Loss

I would add that Vince is set to have a bigger money-losing year this year than WCW ever had, or at least that was the projection at one point. It may be less now because he's cut costs to the bone. There are mitigating circumstances surrounding that, but 2014 has been a miserable failure creatively and they have blown up their business model without seeing any return.

Agreed.

I would have loved to be a fly in the room when Vince found out he was going on Medicare.

I have a Torch sub and seem to always forget about it. Wade has many positives Dave doesn't, and vice versa, but I think one of the main reasons I've gotten away from the Torch is because it's gone from being an "online journal of news and opinion" to just opinion. I can't remember the last time he broke a story. I think all of his sources have dried up. It's interesting how guys like Austin and Ross seem to see him and Dave in much the same way, and that's because at one time that wasn't too farfetched. But Wade has fallen off a lot because he doesn't seem to break any news anymore. Mitchell is a talented writer, but as I get older, I find the polemic style annoying because it seems manipulative and insincere. He's always on some type of crusade to expose that the good workers are the good guys and the bad workers are the evil ones, or at least that's the impression I've always had. Sid Eudy.

He wore them in Ring of Honor.

I moved all the talk about Vince and his decline to the Pro Wrestling folder. Let's keep this topic on Punk.

I don't think anyone is surprised as much as they are surprised to hear it confirmed.

I'm up to the talk with Will and Tim. Genuine question for you guys: Do you think Bret Hart was as driven to be the best guy in the business as Flair was? Did Bret have the same degree of motivation? It was obviously there to an extent, but I feel like there's a big gap.

Something Punk said on Cabana's show gave some context to this. The current WWE payoff structure actively discourages getting too much heat. CM Punk mentioned that his paycheck cut in half when he turned heel. I do think there are ways to alleviate this, and the obvious solution would be to give the heel the lion's share of the payoff since it's acknowledged that he is sacrificing merchandise sales to build the match. By that logic, you make your merchandise cash cows your top babyfaces and your great all-around workers and promos who perhaps aren't as marketable your top heels. Everyone wins.

I think it's more nuanced than that. Yes, I'm sure Punk was difficult, but that doesn't mean that he's wrong. Just like anything, there are also times when people have major problems with each other and both sides have both good and bad points. I for sure do not 100% agree with everything Punk said, but I did feel like I understood what makes the guy tick a lot more after hearing him explain himself. I think part of Vince's (and HHH's) job is to figure out the right way to appeal to all of these big egos. It's wrestling. By the way, he also admitted that he feels bad for how he talked to some people in the company toward the end, which by definition would not make him a sociopath.

I enjoyed chatting with Steven as well. Looking forward to listening to this one.

I disagree with evilclown's post too, but let's try to keep the thread about Punk and not him.

Do you really think that was a bigger issue than his health?

Wait until you hear him unload on Jericho at the very end for the recent story about Jericho saying Punk stopped talking to him.

A heel modeled after Kanye West would get a lot of heat, but it would also require some pretty creative booking. I'm afraid they'd just spoof Kanye by having someone interrupt Brie Bella getting an award at the Slammys or something. And I say that as someone who thinks Kanye is just terribly misunderstood.

I think the key difference there is that we aren't shutting down or silencing any PWO criticism. We are just tired of PWO criticism being used as a Get Out Of Jail Free card in lieu of responding to a specific point someone makes. If someone has a legitimate gripe against PWO as a collective, feel free to post it as long as it's being done in this folder and not in a wrestling thread as a response to someone making a wrestling-related point. There's a difference between this in a discussion of a Henry-Show match on RAW: "I was at The Board the other day and I found most of the posters there awfully confrontational when I praised a Mark Henry-Big Show match." and this in a discussion of a Henry-Show match on RAW: "Jesus, all of you guys are crazy. Why do you all like Mark Henry and Big Show so much? I guess I shouldn't be surprised since I am at PWO after all." One is pretty much always counterproductive to actually having a topic that goes somewhere worth reading. The other? It can go in that direction too I suppose, especially since some of the posters do intersect various places, but it's not a direct troll of people that post here that is guaranteed to go nowhere productive. It definitely can be, and if that type of bashing was derailing a thread, of course we would step in. As for me, I have no problem trying to follow The Golden Rule and not putting people who don't post here in the same bucket. And we're definitely not on Generalization Patrol looking for this sort of thing, ready to ban at any second. Throwing it out once flippantly is very different from creating a pattern of doing it. We'll give these things the response we think they deserve, just as we always have. And it's always our goal to be as hands-off as possible.

I really hated this match when I watched it today. It's incredibly boring for the first 45 minutes, and the crowd response is not there either. I didn't like the Hasegawa-Fukuoka matwork at the beginning at all, and it set the tone for the rest of this, which was pretty anti-climatic. This is probably the biggest disappointment upon rewatch so far.

Yeah, if it's not clear already, I do think it's worth clarifying to everyone that we're specifically talking about how to make live audiences on episodes of Monday Night RAW and pay-per-views boo wrestlers earnestly, and that's pretty much the scope of it.

They aren't / don't? We've entered interesting times where the live audiences don't really represent the WWE Universe as a whole. Even live crowds for TV tapings are much different than live crowds for house shows. It's tough to navigate it all.

That reminds me that Jillian Hall would have been awesome if she wasn't so obviously singing badly on purpose. Imagine if she was almost - but not quite - good.

Yeah, how do you anger 40-50 year old men that refuse to spend money? That's most of WWE's audience. Of course, the live audience makeup is much different. The RAW crowds are not representative of the WWE fanbase as a whole, so I think a different type of heel will get over with them compared to your average TV viewer.

I kind of love that Mayumi Ozaki is not friendly. I think I'd be let down if she wasn't hateful to me if I tried to talk to her.

Her memory is fading. She specifically evoked Hillary Clinton in almost every promo. She even attended Wellesley so she could be just like her idol.

I took out my second paragraph complaining about use of the term "politically correct" and explaining why. It's not fair for me to say that and then say this isn't the thread to talk that out. Let's keep this on the right side and talk about these things in wrestling and not so much our personal politics, although I realize the two are hard to keep separate at times.

I moved all the discussion of race, gender and sexuality in wrestling to its own thread.