look like they are still learning and aren't quite ready to move past the indies just yet. This is yet another match to show the power of a basic Southern tag and how sticking to it can help workers who may struggle otherwise make it through a match, as this was pretty decent because they stuck to what works. The crowd didn't get as into it as they did seeing the old WWF guys in previous matches, but it was a fun match anyway.

I cracked up at the pre-match promo from Mike Sullivan mocking Marty's age, with Sullivan recalling Jannetty's WWWA tag title run with Lou Thesz. The action spilled outside for a while, which made this hard to follow, although we got a really beautiful view of a gate and a bush for about a minute. (Where the hell are they?) The camera work is really working against this match to a point where it's almost unfair to talk about it because I think anything I'd say would be unfair.

I'm not saying even that it should be all that different. I'm just saying it's not really different. They have done an exceptional job getting Strowman over and I was wowed by his showdowns with Henry and Big Show. I don't think Brock or Goldberg could get that much heat against those two. They've created a star. Roman Reigns is tremendous. Baron Corbin is coming along nicely. Just saying the reason they were all initially selected was because of their size, then they developed as performers after that. It's not like Vince McMahon is ever going to make Sami Zayn his two-year project that he protects in booking to set up for big showdowns with top guys. It's just not in him. As has been said, small guys have to prove they can get over and big guys have to prove they can't. That was always the case and it's still the case. They hired Rey 15 years ago and put him in a good spot, but not quite on top. They would hire Rey now and put him in a good spot, but not quite on top. Styles got a title run today. Benoit and Jericho got title runs 10+ years ago. Not too much has changed.

One of my biggest takeaways from watching the Royal Rumble in full and seeing how everyone was getting positioned is that for all the talk about how fans accept small guys now and the company has really changed their mentality, they still push almost all big guys and not very many smaller guys.