Loss

A billion times this. Not a fan of Brock, and the sense of entitlement that surrounds him because he's "legit" makes him even less fun to watch.

Brock is so strong that he ceases to be valuable for WWE. Number of interesting matches for him that are on the table where the outcome may possibly be in doubt: zero.

Someone else can feel free to pick it up if they like. It was impractical for someone with my sensibilities because I kept finding more and more and more matches, and could never get out of go because I wanted to finish the perfect list and then start.

We've made a commitment to watch all title matches, and with that comes this one. This didn't do much of anything for me. I guess it was fine on paper, but it also felt like two wrestlers doing Joshi instead of a Joshi match. I appreciated Miho's attempt at leg work and the subsequent same from Maekawa. They even tried to vary the pacing, so it's not like this was a case of overshooting. But their greenness just really shines through in a way that takes this down for me. I'll begrudgingly give them credit for bringing the crowd into this down the stretch through solid work, but something never clicked at all and it had nothing to do with what they were doing in the match. Maybe it was that this felt a little practiced? Hard to explain.

This was the HHH-Big Show version of a bombfest, which sounds like damning with faint praise, but this was actually a solid match. They cut a hard pace with Show doing all these crazy moves and bumps for a guy his size -- a powerslam, missing a second-rope elbow drop, taking a bump on the ringside announce table, and so forth. What struck me more than anything was how heatless this whole thing was, though. It really did take a long time to get HHH over as the top heel, and he wasn't quite there yet when this match happened. And of course we know Show's story. I thought HHH was perfectly fine here, but Big Show was just dropping bombs and bumping way more than he ever should have. That made this quite the entertaining ride, even if the crowd just sat on their hands. I've had the theory that non-Austin/Rock matches didn't really have heat (even if the wrestlers themselves were over) until Benoit and friends came in and improved the match quality. We'll see if that theory holds water.

This was really fun, really joyful wrestling. Miho Wakizawa, who looks to be about nine years old, is very much in awe of her tag team partner and seems like she would follow Toyota to the moon. I'm going to say something I've never said about a Toyota match -- the execution was off at times, but they made up for it with some great psychology, and I loved the basic story here. When Toyota is in, the match is mostly in their control. Every time that an overzealous Miho tries to help her, she ends up setting them back. So Toyota is trying to mentor Miho while still holding off a formidable team in Watanabe and Maekawa. I don't have much use for Maekawa's samey offense with the constant scissors kicks that are executed more like paper cutter kicks, but I have always liked Watanabe as someone with offense really unique to her within the Joshi world. I was all ready to lecture them about going outside just like I have every other match that has had crowd brawling this year, but they paid it off in a cool way, with a nice visual of both Toyota and Wakizawa doing stereo planchas, Miho following Toyota's lead in doing so. Speaking of payoffs, I also like how the second time Toyota and Miho did the Irish whip on Watanabe and she attempted the same counter that took them both down the first time, they were prepared for it. So Miho may be an annoying little shit, but she's also capable of growth. And what else can we ask from fourth graders in wrestling matches, really? This felt really unique and had some cool layers to it. Toyota has "slowed down", but only in the sense that she's working much smarter. **** for me -- I feel like that's probably overrating it a little, but this was a charming little match.

LCO matches starting around 1997 are really fun until you realize they are all structured the exact same way with all the crowd brawling. Even then, they can still be really fun, and they definitely aren't taking a night off here. It's just that this seems to be exactly how every. single. match they have. plays. out. Some of the weapons shots amused me because what the hell was that huge metal thing? This is way too much of a copy of the genuine classic they had with more promising young wrestlers in Ayako Hamada and Akino less than a month earlier until the match gets back in the ring. What a concept, January 2000 -- keep matches in the ring! This is quite the king-sized beating, maybe one of the better extended squashes you'll ever see. I like the finish as something different too. I wouldn't want to see matches worked this way very often, and I'm glad they aren't, but this was a pretty cool one-off. ***1/2

The opening few minutes had me all prepared to comment on how these two were working this with the same basic structure as an old school cage match, where shots to the cage were teased and avoided and paid off later. That would have been a cool way to continue, but then they went into the crowd and this went down a notch for me. It felt like a case of being able to deliver great intensity in the ring, and I think this would have been better if they'd stayed in the whole time. That said, that's not the match they worked, so I'll talk about what really happened. There are things that seem like bad layout choices that are still executed well in spite of it -- doing a suplex in the crowd is a lot more tolerable when it's a delayed vertical and Honma sells it like mad. And I love Honma's quick bursts of offense, even when it doesn't culminate in something spectacular, just because he looks so good cutting a fast pace and executing wrestling moves. I'm totally with soup in that I appreciated how they built to a few crazy spots and got the most out of them they could. But there was also lots of setup time for some of the spots, which hurt the rhythm. All in all, I'd call this a very aspirational match that was very good, but not at the level it tried to reach. It feels really weird rating that All Japan six-man from the same day higher than this considering their relative scope, but I do think that was just the better-worked wrestling match despite being so much smaller and less inspired. Honma's matches with Shadow WX in 1998-1999 just trump these completely in my mind. ***1/2

Kakihara's UWFI stuff is always fun to see in a total pro-style environment, but this didn't do much for me outside of that and Ogawa's tree of woe eyepoke on Kikuchi, which admittedly may have been worth the price of admission. Pretty one-sided affair without much drama. The late leg work on Kakihara feels awfully uninspired. A match with this many interesting guys shouldn't be this bland, and this felt like an obvious sign that a shake-up was due.

A really nice match to jump into the 2000s with, and also to get my juices flowing as we once again attempt to plow through a decade, only this time doing a bit deeper of a dive. Anyway, I thought this was an excellent match with a lot of interesting and notable qualities. Anyone who says Kobashi never really showed much growth or that he never evolved past putting on the Kobashi show should really check out this match to see something different from him. Long gone are the days of the ne'er-say-die guy teaming with Satoru Asako in strong AJ undercard matches. Here, he acts as a total brick wall for Asako's attempt at offense in the early part of the match, really hammering home just how much has changed for one of them, if not the other one, since 1993. They play the short game to hype his match with Omori that's only a few days away, and to hype his match with Takayama which is still a few months away. Omori looks better than at any point I recall seeing him -- wrestling with more aggression and aiming to match his much better tag team partner blow for blow. The effort is almost enough to carry him to that level, at least for one performance. Akiyama isn't a huge part of this match, but does some really cool things when he's in, kind of nailing the narrative to the bulletin board when he gets the hot tag and immediately destroys Asako's knee after watching his own junior partner Kanemaru get bludgeoned for several minutes. Speaking of Kanemaru and Asako, this match is really about them, which makes this the inverse of a lot of the better All Japan six-mans. Oftentimes, you get the feel in some All Japan six-mans even when they are letting the younger guys shine that the match isn't really theirs -- after all, Kobashi-Fuchi was just a surrogate war for Misawa-Jumbo. This was a bit different in that they made a conscious choice to really hand the match to them. You get just enough Burning and No Fear to keep the heat at a respectable level, but they cede most of the body of the match to the juniors. Kanemaru works as a hell of a Ricky Morton and does some great comebacks swinging at everything in striking distance to try to shift the tide when he's FIP. He's really the best performer of the match, outshining Asako's FIP time if only because he had more of it. This felt more substantive than the Evolve six-man over WM weekend, but it wasn't as balls-to-the-wall as that one, and it's lacking anything transcendent to make it truly great. It's about as good as it can be without any type of a-ha moment, so I don't mean that as a complaint at all. Putting established top singles guys and a young junior against a top tag team and a veteran junior was exactly the type of mish-mash booking WCW should have been doing at this time, and this does feel like the type of match that would be remembered for years if it happened on American television. As it stands, it borders on great, which makes it blend in when it happens in an overachieving promotion. ***3/4

They forgot when building up Brock Lesnar that it takes two guys to have a match. They won't see any return on their investment until they build up an opponent for him that people see at his level.

I think this is what I was getting at with the whole-greater-than-the-sum-of-the-parts discussion, but I was coming at it in a different way. It's not completely the same thing, but there is overlap.

They specifically want Stephanie to be Charlotte Jones Anderson. They even hired a PR firm to promote her as their version of it.

We saw it so many times, not just with Russo, but with others. The NWO reunions never worked because each time one was tried, it was presented as another angle on the show. The whole reason it worked originally was partially because of the star power, yes, but that alone isn't what gave it heft. It was the attack on wrestling fan sensibilities and the feel that they could strike at any moment. It was that they were treated as a renegade pseudo-promotion that went after faces and heels alike -- creating unlikely alliances to oppose them -- rather than a stable. It's the type of thing that only *could* work once, because you do it and then once the people involved become institutions in the company, it's time to move on to something else. That same principle also applies to so many other ideas that were repeated to diminishing returns -- this belief that the original success was simply driven by star power. It's awfully reductive.

Isn't that sort of what happened with Emma?

There's also knowing something worked, and understanding why something worked. And that's not something unique to Russo, but it definitely applies to him.

Well yeah. Huge difference. It's not like Kevin Nash got over in 2011 feuding with HHH, but they literally could never get away with doing that program now without some type of mutiny.

One thing Russo was often criticized for during that time, actually, was not understanding the differences between the WWF and WCW audiences.

Knew hardcores loved him but had no concept of why is my guess.

A huge part of the problem is that wrestling doesn't really canonize its classic matches as much anymore. It's funny to say that considering that we are in such a postmodern era, but it's the Monday Night Wars and ECW that really get canonized. Not much else, and definitely not much since then. WWE seems to have already forgotten about stuff like the Reigns-Styles matches and the IC four-way just earlier this year. If WWE marketed the Reigns-Styles matches as career-defining stuff that accurately sums up a generation, that's how it would be remembered.

That would explain stuff like Steve Austin beating up Santa Claus and the DX Christmas show with the original Fingerpoke of Doom. Wait, Cornette did commentary on those, so I'm not sure it would.

It's evident in how he booked. You don't have to read his mind -- just look at the television.

Vince never believed that. He's always said it, but he's never believed it. What shade of grey did Mr. McMahon have? Why didn't guys the fans liked regularly team with guys the fans didn't like?

His general ideas around pushing young guys and making the presentation seem hip are right, but the details of his execution are just completely bonkers.

I had a mild altercation with Vince Russo earlier tonight on Twitter and he ended up blocking me. I'm sorry, but he tweeted "People who don't take responsibility for their professional failures eliminate the opportunity to grow, learn and become better from it" and of all people to tweet something like that, that it was coming from him blew my mind in some ways.