Loss

If it was me, I'd keep Britt out of the ring as much as possible until there are crowds again because I think it makes her come across as less of a star. She can still get promo and vignette time every week. But since this is indefinite, I guess she has to do at least some matches.

If Britt Baker can get big reactions when there are crowds again, which she seems on track to do, it will disguise a lot of that and give her more time to improve in the ring. Even if she doesn't get to a point where she can have great matches, if she can deliver good ones that have emotionally satisfying payoffs, she'll be fine.

Wrestling has really dumb, pointless and sometimes cruel inside traditions that they disguise as paying dues. It's also a business full of people who think that if something didn't happen to them personally that it never could have possibly happened to anyone. That's my ultimate takeaway from this dispute, and it's hardly the first time I've thought that.

If you look at what AEW is setting up long-term anyway, I don't think they're building to Omega's time on top so much as they are building to Hangman Page's time on top. Maybe I'm wrong, but that seems like the ultimate destination, perhaps with title runs that serve a specific purpose to get something over for Cody and Omega along the way.

If I remember right, Dana Brooke was hired and has gotten so many chances because Vince and HHH are really big fans of her background in competitive bodybuilding. But it hasn't translated at all, as we know.

The match Asuka had with her on her debut in retrospect is a miracle match.

Cornette's comments were out of line there. Way out of line. That said, Dana Brooke has never struck me as very smart. That doesn't mean she deserves to have her looks made fun of in public. Her tweet in response just sort of highlights her basic incompetence at pretty much everything, which is a separate issue. When she was the statistician for the Prime Time Players, she couldn't even pantomime typing.

He thought the sentimentality killed what made her cool as a star. WWE has way too much faux sentimentality these days, but come on, she's pregnant. She reacted like a human being.

I'll also add that he misunderstands Becky Lynch's appeal. He thinks that she's bad in the ring, but got over as the female version of Steve Austin. There are elements of Austin's character to her act for sure, but it's not a direct analogy at all. And the defiance was definitely a key part of her rise, but that's not really how she has been presented since getting to the top.

It was a baffling thing to say. And the idea that they should have worked an injury angle and hidden her pregnancy -- that might have worked 30 years ago, but there's no way it would in 2020 when information flows so freely. The world has changed, and he refuses to accept it. The things he loathes are a mix of the world changing and incompetence from people who produce pro wrestling, and he often conflates the two. Even the idea that they conceal that Seth Rollins isn't single so they don't hurt his appeal to women is such an outdated lens. You can debate whether it's for better or worse, but it's just not what wrestling is now. So many of his criticisms about how modern wrestling is presented I agree with, but the idea that you can hide things from fans just doesn't fly anymore. You can bemoan that, which he has done, or you can come up with a paradigm shift that acknowledges that, which he is incapable of doing.

The Martha Hart episode is quite possibly the best wrestling podcast I've ever heard. All I could think at the end of hearing it is that Martha is a wonderful human being and a genuine class act who is nothing at all like the caricature that has been painted of her. She is proud of Owen's career as a wrestler and harbors zero ill will toward the industry itself. She just can't bring herself to cross the bridge with WWE. When Jericho pointed out that it's possible now to do things like a merchandise line and that he'd know exactly where to point her -- referring to Pro Wrestling Tees without saying it -- she seemed pleasantly surprised, and it makes sense that she wouldn't know that since she no longer keeps up with the business. She said that she was "grateful" to have platform to speak fondly about Owen and the great memories people have of him. It's an uplifting show in many ways, and I'd call her an inspirational person even. She deserves all the happiness and success that life can possibly bring her.

I think it speaks volumes about his mentality that Brie isn't crazy about him traveling right now since he's theoretically at higher risk, but they ultimately made the call that anything that knocks time off of his contract is worthwhile.

Not even good camp, really. I liked the "movie" matches they did at Wrestlemania just fine, but this one was embarrassing and seemed filmed on the cheap by comparison, even though it was probably more expensive to produce.

I know people were raving about it, but I just didn't get it. There are already too many goth characters in wrestling. What was with the lip synching? Maybe someone can explain to me why it was good.

That was the story I had always heard as well. That environment was so backbiting at the time as it was, and Douglas voluntarily throwing himself in the middle of it was pretty dumb. The match in question:

I've also heard stories of actors and actresses who have played villains in famous roles being harassed in public, so it's not just limited to pro wrestling. Tony Goldwyn, Heather Locklear, and Anna Gunn have all discussed this off the top of my head.

Wait, is Reigns leaving or quitting or something confirmed? I feel like I missed something.

Lewis/Stetcher might have been the best answer. There are other matches that have been part of a wave of other changes or have been highly influential, but that might be the only one that actually changed wrestling.

I think I have too high of a threshold in my mind, which is why I'm struggling with this topic. I'm thinking of matches where the way it was worked bell to bell changed something fundamental about the way business is conducted in pro wrestling, and there don't seem to be an awful lot of examples of that. Influential matches, yes, there are many.

It seems like they've covered a lot of the obvious topics in the first two seasons. I know the material is there but I have to wonder if they're going to struggle for ideas. Brawl For All, one of my favorite eps so far, still felt like a stretch because the story wasn't particularly "dark". But they can stretch the definition like that and probably do shows for years to come.

He said that Reigns and Cesaro were the two guys who stood out as having all of this personality that doesn't show on TV.

Sami Zayn is a great performing heel, but the problem is that they've taken a talented guy and made him arguably less of a star with each passing year.

That post sums it up well. People have always known that it's not real. What they haven't known (and some still don't, really) is what that entails. Is every aspect of it fake? Are the grudges themselves fake? Do moves ever hurt? Does someone decide who wins and loses every match or do the wrestlers just decide that themselves? I think there has always been general knowledge of it being fake, just not of how it works beyond that.

Thought about this one but I couldn't point to the specific match in the series that had the most impact. Maybe the 2/3 falls one at the end?

I keep thinking about Flair vs Race at Starrcade '83, but I don't know that anything about the match changed wrestling. It's more that the show changed wrestling and that happened to be the main event. But within a month of that show, Vince started locking up talent, including Hogan, and the War of '84 that forever altered the American wrestling landscape was on.