Loss

It exists on tape for WWF guys. The majority of guys it does not. I have no idea what Jack Brisco, Jumbo, etc.. look like in a small town in a minor show. I mentioned Bret on house shows, but the same applies to his television matches for the most part. There are a few great ones, but there aren't a long run of solid-good *** matches or anything. We have plenty of Jumbo TV matches that aren't taking place in major arenas or on important cards. We have plenty of small show matches for just about everyone who was nominated.

I do agree that beating Undertaker at Wrestlemania specifically has lost its meaning, but I do think beating Undertaker on *a show*, as opposed to The A Show, still matters.

The problem with Miz is part of the problem with wrestling in 2015 in general, in the sense that WWE seems to have one foot in the past and one foot in the present. In other words, does Miz not seeming like a tough guy prevent him from having a main event run? How important is it that casual fans think WWE stars are tough now anyway? I don't know that it is important when we're hit over the head all the time with how fake it all is, but on the opposite side, you see the value even now when fans really buy into someone like Undertaker or Brock Lesnar. I'd say that Miz would probably do just fine in a top role as long as they didn't make the mistake of trying to make him credible. He's a natural heat seeker and he'd probably get more over as a guy anathema to the whole idea of credible heels than someone who goes along with it. The key is that I think in order for it to work, he'd have to be the only guy pushed like that in a land of tough guys. As for the booking of Rock, I've felt for a long time that there was absolutely nothing about how Rock was booked that got him over, other than that they responded when the crowd dictated him being moved up. But Rock lost a lot of TV matches to a lot of guys he had no business losing to at all. His programs were usually presented as secondary to those of Austin or HHH, whether he was champion or not. But Rock's appeal I think was not so much investment in his character as it was singing along with his catchphrases and popping for his signature moves. I never got the feeling WWF fans cared when Rock won or lost as long as he did his routine. It's not the type of push that really works as a blueprint for everything, because Rock's exceptional charisma ensured he could withstand just about anything. But the way Rock was booked seems to be how most guys are booked now, with the key difference being that they are more tone deaf in responding when the crowd is into someone than they used to be.

Unbelievably, Dave has said before that WWE thinks one of the big things that got Rock over was 50/50 booking.

I'd like to raise the question again -- do you think guys dogging it in a lot of stuff that made tape is a huge negative and if so, in which category would it reduce the wrestler's score? I don't even mean that to target Bret. It's more of a general BIGLAV question.

I wish Michael Hayes/Eddie Gilbert types who half-managed, half-wrestled had become a staple of wrestling. Because that would be the ideal role for Miz.

Miz was pushed too soon. He's much more comfortable in his role now than he was in 2010 and if he was being pushed near the top now, chances are that it would work better. The problem is that he's seen as damaged goods, and that's an even harder label to get past than the eternal midcard label most of the guys have.

They don't have anyone anywhere near in a position to get over by beating Undertaker, and they don't really have time to get anyone to that point either. That's why, sadly, Cena is the only guy that makes sense as an opponent to me.

As much as people bag on Sheamus, at least he gets the right reaction and has helped Reigns get over as a babyface. Working with guys like Cena and Undertaker does Reigns no favors at all. He should be working with people the audience genuinely doesn't like.

I agree with those who say Bret's case needs to include the 1-2-3 Kid and Nash matches. However, I think Great Matches should probably also be his weakest category -- not because he doesn't have plenty of them, but because there were also so many cases where matches should have been better than they were. Is that even a factor there? I don't know where to factor in guys who took lots of nights off, but that seems to be the only category here where it makes sense. And is that something you care about? I do consider it a weakness if a guy can't put together a strong 10-minute throwaway TV match with a guy with whom he had no ongoing rivalry. There are one-off matches with Vader, Goldust, Helmsley, Mankind, Pritchard, Crush and others that just didn't hit the mark. There's also the Hennig series in '89, which I think is probably worth a closer look at some point since they had lots of long matches that made tape. The matches with Martel didn't click at all despite both of them being really good. Bret is a mixed bag when it comes to his resume, but where does that factor in as part of this formula?

I don't know about what the plan was post-Mania, except that they didn't want Bret as champion anymore -- at least for the time being -- because he was not drawing well.

At this point in time, Savage either wasn't on steroids or was cycling off. He was noticeably smaller, as you said. My point wasn't that he should have been the champ. It was that taking him out of the ring for the most part was a big overstep because as WCW proved, he still had some good years left in him.

If WWE was willing to sacrifice some short-term success to build some long-term success, we may get somewhere. That's harder for them to do as a publicly-traded company, and it goes against Vince's mentality anyway. But saying "Hey, let's get over the week-to-week guys as the real stars and not use Undertaker, HHH or any part-timers or past acts at Wrestlemania" would result in a less successful Wrestlemania, but in the long run, I would think it would help them.

What I still don't get is why they were so quick to move on from Randy Savage after he dropped the title. Savage was paranoid by nature according to pretty much everyone who has ever known him, and it's never been said, but I've always suspected that they were worried about him crumbling under the pressure at the time since he didn't handle it well at all when Elizabeth divorced him. Everything we've heard about Savage during that time suggests that he was probably going through a major depression, but I've never really heard that confirmed. Still, it makes sense.

What I'm saying though is that I don't think when they did it they had any delusions Bret was going to be another Hogan. They needed to do something big, and they needed a top babyface that wasn't on steroids quickly. They could worry about cementing him at that level later.

Bonnie Hammer, much like Kevin Dunn, Stephanie and the faceless "Creative" have at times become a scapegoat for what people don't like about WWE. The problem is Vince, but I've always sensed sort of a reluctance to really tear into him and him alone for reasons I don't entirely understand.

Well, they did it because they needed to do something to make a new top babyface quickly, and they didn't have the luxury of time. This wasn't them giving up on Bret, this was them thinking they could make him dropping the title and regaining it a few months later right the ship.

WONs at the time said that while everyone in the company liked Bret, house shows were not doing well at all in the first few months of 1993, so they felt like they needed a shake-up.

I know what we can infer, but I'd like an actual report that clarifies if Stephanie is booked the way she is because that's how she wants it and insists that it be, if it's that the writers do it proactively out of fear to how she'd respond to being asked to show vulnerability or if she is booked the way she is because that's how Vince wants it and insists that it be.

Londos has matches against Primo Carnera and Bronco Nagurski that are not complete, but they are long enough clips to form favorable takeaways.

I always think of the Kevin Nash "potholes" promo in 1997 where he made shoot comments toward the old guys for leaving wrestling in such a down state. It begs the question -- should wrestlers feel any sense of responsibility to leave the business in better shape than they found it, or is that idealistic horseshit? I think there is an argument about the stars of the 80s raping and pillaging whatever companies were left for all they were worth, then leaving all of wrestling in a funk as a result. Of course, the same thing happened again at the turn of the century, with Nash doing everything he accused his predecessors of doing. I am probably not phrasing that question properly, because I'm making it sound like as an ethical question, or something about doing jobs for the next generation on the way out. That's not my intent. I don't know that such a thing would have made a difference here, as the WWF empire was built on steroids and that wasn't sustainable. But I do think we have a tendency to only look at the good when thinking about a wrestler's legacy. Hogan's personal conduct did create a downturn for the WWF because of the damage to wrestling's image, just as Flair playing hardball on the way out of WCW made an already-struggling company hit rock bottom. I think it's a mistake to not consider that a vital part of each guy's legacy. As much as the Attitude Era gets credit for turning wrestling around, I think the true culprit was Eric Bischoff and more specifically the concept of Monday Nitro. I also think one aspect that gets overlooked that will make that era sort of impossible to recreate is that they had both a new generation of stars and an older generation of guys that people remembered fondly who were still young enough to be featured as top stars. The combination of fans lured in by something that truly felt like part of the cultural zeitgeist of the time and fans who gave up on wrestling 5-10 years earlier returning to see their favorites presented in a fresh way created an era that probably can't be duplicated. Say what you will about Bischoff, and I've said plenty, but there is no one like him in wrestling now. The whole thing wouldn't have worked had he been an establishment figure from the previous era. He wasn't ideologically married to ideas from the 1980s like Vince couldn't help but be, and ideas like signing talent from all over the world are not the sort of thing that would have occurred to someone too entrenched in what was. Wrestling in Japan and Mexico was on fire at the time -- in Mexico because of the popularity of Konnan and Vampiro and the subsequent formation of AAA, and in Japan because they did a great job building the next generation of stars in All Japan and New Japan. On top of that, wrestling was strong enough that Atsushi Onita could draw big crowds to outdoor shows with no television to promote the card and the interpromotional feuds created a strong period for Joshi. I don't particuarly enjoy most ECW now, but ECW did a great job of drawing influence from all over the world and presenting their interpretation of it to an American audience. But yeah ... RAW ran some lousy-looking venues to dead crowds for a few years there. While I do think it's a very interesting time for the WWF aesthetically because Vince was so desperate to make something work and less attached to one way of doing things, it's probably a time he'd rightfully hate to relive. The cool part was seeing Vince do stuff antithetical to the way he normally did business. In WCW, they were in a tough spot because their entire fanbase was the hardcores. They needed to make changes to grow their audience, but the hardcores rejected anything that wasn't Flair Flair Flair. And there weren't nearly enough of those types to support a national wrestling troupe.

In 1993, U.S. business was in the toilet and Hogan knew that the money was in Japan, which was why he cut that promo. According to another WOR story, he did it not realizing anyone outside of Japan would ever see it or discuss it, but he was just trying to put over their title to let them know he would love to stick around if the money was right. The problem was that it got reported in the WON and the WWF was furious. When Hogan was confronted about it, he denied he ever said it, not realizing that the WWF office had already called Dave Meltzer and asked for a copy of the tape. Most of us were younger at the time and even formed fond memories of the 1992-1996 period, but wrestling was really in terrible shape at that point. We should have a thread about just how dire things were some time.

I don't expect OJ to love it as much as the rest of us just based on what he likes in his wrestling, but I do think he will consider it a good match. The surprising part is not that you don't think it's a classic match, but that it's "pretty bad". You don't think that's an overstatement?

Wrestlers know their universe and don't seem to follow much outside of it. I think most guys would for the most part just rank their own opponents. They tend to have a very narrow view.

Yeah, I thought that was a ***** match.