Loss

Vince has actually said the words, "I don't want an Olympic gold medalist dying on my watch."

Sometimes WWE makes copyright claims on footage they don't even own. I don't know if that's the case here, but they've done it before.

The schedule is easier, but guys are also expected to do more things that are tough on the body. I don't know if that perfectly evens out, but my point is that some things used to be easier and used to be harder. Now, some things are easier and some things are harder.

I'm not anti-anything except wrestling that is bad. Just like there is exciting wrestling that forgets to be logical, there is logical wrestling that forgets to be exciting.

I actually find ranking matches much easier and more enjoyable, but I'll never feel like I've seen enough.

Fun list. I wish I could pull it off but I don't think I could make a list I'd be happy with.

I realize it's mostly a financial issue, but on an artistic level, I think wrestling would be better off using real popular music as opposed to stuff made in-house specifically for them. When I hear "Tom Sawyer", I still think of the Von Erichs. I'd like for that to be the desired effect of all entrance music -- you hear the song doing something else unrelated to wrestling and then you think of the wrestler.

Is the question stuff that's out there that we've seen that we have just never seen anyone put on YouTube or DM, or is it stuff that we hope is in a vault somewhere? I interpreted it to be the former, but maybe I'm wrong.

I will also add that I think part of what contributes to this is that wrestling hasn't produced very many rewarding and exciting storylines or promos on a big stage at all in the last 15 or more years. So people who like wrestling and would prefer to keep watching it have shifted their preferences accordingly, perhaps because the ring work is the only thing that hasn't been completely fucked up, even though it too has taken a hit in some ways.

What about wrestlers who didn't talk as part of their gimmick? Think Samoans. Think Yokozuna. Think Goldberg. What about wrestlers who do talk but aren't particularly great at it and it doesn't really matter? Think Undertaker. Think Shawn. I'm still reading through this post, so my apologies if I'm being repetitive, but the only thing every wrestler in history has done is wrestle. It's the only baseline way to compare wrestlers across various cultures.

I don't mean it as a critique -- just trying to figure out if we're determining GWE primarily based on who has footage on YouTube and Dailymotion. And what kind of skewed lists do you think that might create?

It's almost impossible to overstate just how hated Shawn Michaels was near the end of 1997. But DX lost something to me when Bret left. Shawn wasn't as over when Bret left either, because he didn't have another foil at that level -- Shamrock wasn't it, the Undertaker feud had run its course and Austin was so far above Shawn. I would call the time from Shawn doing the promo in Canada with flags in his pants while wearing those douchebag loafers through the first HIAC my favorite heel run the company has ever had, just because Shawn was so passionately despised.

The Haku story as I understand it was not that he picked a fight with someone. Every story we know about Haku is that he's the nicest guy in the world unless you fuck with him.

I wouldn't call The Giant's made up biography as Andre's son scummy on his own necessarily. But the promo Hogan did in tears about how he had always heard Andre fathered a son to me crossed a line into slander and was pretty tasteless.

WCW once considered manufacturing a story that a wrestler died in a plane crash. I don't know if the goal was to play it like Al Wilson on Smackdown or to try to be more legit about it, but they never did it.

Gene Okerlund should have his own subcategory. He once did a Hotline plug saying Davey Boy Smith and Magic Johnson had something in common and that the reveal was too hot to talk about on the air. It turned out it was just that they had the same type of surgery.

Dave shot that one down.

I don't expect Bryan to wrestle again in WWE. But I do think his music starting when we find out who drew number one, him somehow sidestepping/eliminating Brock later and Brock rushing in and putting the hurt back on him and taking him out of the Rumble to set up a WM match would be a case where fans would easily accept Bryan not winning the match. I don't expect that at all, but one can dream.

He didn't say Brock-Roman wasn't their current plan. He said he didn't expect that it would happen at Wrestlemania. He wasn't reporting it as news.

He didn't report it as fact. He said he didn't expect it.

Have you had the chance to watch anything after Dream Rush yet?

If the idea was to tease Roman-Brock for WM, I figured the announcers would say "This is the first time these two have crossed paths since last year at Wrestlemania" or something to that effect.

It's not, but it's on the Best of the Super Juniors 1999 commercial release.

The reason people are doubting it is that HHH, based on rep, seems more likely to start working Vince to make him think it was his idea to change it. Plus, HHH wasn't really known for refusing to do jobs as much as he was doing them in a way that they meant nothing, to people who weren't likely to threaten his spot.