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I think Loss makes an excellent point, given that Batista has tried working through a muscle tear before and rushed back from his previous injury because they were so low on star power with HHH, Shawn and Taker all out of action.

I'm not sure I'd call Vickie Guerrero's run on WWE TV "a feel-good story", though I'd certainly say it was admirable that she took her role seriously and really tried hard to generate genuine heat. The story didn't have a fairy tale ending, as they started making fun of her weight on TV and then buried her on the way out the door when she had the gall to quit. Earlier on, they were certainly exploiting her loss and her grief in the storylines. I think Sean's right though about Vickie helping Edge. Edge is one of the few heels in recent years who has been passionately disliked and people genuinely wanted to see get their comeuppance. In large part that's due to the heat his on-screen partners had, who tended to be more hated than he was on his own.

You'd think they'd be pleased they wouldn't have to pay her anymore. Really, I'm amazed she lasted this long given all the travel, exploitative storylines, bitchy remarks and general wrestling insanity that she had to endure.

Will, I read Terry Funk's book years ago and I thought the prediction was silly then. That Cornette isn't alone in his thinking means little, there's plenty of commonly accepted beliefs in the wrestling business that are pretty silly.

With Batista suddenly coming down with a "bicep injury", Umaga being fired or quitting, and talk of the creative team being given a list of guys who would be unavailable for TV starting next week, one has to wonder how the drug testing would become more effective all of a sudden. I mean Batista has been a walking Wellness policy violation for years and only now does he get caught. Sounds like some WWE wrestlers are involved in another Signature Pharmacy scandal.

I think Dylan's right. More likely than the news being false, is that WWE got so upset that word leaked before the PPV that Batista was seriously injured again, that they decided to give him a quickie title run to SWERVE~! the internet.

That wasn't Meltzer's opinion, it was the opinion of one of his subscribers who wrote in.

This was Cornette's conclusion: This is a factually inaccurate portrayal about the roots of pro wrestling, as it is generally accepted that Gotch vs. Hackenschmidt I wasn't the first ever worked wrestling match and even if was, it's laughable to suggest the promoters and seconds weren't in on the fact that the match was a work. Pro wrestling wasn't created by two shooters going into business for themselves realizing that by trading wins and losses they could create a feud that could draw money, but by promoters who manipulated the hype and the results of big matches to con the gamblers that bet on the outcomes of these matches. As for my "starry eyed nonsense" crack, believing that the top two MMA stars would risk working a series of matches when they would be thrown out of UFC and banned from competing if they were discovered, is exactly that, "starry eyed nonsense". It's not going to happen.

Wasn't the problem with Ronnie Garvin that he was super over as a challenger to Flair, but as soon as they put the belt on him the fans stopped supporting him?

Dave was never a cheerleader for Vince, but there were a couple of occasions we know of where his journalistic integrity was potentially compromised by his links to the WWF (once covering for wrestlers who failed cocaine tests as a favor to the WWF and later being on their payroll as a consultant). That said, I don't think Sek's portrayal of the time period to be fair or accurate. Meltzer warming up to the WWF really wasn't surprising when the NWA was being killed by Dusty's self indulgent booking and later when WCW was being run by an incompetent buffoon in Jim Herd. The comparison made the WWF look favorable. It's simply crazy to call Dave "WWF hating" during the sex scandals, because Dave was Vince's new best friend during that period, as he wasn't a charlatan looking for a quick payoff from Vince, he wasn't looking to unfairly bury the company and he was happy to report the WWF's side to the story.

I mentioned this on Smarkschoice, but I think it bares repeating. His conclusion about pro wrestling returning as it used to be is starry eyed nonsense based on a factually inaccurate portrayal about the roots of professional wrestling. His grasp of Japanese wrestling history is also a bit shaky.

To be fair sek, the timing really wasn't right for even a quickie World title run, as it would have diluted the build to Mania and Austin's ascension to the thrown. Still there was no good reason why Shawn couldn't have dropped the European belt to him and Hunter won all their singles matches in their feud. That said, it's easy to blame DX, but I get the sense that Vince McMahon was reluctant to reward Owen for his brother's treachery. How Owen was booked in that period is very similar to how Chris Benoit was being booked by Kevin Sullivan around the same time.

Rey really wasn't a "crowd forced hand" situation, it was more a "circumstances forced hand" deal. Rey was sixth in line for the belt, but Eddie dropped dead, Batista tore his triceps, Shawn wouldn't work Tuesdays, Angle was on the verge of breaking down both physically and mentally, and Orton was a big headache at the time who had to be punished, so Rey became champion by default.

I think this was alleged to be one of Vince Russo's big booking ideas when he very briefly returned to WWE in 2002. Given that it's Russo we're talking about it's certainly believable, but it could also be one of those exaggerated stories that his opponents used to bury him as his ass hit the door on the way out of the company.

I think it should be remembered that hardcore fans in general ripped on the WWF pretty unmercifully in the mid 1980s. Meltzer's opinions weren't atypical for the time they were written in. If anything, Meltzer was a lot fairer than his readership, as he would at least give Vince credit for his business success. Also, a lot of the criticism was warranted, as from a match quality standpoint the WWF couldn't hold a candle to most other territories and the booking too was often more compelling and cutting edge.

Then again, Finlay's been in the respected veteran worker role on ECW for a year now and he's still waiting for his token run with the title.

Loss makes an excellent point. It's pretty clear for Owen to get a World title run the fans would have to get behind him to the point that it was enough to overcome Vince McMahon's prejudices about him as a talent, like Benoit, Jericho, Eddy, Rey, RVD and Jeff Hardy did. It's hard to see how that would happen given the context of Owen's career post Montreal. He was used to put over talent they had higher hopes for (Triple H and Ken Shamrock) or worked with green guys who needed help in the ring (Edge, Dan Severn and Steve Blackman) or placed in a tag team when they had run out of things for him to do as a singles star. Maybe the Blue Blazer gimmick would have taken off big, but that's a long shot as it was being booked as a comedy character. Sure, he was going to get an IC title run, but by that point the title was a joke, bouncing around career midcarders like Val Venis, Road Dogg, Goldust and the Godfather in very short order.

To be fair, I don't think this is just a WWE thing, though they've certainly worsened the image of professional wrestling at times through their sleazy business practices and silly storylines. I think it goes back to the roots of professional wrestling being a scam to con carnival goers and gamblers. I think the industry attempting to maintain kayfabe, even though it was regularly exposed and keeping the charade up was pretty ridiculous, created the stigma around professional wrestling that is maintained to this day.

I don't think I view any of my other hobbies as less worthy than wrestling, but then I wouldn't say any of my other hobbies are particularly high brow (playing video games, watching soccer, etc). But I'm still wary of telling people I'm a pro wrestling fan, I think partly because I work at a university and it's not the sort of hobby to impress people with. Most of the time people are fine with it, but there's always that one stranger who has to be a dick about it and remind you that it's all fake, like this was something I hadn't known for over a decade.

With regards to Al's point, I think it should be noted that all three of them were younger than Owen, Jericho and Eddy were much more charismatic and better on the mic than Owen ever was, Benoit (and Eddy too) was much more respected as a super worker than Owen was and perhaps most importantly Owen would have never juiced up as much as Benoit and Eddy did to get noticed by Vince McMahon. I see Owen as a respected veteran worker used to groom young stars in line for the big push and help green workers improve in the ring, rather than someone who would ever break out of the pack and get given that big push himself.

To be fair to HBK and HHH, the influence of Steve Austin was perhaps a bigger detriment to his career post Montreal, as they were. If the biggest star in the company steadfastly refuses to work a program with you, you're pretty screwed. Scott points to the talent pool eventually thinning out, but let's face it Owen wasn't going to be given the big World title push before Kurt Angle or Chris Jericho or Brock Lesnar or even Chris Benoit and Eddy Guerrero were, by which point Owen would be pushing 40 and who knows whether he would even still want to wrestle at that point. I think in all likelihood Owen's career would have finished like Lance Storm's, he would've got out when he had saved up enough money, started get banged up and saw the writing on the wall as far as his future in WWE was concerned.

I think he was lumped into the washed up group because he was one of many workers on the WWF roster that had a lot of talent but either wasn't allowed or got too lazy to actually use it. That explanation doesn't really make sense, as he was allowed to use his talent, as he was given the IC belt in 1984, worked with many of the top heels from a working standpoint (Muraco, Valentine, Orndorff, Orton, etc.) and his matches were given time to breathe. He also wasn't too lazy to use it, as his work from that time period held up well in the DVDVR 80s set. He was still a very solid, reliable performer. Sounds like an early Observer myth.

I have to disagree with this, as Bryan Alvarez ran the hyperbolic headline "Biggest upset in 30 years" in the Figure Four. Meltzer didn't give it the cover story treatment, but pretty much concurred with Bryan's headline in his story and gave it more coverage than a typical big CMLL show. Sure he didn't review the whole match, but that's par for the Mexican course nowadays.

Injuries per se really aren't the problem. Wrestlers are inevitably going to get hurt seriously from time to time, no matter how conservative the wrestling style or how hard the schedule is. The problem is the pressure to work hurt or rush back from serious injuries, which leads to the abuse of painkillers and using short cuts like steroids to aid the healing process. Sek was quite right to lampoon Scott's post. It isn't a strong point to note that painkillers and injuries are a worse problem than steroids, as most people readily acknowledge that. Trying to use Ken Kennedy to prove that point is dumb when he's a known steroid abuser and all of his major injuries have been some form of muscle tear, something that is highly unlikely to be a coincidence. Saying the larger scale problem is "guys jumping off ladders and then taking bottles of Oxycontin" is also dumb, as plenty of people had pain pill problems who never jumped off ladders or fell off cages, and there really isn't much ladder jumping going on in WWE today. It isn't 1999 or 2000 anymore when that point would hold more true.

Yes, let's just look at Ken Kennedy a guy who suffered a serious latissimus dorsi muscle tear in December 2005, a slight triceps muscle tear in May 2007 and a torn labrum in the summer of 2008. Obviously there is no correlation between a "vicious cycle of injuries" and steroids, so it must be that one ladder match Mr. Kennedy did during his WWE career that caused his downfall.