Loss

More than anyone else I can think of, Jerry Jarrett was more willing to just do what worked. He wasn't a zealot about a particular version of wrestling. He was a cheapskate, but he was an open-minded cheapskate.

Whether it's Sami Zayn or not, I really do like the idea of a smaller guy cracking the code and doing a great underdog story, but they don't tend to push small guys proactively, so that's a tough one. I think Reigns is the best bet of the options they have, but I also feel like that's going to make the resentment even worse if they treat it as a babyface moment. It doesn't have to be Sami Zayn and at this rate it shouldn't be, but it would help if it's someone that fans perceive as being held down, correctly or incorrectly. If Daniel Bryan was healthy, he'd be perfect.

If I use the 80s WONs as a source, it paints the picture of New Japan as a pretty volatile company. Lots of politics and far more masters to serve than in All Japan. More extreme ups and downs in business than All Japan. I don't know how accurate that is, but it's one reason I've always ranked Choshu highly as a booker. He seemed to navigate the landmines really well.

I'm not the target audience, but I agree. Yuck. I also think this is going to mean very little. Goldberg peaked before a lot of fans were even born. He's a relic from an era long gone. Plus, the fanbase has changed and I'm not even sure it would get over now. The average WWE fan in 2016 would rather watch Brian Kendrick and Sami Zayn than Goldberg and Brock Lesnar. If they want to put Brock in attraction matches (which I think is all they can do since they haven't built up any main roster opponents who are viable for him), then I'd rather them do worked matches against guys from MMA and boxing and try to make him an American Inoki or something. I will admit if they were still on pay-per-view and promoted it properly, they could probably get a bunch of old fans back one time with a big buyrate.

When did Alexander Otsuka work a pro-style? It has somehow eluded me.

Vince runs Smackdown by phone most of the time according to Dave. Is that the key?

I'd probably go Flair, Liger, Eddy and Ted DiBiase. DiBiase may not poll exceptionally high in a GWE poll but something like this plays to his strengths. Other guys I'd consider are Negro Casas, Arn Anderson and Vader. Also, people will laugh but this is why Chris Jericho has had so much longevity -- his ability to "do it all".

Chris Jericho is a nonstop barrage of catchphrases. He's babyfacing himself, and I'm not sure if that's intentional or not.

Jushin Liger is a great babyface and heel, was a great young wrestler and is a great veteran, has worked great with and without a mask, could fly, could work the mat, could have great matches with heavyweights and juniors, could do great bloodbath brawls and great technical matches and could work great singles and tags. He has great charisma and personality, and he's also a tremendous technical wrestler. In terms of an all around package, there are few better. But if promos are a requirement, full stop, then Liger can never be placed there by English-speaking fans, nor could anyone else whose promos aren't in English. And that's the part that doesn't sit right with me -- it seems discriminatory.

I guess there are two ways to define an all-around type, and both have been used in this thread if you look at Case's post and JvK's post. It's an old conversation of course, but I still struggle with being fair to wrestlers from Japan and Mexico whose promos we can't understand. It means they can never be the greatest all-around performers unless we understand what they are saying, which seems discriminatory to me. At the same time, if we don't factor in promos, we are excluding something hugely significant in American wrestling. So what's the best way? Do you look at wrestlers who are versatile in the ring or do you look at wrestlers who can work and talk? Neither way seems fair, and so I get paralyzed.

Their best shot was to turn the clock back to 2000 and groom Chris Jericho as their new top star. It's semi-forgotten now because a lot of people are sick of him, but in Jericho, they really had something special in 2000 that they sort of squandered. He was already the #3 merchandise seller in the company without a full-fledged main event push, so the foundation was there.

Coming back to this just to say I always thought that the heel should get more of the pay-per-view/big match payoff than the babyface. The babyface had the ability to make money through merchandise that a heel doing their job wouldn't have had. It should have been understood that the heel was making sacrifices in those areas to sell the match and thus should get a bigger piece of the pie for the match itself. In the current structure, that probably isn't relevant and I don't know that it applies anymore. I'm more making an argument about how I think things should have been pre-Network. Now WWE's popularity is completely the same whether or not Seth Rollins is around just like it is whether or not Jinder Mahal is around. I suppose the demands of Seth Rollins' job are higher, which would be the reason to pay him more. But as far as contributions to the bottom line, I'm not sure.

Austin should have said he had been plotting with Vince McMahon to make millions of dollars off of a gullible population for the last three years, if he absolutely had to turn.

I know Dave's version of the Miz story that got him kicked out of the locker room years ago always seemed exaggerated to a point that it had no credibility, so that's probably true.

I would say the two guys whose greatness he'll never acknowledge are Miz and Sheamus. Just a blind spot. I don't think it's something personal or anything like that. His mind is just made up.

For someone who wasn't paying attention at the time, how would you compare Sami Zayn's ability to engage people and have good matches since joining the main roster to babyface Daniel Bryan in 2010-2011?

I think over time you can build up a mythology that has its own versions of Skull and Bones, Bohemian Grove, Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, Federal Reserve, etc. (I should clarify that I am not at all saying those agencies have no questionable dealings, but just mentioning them because they are often at the center of conspiracy theories.)

I have just learned over the last few days of the conspiracy theories surrounding Hillary Clinton. For those unaware, she either died at the 9/11 memorial or vanished for real that day, depending on your point of view, and has two body doubles now pretending to be her in public. Her campaign rallies have often taken place in fake venues against green screens, sometimes with a laugh track and with phones in the audience that are on her but not even picking her up in the shot. This is because the Rothschild Family and other New World Order globalists plan to stage an assassination against one of the body doubles before the election so that Barack Obama can declare martial law and stay in office to go to war with Russia, who will take the blame for the assassination attempt. If you believe Hillary survived, then the real Hillary, with Bill, will be long gone to South America to live high on the hog by that time, as the reward for their years of service in favor of powerful interests. It's an insane story and would make an amazing serialized television show -- almost a version of Breaking Bad on hallucinogens. So while it frightens me that there are people who seriously believe this stuff, I do get major entertainment value out of it, and wondered how that same concept could be applied to pro wrestling. The thought I came up with was of a pro wrestling company that takes old-timers who are past their prime, and they relitigate the details of past feuds and come up with some extremely over the top explanation for things that happened within it. The wrestlers involve could post doctored YouTube videos and tweets walking through their theories to facilitate the grudges. All the players make their case to either accuse others or defend themselves against accusations of wrongdoing, and it leads to a blowoff match where the whole conspiracy is either revealed or we get another wrinkle in the story and it continues to build to something else. I'm sure there are other ways to make it happen. I'm guessing it would also be a big draw for loons.

Savage heel turn on Bret and title match.

We know how Vince thinks. This may be his way of proving that it doesn't work.

I wish they had come up with something different to call them. The word "cruiserweight" has a stigma that I don't think can be removed.

I dunno, but overt racism, homophobia and sexism seem to me to be more important issues to tackle than Christmas, calling matches "abortions" or using gender neutral terms in innocuous places. It seems to me important not to piss off large swathes of normal people when the first set of issues are still far far from being sorted. The second set of issues encourages general eye-rolling, and makes it easier to reduce the first set to that same level. Worse it pushes simmering resentment under the carpet, and I'm convinced that that is part of some of the far-right political movements we are seeing in UK and USA right now. Campaigns being run on basically racism. I don't disagree with the basic premise of what has fueled the rise of far right candidates, but I also don't think that such movements are empowered by this stuff. They are empowered by economic realities and changing cultural norms. Arguments about word policing are just superfluous appetizers used to enhance the message.

May not make a difference but "monstrous" or "messy" would be closer to how I often see it used outside of the actual medical context. Fair point. If we're talking in those terms, I'd say that a bad match is acute.

But what you're advocating is a form of action policing in itself. And who gets to decide which hills are important? They usually target minorities, which means there's a disproportionate impact. That's in a way the entire point. Wingnut cottage industries will exist whether anyone gives them legitimate ammunition or not.

Set aside the issue of comparing a bad match to an aborted fetus. It's idiotic to compare a bad wrestling match to a medical procedure. It bugs me mainly because it seems like an attempt to paint a bad match as something traumatic. It's not. It's just a bad match. It has no bearing on the viewer's life beyond just having watched a bad match. The end. I'd also say that there is this idea that "language policing" somehow prevents people from speaking freely. That's ridiculous. This misguided idea that freedom of speech means shelter from critique of words has to go. In most cases, it seems like the people who are being policed are the people who point out the offensive thing, but the argument is re-framed in reverse. People do it so intrinsically at this point that I'm not even sure they realize it's happening.