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Agreed. They invest their time in people that are tall and muscular, and don't in those who aren't. The rest is just fucking with people for fun and serves no purpose outside of that. Even the tall and muscular people they fuck with, if they have the audacity to ask for more time off or quibble about their push and payoffs. Really Lesnar and Lashley quitting, two guys with options outside of wrestling, proves that WWE should treat their wrestlers better, not do a better job of weeding out the people who wrestling is just a job to and wasn't their lifelong dream. That's part of the reason why developmental is in such a shambles at the moment, as they are no longer recruiting athletes out of college, leaving developmental full of sons of ex wrestlers with almost no experience and indy guys who tend to lack the size they crave and work a style they dislike.

Yeah, I don't see the relationship between being tough and being a good trainer. If anything the converse is closer to being true, as often the tough veteran is bitter and jealous that he's been put out to pasture as a trainer, while these youngsters who have never paid their dues like he had to and can't work as well as he can are taking his old spot on the roster. So the pissed off veteran takes out his frustrations on his helpless trainees. Do we need to risk Hardcore Holly running off the next Batista in WWE developmental or becoming so loathed that half the trainees are constantly complaining to John Laurinaitis about their treatment, so they have to start taping his training sessions to shut them up?

I'd imagine the other plaintiffs are wrestlers like Raven who have a snowball's chance in hell of getting rehired by WWE, so have got nothing to lose by filing the suit. I wish them luck, they'll need it facing the corporate giant and their Rottweiler lawyers.

There's definitely a lot of truth to Luger being a jerk, particularly towards the end of his career when he was prone to throwing hissy fits whenever he was asked to job to younger talent. The most infamous example of this was when he and Buff Bagwell went into business for themselves and laid down for Chuck Palumbo and Sean O'Haire in the opening seconds of a match scheduled to go much longer. That said, I agree with Will, that because he was so easy to hate, that he doesn't get his just due from people within the business and they never acknowledge that he was once a capable worker who for a short while deserved the mega push he was getting.

Well, that was pretty insulting to my intelligence.

What is 80s about Hulk Hogan playing cool heel? Going further back, what is 80s about Hogan wrestling in WCW and fans booing him out of the building? Just because Hogan forced WCW fans to relive the 80s in 1995, doesn't mean that the business hadn't changed significantly from the late 80s, it just means that Hogan and WCW were tiresomely slow to react to the changes.

To a degree, as some of the things that happen out of the blue such as Cena winning the Royal Rumble unannounced and Triple H moving to Smackdown were planned well in advance and they did a tremendous job of keeping the news from leaking. The long running Vickie Guerrero and Edge soap opera also clearly had a lot of thought put into it well in advance, even though the storyline has often had to be tweaked on the fly due to unexpected events occurring like Kristal Marshall being fired and Vickie getting so over as a heel in the role that it would have been a mistake to turn her back babyface. That said, it seems like outside of the Undertaker vs Edge Hell In A Cell match the rest of the SummerSlam card, typically the second or third biggest PPV event of the year, has been thrown together at the last minute.

Do we really know if it appealed to the "average reader", because most of the discussion about the book, both good and bad, has come from long time newsletter readers, online fans and people inside the business, both of whom already knew most of the stories, but strongly disagreed with how he told them? You can argue whether it was a positive or a negative, but the book clearly wasn't written with those people in mind. That's why Matt went into so much trouble to put every character in the book into context, so people who were not wrestling fans or were only very casual ones could paint a picture of what people they had never heard of before looked like and what made them tick. That's also why he was free to criticise so harshly those same fans and insiders when he saw fit. The fact is the dyed in the wool wrestling fans who have decided that the status quo is acceptable weren't going to change their mind after reading a book, no matter the tone, if the deaths of Eddie Guerrero and Chris Benoit themselves didn't change how they viewed wrestling. That would have been an impossible challenge.

Successful amateur wrestling career. Successful professional wrestling career, both as a heel in the '60s and face in the 70s. I don't think his announcing career alone gets him in, but the whole of his career in so many roles is enough, IMO. The problem is he's on the ballot as a non-wrestler, so whatever he did inside the ring should not be considered when voting for him.

What makes Gorilla Monsoon a stronger candidate as an announcer than Tony Schiavone, who was a lead announcer for a national promotion for longer than Gorilla was?

I guess this is good, but does it mean that the younger voters shouldn't bother to pick them? I think we'll find out the answer to that question from whether the Fabulous Moolah gets in this year or not. My hunch would be if someone votes for them their vote will be counted regardless of the voter's age, because it has always seemed that Dave expects his voters to be self policing and only vote for candidates from regions and now eras that they know enough about. Of course this leads to people like Bruce Mitchell and God knows who else voting for Japanese candidates, who can't be considered experts of Japanese wrestling history.

The relevant posts:

The Ring Of Hell thread has been bumped and the level of discourse is probably what you would expect. Outside of Famous Mortimer defending the book and criticising Lance Storm's review of it as wagon circling, most people are lapping up Dave's article and are using it as an opportunity to call you names.

Maybe not, but Flair himself had a terrible time coming to terms with the fact that he was no longer being treated as the best by management and an even worse time of it when he realised he was indeed no longer the best, going into a deep depression and losing all of his self confidence.

I got the sense from Flair's book that Herd came up with the Spartacus idea long before Flair was fired from the company. Kevin Sullivan was on the booking committee at the time and he had left the company by the summer of 1990. The straw that broke the camel's back was Herd wanting to cut Flair's pay by half when his contract came due and Flair subsequently using the title belt as leverage to keep his old deal.

This quote by JR isn't particularly grouchy or hateful or vile, but I find it hilarious coming from a long standing WWE employee: Maybe instead of using the F word Forrest should be insinuating that Quinton Jackson is gay or spray painting the word poopy on his limo, because that would be so much more high brow and sophisticated? Next he'll be complaining about Nick Diaz flipping the bird at KJ Noons!

That seems to be the case, given the following article by Shelley Bonin, Jim Melby's daughter, responding to the recent controversy over the award: Melby Award winners deserving of honor

They were also sowing the seeds of their decline by cooling off Chris Jericho in mid card feuds with the likes of X-Pac and Kane after he got red hot in the spring of that year with the whole title change that never happened angle with Triple H, botching the ending of the Kurt Angle, Triple H and Stephanie love triangle, the ill conceived Rikishi heel turn, etc.

The Life And Times Of Mr. Perfect DVD (2 Discs)

I don't think we need to know the clear complete story to make a moral judgment in this case. Bret should have made it known to the organizers that Greg Oliver being honored at the ceremony was such a problem as soon as he found out about it, rather than waiting until his speech at the ceremony itself to complain where it would cause maximum embarrassment for everyone involved. And really the things Greg Oliver has written about Bret that he is so upset about rank very low in terms of nasty things people in wrestling have said about Bret Hart. I mean it says a lot about the screwed up nature of the wrestling business that Bret Hart would single out someone who treated him respectfully in all their meetings with such bile, just because he never stepped foot in the ring and had some opinions about himself he disagreed with, while being happy to play nice at WWE's Hall Of Fame induction ceremony in front of a crowd of people who had stabbed him in the back and badmouthed him for years.

This is the paragraph from the book review that supposed to have most irked Bret:

Plus, when they made it clear ahead of time that the announcers were included in the draft, that was a clear message that 2 of the play by play guys or colour commentators were going to swap places, so Ross should have at least expected it as a strong possibility.

Yeah, this really doesn't rank highly in terms of nasty things Vince McMahon has done to Jim Ross. With regards to Triple H, my theory is that he'll be glad to work in the lower pressure Smackdown environment with his second child on the way, at a time when Raw's ratings are at their lowest level in years, there is huge pressure to hotshot them back to where they were a few months ago and there is no sign of a long term solution to their ratings woes. His position as the top star of the brand will be second guessed a lot less on Smackdown than if he had stayed on Raw.

Surely Gabe if offered would covertly work with the Evil Empire as a "consultant" for $1000 a week and a cup of coffee on the creative team after ROH goes bankrupt? No need to go to all that expense of subsidising the whole company!

I really think you're overplaying ECW's influence on WWE's promoting style, as Vince McMahon always promoted his brand name above his wrestlers and treated his wrestlers as disposable commodities. He'd take a regional or even national wrestling star, repackage them with a new name and gimmick, push them hard if they got over and start the process all over again when they inevitably left his company, theoretically damaged goods as they would be buried on their way out and couldn't take their names and gimmicks with them to opposition promotions. It's also an exaggeration that ECW didn't live and die on their talent, as so many stars leaving them in late 1999 - early 2000 did hurt them badly and they'd have been dead in the water a lot more quickly if RVD quit earlier. If RVD was disposable, why did Heyman fight so hard to keep him and give him a lucrative six figure contract that he knew he would struggle to pay.