Loss

The walk-through of the MX vs Fantastics match from Clash I in real time was excellent and I'd recommend that everyone check it out. THAT is what I want to see more of from Cornette.

It probably never will be verified since WWE is on information lockdown, even internally.

That's pretty much entirely what Cornette should be at this point -- a historian rather than a shock jock. But I guess because people are stupid and uninterested in learning much of the time, there just isn't as much money in that. At the very least, imagine if he did a no gimmicks show that focused entirely on stuff like this. Then I could at least safely ignore everything else he does.

I think the idea of fans holding WWE accountable may have worked at one time, but it's too little too late. It doesn't work when presenting pro wrestling/sports entertainment is largely a side hustle to Vince's real business now, which is transferring wealth to looters on Wall Street.

I don't think Stiva is implying that WWE acted with intention there.

I haven't been following this closely for reasons I mentioned earlier, but I hope people are looking at this as both individual offenses and systemic problems. There is a need to uproot both. Pro wrestling has fostered an environment like this since the beginning of time. It's not unique in that regard when compared to sports or other forms of entertainment, although it's easier for some involved to justify looking the other way because of the secrecy surrounding wrestling in particular and ideas that wrestlers should live their gimmicks. Even in the latter territory days, babyfaces were expected to "take care" of the women on the road so that they would come back. I made the comment to someone before all of this that more than any great matches or changing the landscape post-WCW and ECW, the ultimate legacy of the 2001-present generation might be that they cleaned up wrestling. I was basing that on it seeming to be a more fan friendly business with less scam artists and less wrestlers dying young. I feel pretty stupid for that one.

The apologies ... my God. Bullshit apologies really bother me on a personal level because I see apologies as a sacred part of human interaction. We all fuck up to varying degrees, and a heartfelt apology is an important part of healing and repairing damage. If you really aren't sorry about something, it's probably best to not say you are. The sincerity (or lack thereof) of an apology is almost always self evident. We've seen a good amount of bad attempts at PR and careerism, but from what I can tell, no real apologies yet. That's not even a criticism confined to this story. Corporations and celebrities have made a mockery of the apology process by pretty much turning it into a formula that almost seems like a robotic parody of hu-MONS -- you issue a statement, then you do photo-ops with charity, then lay low and hope it all blows over.

Is it possible that the live action hero as a concept is now dated? I think younger people now have heightened awareness of facades and don't hold institutions in the same regard. They are more hesitant to put people on pedestals, which makes it harder to create major stars. And because wrestling stardom has almost always been the product of manipulation, some people check out of the entire project itself because they see it as corrupt and authoritarian. See Roman Reigns. Fans were mad that the company tried to make him a star because the company shouldn't be in the business of making stars. I think fans in some ways now see that as manipulative or overly controlling and believe instead, that promoters should be in the business of reacting when someone catches on. That makes it much harder to promote pro wrestling, but it's a cultural change that I think has definitely impacted wrestling.

I think what I was getting at that I didn't articulate well is that there is now a lack of new action heroes. You see a lot of retreads of old stories but not really new stories with new characters as much. And that sounds similar to professional wrestling.

Just making a quick post because I felt the need to point out that my silence is not condoning or reducing any of this. And this is more confessional than I'd prefer to be, but as someone who has been drugged and abused, who narrowly avoided a seriously bad situation in my early 20s and who also has my own childhood trauma that will always be with me, it's a topic that's really hard for me to discuss at length. So if you see me posting elsewhere on the board and not really in this thread, know that it's not because I see this story as unimportant. I'm not sharing that because I'm seeking sympathy or care to talk about it. I'm just posting that because I don't want to contribute to any enabling through silence, but I also don't really want to post about this topic. Hope that makes sense.

I haven't thought this through, but how do you all feel about the idea that wrestling stopped creating new megastars around the same time that film stopped creating new megafranchises, especially in the action genre? Are the endless references to "The Attitude Era" being the peak of all wrestling much different than The Fast and the Furious Part 49?

Obviously HHH and Shawn wouldn't treat them like that since they work with them regularly, and they said Waltman didn't. So it sounds like it was just Hall and Nash. The story was that Ricky Morton was a guest trainer for a day at the Performance Center and ended up spending a lot of the day by himself because no one had any questions for him or made it a point to talk to him, which is indeed pretty shitty if that's how it went down.

Wow is this a blast from the past! Hyatte exploded in popularity right around the time I came out, so reading his articles wasn't always fun because of the nonstop gay jokes, but that was everywhere in wrestling at the time, even at live shows. He was a very well-known columnist who I sort of "hate read" every week. Despite sort of coming across as a horrible person most of the time, I did get a kick out of his attempts to expose the lack of wrestling knowledge of most of his readers. He did a basic quiz once asking, "Who was in the Dynamic Duo?" that stumped pretty much everyone. I've never been too big on the types who are more interested in the gossip and online feuds than wrestling itself, and to me, he's one of the originators in that category, but at the same time, I don't wish illness and early death on anyone.

MLK is a Disney character to a lot of people who probably wouldn't like the real guy very much, and I suspect Vince McMahon is at the top of that list.

"Pro Wrestling Only" doesn't mean the same thing that it meant a few years ago. It was always there at least on a subtle level but now it's more overt. There is no escaping politics in any aspect of life anymore. It is what it is. I think we're still figuring out where that line is here, because obviously it is possible to be gratuitous and cross one. However, when we talk about things wrestlers are saying, I don't think we have. But we aren't going back to 2007 when the board started and there was a very clear line. I can't say with a straight face at this point that debates about racism, sexism, transphobia, body shaming, corrupt authoritarian regimes, police brutality or the gig economy have no relevance when discussing pro wrestling.

I would even go back to 2003, with Austin as a retired commissioner giving stunners to the active wrestlers every week.

My response would be that AEW is not above mistakes. I think people are more forgiving because most of the time when they make them, they quickly learn from them and correct for the future. They don't have the stubborn streak of WWE where they think they are always right and never have to apologize or change course on anything. I am pretty lenient with any wrestling company that makes mistakes -- sometimes even major ones -- if they also have a track record of learning from those mistakes.

I saw a video of Cornette reacting to the FTR debut on my YouTube recommendations today and was immediately annoyed. He said he was swearing off AEW after the Stadium Stampede. I would like to hear his explanation for why he isn't.

Keith Lee's ceiling is more likely to be Rusev's ceiling.

The problem isn't so much the age of their stars. It's more that I can't point to a single, full-time person on the active roster that I can say is definitely above the IC title picture. If the goal is to create Rob Van Dams or Tito Santanas, they've done a fabulous job and created dozens of them.

I always thought Vince seriously overlearned the lesson of putting Hogan and Savage out to pasture when they turned 40.

Nothing puts smiles on faces like a drunk driving angle.

Cornette clearly never saw the actual match where Russo won the WCW title or the battle royal with the Randy Savage cameo.

Cornette responded to Jericho making a similar point that I did, arguing that people believed he was getting his face shoved in a cake because he was an asshole, while this was just an attempt to mock pro wrestling. Talk about moving the goalposts. Cake in the face is not part of a serious, sports-like presentation. It sounds like one of his big complaints is that there's not the same degree of love and hate coming from fans, or at least that it's not expressed in the same way. I'm nostalgic for that aspect of wrestling too, where Ricky Morton gets mobbed on his way to the ring by horny teenage girls or people throw garbage at the heels and they have to fight their way to the dressing room. He diagnoses a lot of the reasons wrestling isn't like that anymore correctly, but he also refuses to acknowledge that time doesn't stand still, and that just as many people were turned off by the deceit of wrestling -- that no one would admit it for what it was -- as watched it. Incompetence in wrestling is a big part of it, but so are changing cultural, political and economic factors. Wrestling in 2020 is far from perfect and I have lots of criticisms of it myself but I also didn't see Stadium Stampede as making fun of pro wrestling. It was a king-sized tribute.

It's just a ridiculous argument that bothers me because it's not even true about his era. Real sports wouldn't have guys with masks. They would all use their real names, managers interfering would be suspended by the company, attacks during interviews or after matches would be treated as criminal assault, and no one would get their face shoved in a birthday cake. The gaga is what makes wrestling fun and his era had plenty of it, much of it involving him! I think there are arguments that wrestling should be internally consistent and I definitely agree with those. I also think in spite of that, moments that unsuspend your disbelief are bad, just like they would be in any scripted form of entertainment. But he is nostalgic for an era that never even existed.