Loss

There have been cases when WWE has received calls from angry parents because John Cena lost, actually.

Internal continuity, quality of the action and working of the crowd (that's something different than involvement of the crowd, for the record) typically determine how good or bad a match is for me. Those are usually the things I'm looking for. There are exceptions, there always are, because in any type of performance art someone can intelligently break the rules and end up producing something really cool in the process just as much as they can follow the rules and produce something that just doesn't click. A match can also be so overwhelmingly good or bad in one of those categories that the other ones don't matter so much. I don't think those three things are necessarily universal standards for what makes a match good or bad, but they are my standards for what makes a match good or bad, and I apply them to everything I watch, or at least I try. Others may differ in what they are looking for, and that's ok. Personal biases will always creep in, but when I'm reading a match review, I like to hope that type of thing isn't so strong that the person reviewing the match will overlook good work just because it didn't do much for him. Subjectivity through failed but unwavering attempts at objectivity is the way to go, I think.

If you find a match fundamentally flawed but really fun and find another match to have really good action and really good psychology but there's a personal disconnect for you, which do you think is the better match?

I'm with Lee. There are plenty of matches that I enjoy more than matches that I think are much better.

It's not just this time. Apparently, every time Cena loses, his merch sales dip, which is why no one ever beats him twice. Considering he's outselling the #2 person in merch at a 5:1 margin, I can understand them wanting to ride that gravy train. Vince has told people in the company many times that Cena feeds their families.

That was how I interpreted his loss to Rock at WM28 and promo the next night before Brock laid him out. But then he started feuding with Big Show and had a pay-per-view main event against John Laurinitis, so if they did soft turn him, they soft turned him back quickly. They have tried things over the years to give him an edge, but they are dropped quickly. Is a guy who makes out with Zach Ryder's girlfriend while he's confined to a wheelchair really a pure babyface? It's worth noting in this thread that Dave hinted that the reason Cena won the rematch against Owens is because his merchandise sales dipped after losing to Owens, just as they often do after he loses a big match.

I like that too, and I think there are cases where it works really well. If you want to quantify how good something is (rather than just that it *is* good), it doesn't quite hit the mark. JvK, you mentioned how I write about matches. To be honest, I have done very little in those threads that I would consider "reviews" (at least the way that I would write a review if that specifically was my goal). So in the Match Discussion Archive, I usually just write my takeaway impressions because of the amount of wrestling I'm trying to watch, but also because I consider it an informal posting of my immediate thoughts. I usually have more to say about the match the second time around, and at that point I'm more interested in getting into specifics. It's just that my to-watch list has grown so exponentially that I haven't done a huge amount of rewatching in many years.

It's not reductive at all. One of the challenges of talking about wrestling that I enjoy most is trying to figure out a way to put the intangibles into words. Sometimes, we succeed in doing that, and other times, we miss the mark and try again. It's sometimes not easy.

You may have figured out by now that I'm going to be starting threads for a lot of the indy groups. I've seen Joe-Butcher (only the first one) and Ki-Butcher, but that's really it, so I'm open to any and all recommendations.

I actually like death matches too, but I like the ones where the violence is mostly implied and its the charisma of the wrestlers and spectacle of it all that fuels the match. If there are any like that in CZW, I'd definitely be interested. Gore for gore's sake doesn't do much for me.

If Hulk Hogan did a Burning Hammer, that would be worth at least a star.

I know most of CZW has always been pretty bad, but they also seem to have good matches here and there that get lost in the sea of other crap. So I thought I'd start a thread to try to get a list going of all the CZW matches that are actually good. This is inspired by me watching the Dojo stuff on YouTube, which I've really loved.

The first time I ever saw Code Red was in the Cesaro-Zayn match on the first NXT special, and one of the reasons I'm not so high on that match is that was that spot being thrown away for a quick nearfall. I still think the move is spectacular enough that it being anything but a finish is a tough sell for me, but it was at least a bigger nearfall here than it was there. I think once I get over the excitement of the moment (I just finished watching it), I'll prefer the first match because this really was just a series of moves-moves-moves. But it was an awfully entertaining series of moves-moves-moves and it was the most fitting match it could be for where I see the feud going, whether it was the best match these two could have or not.

It's 2015, and I think someone would have to convince me that John Cena hasn't been WWE's best guy this year, the same year they are phasing him down the card.

Song contests? Aren't they a wrestling website? No kidding. Dave has got to update his model. The editorial standards aren't strong in the newsletter either, but people forgive that because he writes such a huge amount each week. But that kind of thing can destroy Dave's rep over time even if he has nothing to do with it. Whether it's him or someone else, someone should be screening everything that goes on the site against a set of consistent standards. Just imagine if that site was run like an actual news enterprise.

Before he had even proven himself, Luger was smart enough to negotiate a big money contract and he was also usually able to add perks into his deal that no one else got. So other wrestlers resented him in part for that. Kevin Nash likes to claim that the guaranteed contract is his legacy, but I'm not so sure about that, as Luger was the first guy to really negotiate his contract in a smart, all-encompassing way.

They even chased away guys with name value who had drawn like Goldberg all because he treated wrestling like a job.

I believe in Bad Match Theory. If your matches suck, you must be doing something right.

Yeah, Mind Games is what is remembered but the Shawn-Mankind match at the beginning of his 1997 heel turn is an excellent TV match too, one of the best TV matches of the year for the WWF in fact.

One of my very favorite Nitro moments:

Realistically, I think it only took a year for Shawn to find his footing as a singles heel. By 1993, he was someone who could rise to the occasion, which is evident by looking at his series with Marty Jannetty (we have strong matches from them on TV, PPV and handhelds), his surprisingly good Raw match with Duggan and the match later in the year with the 1-2-3 Kid. He has some stinkers (that Mr. Perfect feud ... ugh, and don't get me started on the Bret Hart cage match from Coliseum Video), but I don't think the argument against Shawn in '93 is that he wasn't good. It's more that he didn't care to be good unless he felt it was an occasion that warranted it.

The championship has definitely become a lifetime achievement award at times.

If you take them at their world, it had less to do with ratings or money and more to do with the new boss disliking wrestling. To save the company from that philosophy, you would have had to either: * get someone above Kellner - the guy who'd been made new head of TBS two weeks earlier - to overrule his first order of business, * dramatically change the show's presentation into something as reputable as, say, the NBA, or present-day UFC at minimum, * or find a new network fast, which they tried and couldn't do. Even if the ship had been steered back into place in '99, I'm not convinced that great creative and better ratings would have even saved them in '01. The landscape was so against them at that moment. In the same way that Bischoff was "in the Hogan business", the media was never "into" wrestling. They were into the Rock and Austin. Keep in mind that at this same moment of truth for WCW, the XFL was bombing on a colossal level, starting the month before WCW went under. As weird as it sounds, that absolutely had a hand in networks wanting nothing to do with anything that smelled like wrestling. I know this was the public explanation, but I've never completely bought this. WCW made a $55 million profit in 1998. Had that been true in 1999 and 2000, I can't see them dumping the company.

Stunned. Where do you even begin talking about his impact? This is a tough one.

The Rock matches from 1999 are good, yes. I just don't think they are at that elite level needed to make a strong case for Austin.