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kjh

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Everything posted by kjh

  1. No Mercy UK '99. Just look at the card. Plus, Undertaker was in his struggling to walk Ministry of Darkness phase so the main event was a lot more boring than it sounds on paper too.
  2. Here's the full quote from the Aug. 7th, 1995 Observer:
  3. Really says a lot about the NAC that they seemed willing to clear someone to fight with a broken rib.
  4. Latest TNA stupidity from Dave Meltzer on THE BOARD: The DA representative at the TNA tapings was pissed that her format on Wednesday didn't include "The guy who was in the ring promoting a rival company." After all, social media surprise is much more important than keeping your television partners happy, right brothers?
  5. I agree that he could have had a good WCW run in the late 90s in him. I just don't think there's much evidence that Vince would have given him a decent push if he hadn't broken his ankle at the end of '95.
  6. True, we'll never know what would have happened, but it wasn't uncommon in that period for guys to get a big TV match quickly, lose, then slide down the card fast. Spicolli's second TV match that year was with Shawn Michaels, for example. Usually guys they had big plans for in those days got the multi-week vignette treatment and were built up slowly.
  7. Excellent show as always. I'm not sure I agree that Landell in late '95 was a big what if moment. My gut says that he would have quickly fallen into an enhancement talent role like the other SMW talent that were hired in mid '96.
  8. I don't think Bryan Alvarez or Dave mentioned the word concussion until after he got pulled from the European tour. There was talk about Sheamus "working too reckless in spots" and how Daniel Bryan needed several stitches to close a cut, almost immediately after the match happened, so it's likely that people within the company knew he had suffered a concussion at the time. At the very least, he would have had to have been checked over by WWE's medical staff due to the cut and they should have spotted the concussion then. Dave turned into Cryptic Dave over the last couple of months was likely because WWE were privately telling people that the story was false to those who inquired about the story. Their tack now is just to hide behind the statement that "Daniel Bryan is not medically cleared to perform."
  9. It says a lot about Dixie Carter's abilities that she has to go cap in hand back to Jeffey, six years after she ousted him from power.
  10. kjh

    Bob Holly

    Actually Bob was Bombastic and Bart was the Bodacious one. Agree with all here that he's not a serious candidate, but wouldn't be the worst person to fill someone's list out with.
  11. There's no business issues yet. Jan. 4th Tokyo Dome drew the largest paid crowd since the mid '00s. Ibushi vs. Styles sold out Sumo Hall (lower set-up than in the past, but legitimate sell-outs for non-G1 shows had been a thing of the past until very recently). House shows have been regularly selling out too with the Bullet Club on top. The Dominion show in July is a big test, as they run the 16,000 Osaka Jo Hall for the first time ever, and the G-1 too, as they run Sumo Hall for three consecutive days for the first time since 2004. The booking is conservative and predictable, which doesn't suggest any behind the scenes issues.
  12. It would have been interesting to see how Tenta would have progressed if he had stayed in Japan longer. Can't see Tenta ever getting as good as Williams was in his mid '90s All Japan peak.
  13. I don't listen to the audio, could you explain what he means? That they've got a really talented group of performers that popped business, but are running the risk of losing popularity long term by going with a pat hand for far too long. Putting all your eggs in the Okada basket is a bit risky, given that WWE has shown interest and that allure may eventually be too much for him to turn down. It also remains to be seen how well he'll draw when Tanahashi/Nakamura slow down and slide down the card into more supporting legends roles rather than being regular co-headliners, particularly on the annual Dome Show. I'd also say Crockett actually had a better crop of future headliners in Luger/Sting/Windham in early 1988 than New Japan does today and there was more name talent on the outside that they could bring in to freshen things up on top (like Steamboat and Funk in 1989) that they actually had much more room for manoeuvre, but the booking killed the promotion. This is where New Japan has the advantage, as Gedo hasn't shown any signs that he'll run the company off a cliff through a combination of ego, incompetence and burnout. They also have the advantage of being the clear number one promotion in their market, which JCP/WCW never had outside of the Carolinas. The better comparison would be All Japan in the mid 1990s, as more likely is a slow tapering off of crowds, rather than a fast fall from grace. Still, Okada is clearly in a much better position to lead the company than Jun Akiyama was at the same age. I'm sure Tanahashi and Nakamura will keep going into their mid 40s than the legends before them too.
  14. I agree completely with everything that you said... however the rewriting of scripts the day of the show and the giant "creative teams" filled with people who didn't make it in Hollywood by all accounts seem to be Vince trademarks. Has Hunter ever gone public with his thoughts on the entire process? I don't think so but I am curious. Who knows if one of his first moves in a post-Vince world will be to downsize the teams and to stick to longer term plans. On the ESPN NXT special, we saw him leading his production meeting with about two dozen people involved, taking suggestions from everybody. So I doubt he'd downsize the creative team (which was more of a Stephanie trademark than it was Vince's, as before she became head of creative, Vince tended to work closely with a handful of people). I think he'll likely have more wrestling minds involved and won't be as impulsive/whimsical as Vince, but whether that will translate to greater business success and a hotter product, who knows? The programming may very well be more in tune with the tastes of hardcore fans, but whether he has the vision and creativity to heat up WWE outside of its loyal base remains to be seen.
  15. kjh

    WWE TV 6/1 - 6/7/15

    From my experience most math professors at university think that statistics is not proper science and way beneath them to spend any time on. That's true, I was specifically speaking about people who work in the field of statistics.
  16. kjh

    WWE TV 6/1 - 6/7/15

    There is nothing to ask him. He just doesn't understand probability and instead of saying what he thinks, he would rather just make up a bullshit number. He's either an idiot or is misinformed. Either way, it doesn't matter it just annoys me when people talk like that. Fucking math nerds. I'm a math nerd too and I actually disagree with Grimmas! If JR genuinely believes, based on all the information at his disposal, that there is a 35% chance that the match will happen, there's nothing mathematically wrong with his statement. Statistics is a funny subject where a good proportion of academics believe that standard textbook techniques like hypothesis testing and confidence intervals are fundamentally wrong and that the standard interpretation of probability is limited, but they don't tell you that until you do a third year course in Bayesian statistics (at least when I was first studying at university).
  17. To be fair, the Punk interview landed on Thanksgiving, so I don't blame Dave for being underprepared then.
  18. It's a lot easier to have a coherent narrative that builds from week to week when you tape four one hour shows in one night and you have maybe one or two people writing the scripts. Will Triple H have the same level of discipline when he's running a creative team with two dozen people on it and overseeing two four hour television tapings a week? We'll only know for sure when he takes over for good. I don't think it's a sure bet that Triple H runs the company better than Vince does, although he's done enough things right with NXT that we shouldn't be horrified at the prospect.
  19. You mean the main roster doesn't have Robbie Brookside?
  20. The problem is with the writing, not with people no longer believing it's real. The "evolution" of kayfabe (I'd argue that it's an inferior mutant) has led to a strange mix of attitudes from the lazy "who cares if it doesn't make sense, everyone knows it's fake anyway?" to those who perversely focus on fooling hardcore fans for the sake of fooling them because people in wrestling get off on the schadenfreude of pulling the wool over people's eyes (or trolling them because they don't like their opinions) even though it doesn't really translate to money.
  21. I would say the peak would be the mid 1980s. You had the Crush Gals in Japan (who drew high ratings on national TV, all women fanbase), Kerry and the other Von Erichs were still strong draws in Texas, The Fabs in Memphis, The Rock N Rolls in Mid South/JCP, The Fantastics did pretty well as Von Erich understudies/Rock N Roll replacements in Texas and Mid South, respectively, The Midnight Rockers in the AWA, etc. Obviously the psychology was different in AJW than in the territories, which suggests that you need different characters to appeal to different ages.
  22. I thought they had all but phased out the TNA moniker and we're mainly calling themselves Impact Wrestling now? They did a half-assed job of rebranding where most people still call them TNA anyway (as seen in the memo posted above) and they didn't completely eliminate those initials. It's probably not a big factor, but can't help.
  23. I wonder how much of the advertising phobia around TNA Wrestling is due to general pro wrestling stigma and how much is due to their ill-conceived initials? Even if the latter is just a small factor, it's another advantage in Ring Of Honor's favour.
  24. Any ROH matches on Will's MOTY sets. Not exhaustive, but covers most bases for those years.
  25. Pissed that he didn't get the deal.
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